We’re working to make it easier for government technologists to access the guidance they need to buy, design and build the best possible digital services in the most efficient way…
We’d love to hear from people across cross-government who use technology guidance regularly. You can get in touch with the team by leaving a comment below.
Meeting the guidance needs of government technologists
The technical standards team is here to make it easier for departments to find the technology guidance needed to provide the best public services possible.
We want to take away any barriers that might prevent technologists from accessing the guidance they need. We recently started doing user research so we can find more about:
- the guidance needs of technologists within government
- how technologists access this guidance when they are changing technology
- the user journeys technologists take when buying, building and designing technology
We’ve collected guidance by topics as a first step
Previous user research on the Service Manual showed that technologists often want to find government technology guidance by topics, particularly as we have a number of different products including the Technology Code of Practice and the Service Manual. These products are aimed at different users but there is potentially an overlap of users who want to access both.
This is why when we published a major refresh of the Technology Code of Practice in September 2017, we introduced a page called Technology Code of Practice: collection of related topics. The topics include areas such as APIs, cloud and security.
This collection page holds guidance related to Technology Code of Practice, curated from GOV.UK and the National Cyber Security Centre as well as some content from the Service Manual.
To create the collection, we carried user testing with cross-government participants to help develop the topic categories and make it as easy as possible to find the information on the page. The page currently has over 250 pieces of guidance spread across 46 topics, which we are constantly updating. We may add more guidance from the Service Manual depending on our user research findings.
Next steps
Our user research will help tell us if we should develop the collection page into the central navigation of GOV.UK. We will also look into how we can better signpost content and improve the usability of the page.
Sign up for email alerts from the GDS Technology blog and get in touch below if you’d like to help us fulfil this mission.
1 comment
Comment by Gemtech Technology Solutions posted on
Awesome Blog