My name is Ben Territ and I'm Head of Design for the Government Digital Service which is
part of the Cabinet Office in the UK and I'm here in Cape Town at Design in Darba talking
about Gov.UK and the design work we're doing at the Government Digital Service.
We are making Gov.UK which is a single domain for government which comes out of Martha Lane
Fox's report which the government asked her to write and look at all digital stuff and
that was one of her recommendations is that we have a single place for all this so those
thousands of websites and you know we close those and kind of fold them into Gov.UK and
just make one and the reason to do that really is to ensure that the user doesn't have to
understand government to find something out they just go to one place and it's there
they don't have to know which department has that information or which site has that information
and also that they don't have to learn new things so typically it's not like the BBC
News website something you might go on once a day people only go to government websites
once or twice a year to find out that particular thing or transact with a particular service
so people shouldn't have to spend time reusing how to use that so booking a prison visit
should be the same as booking a driving test say it should be the same thing and so if
we have one single domain we can do that and I guess that the core of all our work not
just design the rest of the team as well is focusing on user need and you know the user
need is really clear and really simple and you know so we just have one place where we
just make one website.
So if you look at the design of Gov.UK it's a very simple design and that comes I think
from two things again focusing on the user need and doing early user testing and just
removing things that users either told us or it was clear from their behaviour that they
just didn't need you know that they just want the information on the page just removing
everything that gets in the way of that and I think the second thing is and this is I
guess where some of the conversations I've had with Margaret Calvert have helped is
that we realised that we were designing we were doing information design not just pushing
pixels around the screen so I think as a tendency these days for you know web designers to sit
in Photoshop and push pixels around and that looks nice but we sort of got to forget that
and remember that people want information from the site and we're designing that information
so we designed something for that information and that leads you to strip away all the bits
that get in the way of that information.
The other thing that's really nice at the moment is we're starting to be recognised
sort of other areas and we've just been nominated for the design museum design of the year you
know never thought anything like that would happen you know we're just making this government
website for users really you know but to be nominated for something like that and amongst
the next to the shard and the cauldron and you know all those things it's fantastic.
Now I think it takes like five ten minutes and you start looking at British design and
British history and you realise that there is this huge catalogue of canon of projects
you know right back from Baselgette and the sewers you know these fantastic public sector
design they're not just design but they've got a design element to them these fantastic
projects like the sewers or like the tube map or like Calvert and Kinneas road signs you
know we've got this fantastic heritage of this public sector sort of design work really
that is fantastic and that became really obvious to me and really clear and the more you looked
at it there were more of those and the more you thought about it the more they were trying
to do a very similar thing to what we're doing and I think if you're a graphic designer you
know working today then the future is digital obviously I mean you know I'm part of a thing
called newspaper club so I love print as much as anyone else but you know the future is
digital and if you're a young graphic designer working today that's where it's all at really
and so I think that there's some combination there this is a big exciting digital project
and there's this amazing heritage you could somehow merge those two together you know
this could be absolutely amazing that was sort of my you know day one that was my thoughts.
In terms of web design and particularly user interface design and the maturity of web design
it's only just getting started I think I think there's lots to do particularly with interface
there's lots to do as technology changes I mean we saw a guy from Google talk about
Google Glasses and I think it's really interesting that he made that little point about there
being no UI you know because with Google Glasses there's no buttons so you're just talking
to it and then stuff is appearing I think that's really fascinating and something something
we're trying to do on our site in particular is get out the get out the let design get
out the way and let the user get to what they want and you know you shouldn't come to the
website and go wow look at the graphic design you should come to the website to find out
what the minimum wage is and then go out you know and I think web interface most you know
we haven't achieved that yet in most web interfaces it's still getting in the way it's still loads
of website you know you can see the graphic design everywhere you know and we need to
sort of get past that and technology will change and that will prompt some of that I
think so like Google Glasses and other things that we don't know about yet will kind of
prompt people to think harder and work harder on that stuff but I think yeah I think there's
a long way to go and I think it's a fascinating challenge you know really exciting challenge.
