The Digital Service Standards for Wales set out how new or redesigned digital services by Welsh public sector organisations are expected to be.
The standards are not a set of rules that you must follow. They help support organisations to build great digital products and services.
The standards make your job easier by:
Building what your users need
Talking to users, understanding what they need to do and testing different ways of meeting that need, means you’ll get a minimum viable product (MVP) out to users quicker.
In turn, this means you avoid building something that isn’t suitable that can delay launch and cost time and money to fix.
More people can use your service
By making it simple, accessible, and bilingual, your service can be used by all your users. Which means there is less need to design and build workarounds and offline processes. You can focus on solving the right problem.
You can re-use what others have already done
Our service standards promote sharing and the re-use of code, designs, and insights.
This means you don’t have to spend time and money solving a common problem as it may have already been solved somewhere else.
All your learnings and resources should be available to others in the public sector to re-use.
Solving whole problems
The service standards support you to solve problems bit by bit. They make it clear what needs to be done before launching a service and what can be continually worked on.
Teams are encouraged to use their judgement. We don’t want teams to be delayed trying to build the perfect user experience, we can improve that once users have it in their hands.
But we do want services to be accessible and secure, so the service standards help take away the guesswork for what is done ‘enough’ and what to prioritise before launch.
Embed Welsh language and Future Generations
In Wales, we have ambitious strategies for the Welsh language and supporting future generations. The service standards encourage teams to think of these throughout. This helps show how your digital products and services are supporting your organisation to contribute to Cymraeg 2050 and the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. The service standards ensure you avoid major changes before a launch such as creating the Welsh version of the service after the English version, both versions should be built simultaneously.
How to review your service against our service standards
The workshop is 2 hours, and we go through each of the standards one by one and discuss what’s going well and what could be improved.
At the end of the workshop, you should have areas to focus on and, highlight the things you’re doing well and should celebrate.
We’d love to help facilitate these workshops with you. If you’d like to take part, get in touch – info@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales