We know from our research that teams who are building public services want specific information, guidance, or resources on how to apply and meet each standard.
We have been developing a service manual where users can get practical advice and guidance on how to apply and meet the Digital Service Standards for Wales.
Our service manual will provide people with information that is relevant to Wales, such as building bilingual services, which isn’t available in the GOV.UK Service Manual.
Impact
Our service manual is currently in beta which means that we are testing with users and iterating based on their feedback.
In alpha, research was done in 2 phases: design workshop with 15 internal colleagues, and one-to-one usability testing with 9 external participants that were recruited from our user research panel.
Results from the design workshops highlighted a number of issues with the content of the service manual. The information wasn’t clear and well structured, and participants felt lost trying to perform tasks. Overall, they found the layout of the prototype simple and easy to understand.
We held a show and tell where we introduced our service manual and gave a demo on how it could work.
The Older People's Commissioner for Wales published a recent report, ‘Access denied: Older people’s experiences of digital exclusion in Wales’ and made 2 recommendations aimed to health boards and local authorities:
Gaining traction
“Use the Digital Service Standards for Wales (developed by the Centre for Digital Public Services) and involve older people, especially people not online, in the design of services, systems and relevant research from the beginning to co-produce better and more accessible services and policies.”
Other work
We set up a Digital Standards Working Group to seek out, collate and facilitate the adoption of other existing good practice, guidance, and standards from across other sectors, countries, and government departments, making them relevant to Wales by providing additional context or advice. This group will also provide a feedback loop to iterate and improve these standards as well as advocate for Welsh priorities in relevant UK legislation and consultations.
We also published a standards catalogue, and will be adding existing tried and tested standards and guidance to help people design and deliver better public services in Wales.
Next steps
We will launch the service manual on our website in late 2024.
We will continue to do more testing with users and continue to convene the Digital Standards Working Group to adopt relevant guidance suitable for the Welsh public sector to use.
If you want to get involved in testing, contact standards@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales
Read more
Service manual in beta: some lessons learned
How it meets our objectives
CDPS’s objectives:
Objective 1: Supporting the leadership and culture amongst public service leaders to drive good digital policy making and support digital transformation.
Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs.
Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology.
The Five Ways of Working – Well-being of Future Generations Act
- Long-term
- Integration
- Involvement
- Collaboration
- Prevention
7 well-being goals – Well-being of Future Generations Act
- A prosperous Wales
- A more equal Wales
- A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language
- A globally responsible Wales