Local Government Digital Service Standard

15 points developed by the Local GOV Digital Team to help make their digital services outstanding.

1. Understand user needs. Research to develop deep knowledge of who the service users are and what that means for the design of the service.
2. Ensure a suitably skilled, sustainable multidisciplinary team, led by a senior service manager with decision making responsibility, can design, build and improve the service.
3. Create a service using the agile, iterative and user-centred methods set out in the Government Service Design Manual.
4. Build a service that can be iterated and improved in response to user need and make sure you have the capacity, resources and technical flexibility to do so.
5. Evaluate what tools and systems will be used to build, host, operate and measure the service, and how to procure them, looking to reuse existing technologies where possible.
6. Evaluate what user data and information the digital service will be providing or storing and address the security level, legal responsibilities, privacy issues and risks associated with the service.
7. Use open standards, existing authoritative data and registers, and where possible make source code and service data open and reusable under appropriate licenses.
8. Be able to test the end-to-end service in an environment similar to that of the live version, including all common browsers and devices.
9. Make a plan for the event of the digital service being taken temporarily offline, and regularly test.
10. Make sure that the service is simple enough that users succeed first time unaided.
11. Build a service consistent with the user experience of government digital services, including using common government platforms and the Government Service Manual design patterns.
12. Encourage maximum usage of the digital service (with assisted digital support if required).
13. Identify performance indicators for the service, incorporating existing indicators and publishing to a performance platform, if appropriate.
14. Put a process in place for ongoing user research, usability testing to continuously seek feedback from users, and collection of performance data to inform future improvement to the service.
15. Test the service from beginning to end with appropriate council member or senior manager responsible for it.

Local Government Digital Service Standard, (12 page PDF document)

Original author / source: Local GOV Digital