The news is out, and I can more openly discuss it: We are working on an updated version of the German Service Standard.
An article published on Wednesday gives an outline of what we are doing.
Developing the Service Standard further
The small team includes senior transformation manager Stefan and senior product manager Robert. I spend at least 10% of my time contributing and supporting them each week.
The goal is to have an updated version of the Service Standard by the end of 2024. The Online Access Act has been updated recently; it has an extended scope, and now the Service Standard has to follow suit. For that, we are working in close partnership with the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which created the Service Standard over 4 years ago.
The mission statement for the project is straightforward:
The Service Standard 2.0 will be an enabling, practical and impactful tool to develop and operate better digital public services faster.”
One interesting motivation for the Federal Ministry of the Interior to update the Service Standard is the European Interoperability Framework and its associated national reporting requests. Tying the principles of the European Interoperability Framework should reduce the reporting burden across the country. That is at least the current hypothesis we are working against.
In the past few weeks, the international call on standards, a call with the OECD, last Friday’s exchange with Steph Marsh, and more peer reviews all feed into this workstream.
This week, I helped identify and approach more people to interview for the Service Standard update. We will do that in thematic waves and start with user-centricity and multi-lingual support.
There is much to write and share, but first, we must do more work. We are writing short internal team weeknotes. I hope we can eventually make them public. That will be useful as engagement across the German public sector will be at the core of this project.
Expanding our content designer efforts
Services don’t work without words. Others and I have said that many times, and we have seen it countless times at Digital Service: Content design is crucial for a service’s utility, usability, and accessibility. If users don’t understand the service, they cannot use it.
A single word or phrase can create such a mental barrier that users drop out of a service they are looking for and are eligible for. That’s why content testing and iterative content work are vital for making public services work for everyone. Before that, we must understand what language people use, their mental models, and what content structures work for them. We have collected countless examples across tax, justice, and benefit services.
Transforming services and their content by digitalising forms is sometimes easy, but more often, it’s hard. When starting from a paper form and related policy document, we take things apart, turn everything upside down and question the most fundamental things. Occasionally, it’s a tedious back-and-forth with subject matter experts and legal colleagues on particular wording. One step forward, two backwards, it feels sometimes. We have seen that in multiple service areas in the past few weeks. For the teams, it can be frustrating.
All of that effort is worth it, though. When we get it right –through myriad iterations – users navigate the service easily and effortlessly. Things make sense, and they might even be positively surprised by how clear a government service can be.
There are many stories to tell and examples to share. Before we finish a proper blog post with examples, we are looking for 2 content designers – one for justice services and another to work on parental allowance. Both are service areas that need integrated service design and content design approaches.
Berlin’s content design scene remains opaque to me. There are a few people working in content design roles in tech companies here, for banks, online retail and other industries. Some have even worked for UK government departments as content designers before. But they speak only a little German, unfortunately. For the area of our work, we are looking for people who speak German at a C1 level and are curious about working with those service areas.
Somewhat in sync, Marco took a closer look at our career page this week and identified various things we could improve, including backlinking, filters, structures, and user flow. There is more design work to do for applicants.
Taking next steps with accessibility
Lena and Marion covered a different recruiting aspect in a Thursday workshop. With about a dozen participants from across disciplines, including engineering, product management, and communications, they ran an interactive 2-hour session on a disability-inclusive recruitment process.
We have a page on the accessibility of our office. In each job description, we say we “value a diverse workforce and an inclusive work environment” and “welcome all applications – regardless of religion, nationality, (ethnic) origin, gender, age, ideology, sexual identity, or disability”. Last year, we also published a blog post about deaf designer Tomie experiencing his 3-month fellowship. Yet, we objectively do too little to hire colleagues with disabilities. This workshop, set up in collaboration with the talent acquisition team, tried to address that.
Just came out of a 2-hour ‘A disability-inclusive recruitment process’ workshop earlier this afternoon. So, this relates and links to some of the topics we touched on today. Much to do everywhere!
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Jul 25, 2024 at 18:56
For the session, Lena and Marion built on material from AbilityNet and their ‘How to build a disability inclusive workplace’ content. They got us started by asking where we are regarding inclusive recruitment – from acord to seedling to sapling to tree. The majority of participants said seedling. We looked at the recruitment process as a sequence and used adapted versions of the accessibility personas to review job descriptions through the lenses of 3 profiles.
By the end of the workshop, we had plenty of notes, problem statements, and big and small ideas to respond to. Now, these need sifting, prioritising, and then implementing. Some accessibility ambassadors have already volunteered to pick up some. I will see what I can carry.
In the past weeks and months, our application of the accessibility personas has only increased. User researcher Joshua has been carving out time to build a Chrome extension for our internal accessibility checks. Building on the accessibility personas Anika Henke at GDS developed some years ago, the Chrome extension makes simulating their experience or running their tools much more straightforward. Joshua has done a brilliant job, and we used the extension in 3 pizza-powered accessibility checks in July. There are a few things to improve before the extension can be more widely promoted. In next week’s Show the Thing format, Joshua and Marion will demonstrate and explain how they have used it. Before that, I might also try to provide an updated icon for it.
We are also in touch with Anika at GDS and plan to talk to her next week, sharing all the things we have done based on her foundational work.
What’s next
Next week, I will continue trying to understand the new projects and their staffing needs. Staffing tasks are often like an advanced game of Tetris, as you can never make the right decisions at the right moment.
On Wednesday, I will talk to project partners at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth about taking a broader service design view. Our work on parental benefit services is expanding from online calculators to paper forms, but there is much more to it. We have been building further knowledge about applicants’ journeys, users’ pain points, and cross-channel failure demand. The team has also started creating baseline metrics to work against.
Throughout the week, I will be interviewing the first candidates for the content design roles. There are some promising candidates, and I hope we can find suitable experts.
I also want to do some more writing!
In the meantime, my Touchpoint magazine article is almost completed after 2 rounds of edits by the anonymous peer reviewer. I want to get to some blog posts and publish a Service Standard report in the coming days.