Design for users, not systems
Government services must meet real user needs. Early research helps you understand problems, design better experiences and avoid the cost of building the wrong thing.
What you need to do
- Allocate time, budget and tools to explore the problem and iterate
- Involve people skilled in user research throughout delivery
- Ensure the team shares a clear understanding of the problem and desired outcome
- Use research to test early ideas and any pre-determined solutions
- Co-design with users and across agencies, platforms and channels where possible
- Maintain accountability for outcomes and support teams to change direction when evidence shows a better path
Choose the right tech and tools
Good government services are flexible and able to adapt. Decisions about whether to build or buy technology are critical. Poor choices can be costly and limit your ability to change course.
What you need to do
- Use vendors that transfer skills and knowledge into government. Innovative procurement can help with this
- Use modern, modular architectures that support reuse and resilience
- Show how tool and platform choices support quality, flexibility and value
- Consider building internally where it reduces long-term cost and effort
- Avoid long-term lock-in so services can adapt
- Plan for skills, funding and legacy technology management
Make it for everyone
Customer-facing and internal services must work for everyone who needs them. Understand accessibility and inclusion requirements, and research and test with diverse users.
What you need to do
- Include people with disability, language barriers, diverse cultural backgrounds and learning differences
- Consider regional and remote users with limited connectivity, in line with the NSW Government’s approach to digital inclusion
- Test with assistive technologies such as screen readers and voice recognition
- Comply with WCAG 2.2 at level AA (AAA where achievable) and continuously review for compliance
- Align accessibility standards across connected devices
- Write in plain language and provide alternatives to written English if possible
- Ensure funding supports recruiting and testing under-represented groups
Be open and transparent
Government has a responsibility to deliver value with public money. Transparency in design and delivery builds trust and drives reuse.
What you need to do
- Document decisions and share findings collaboratively – unless restricted by personal or sensitive information
- Use open-source technologies securely and share your source code where appropriate
- Publish suitable datasets on Data.NSW
- Be accountable for decisions that affect user outcomes
- Collaborate across government to reduce duplication
- Resource this work across the full-service lifecycle
Build multidisciplinary teams
Having a multidisciplinary team with the skills and authority to make decisions and deliver outcomes. Employ the right people at the right time so that you can deliver over multiple releases. This increases the chance of building and maintaining a quality service for the user.
What you need to do
- Ensure the project team has the right mix of capabilities
- Bring in new skills when needed, and share knowledge with new members
- Integrate contractors and vendors with government staff to retain capability
- Engage stakeholders and subject matter experts throughout delivery
- Agree on a purpose and expectations early
- Support a safe, flat team culture.
Measure, learn and improve
Define success from the user’s perspective and resource teams to continuously measure and improve. Iterating a service ensures it remains useful and cost-effective until it’s no longer sustainable.
What you need to do
- Budget for ongoing iteration
- Maintain a team that can respond to changing needs and government policy
- Define measurable outcomes; establish channels to gather feedback and insights
- Use evidence from actionable metrics to guide improvements
- Understand user goals at each stage of the service
Design for security from day one
Government systems and data must be secure and trusted. You can reduce risk and the cost of things going wrong later by ensuring the safety and security of your service design from the outset.
Plan and budget to set up for risk mitigation. Continue to track and test the safety and security of your service after every release.
What you need to do
- Work regularly with information security teams to meet NSW Cyber Security Policy requirements
- Test for vulnerabilities before release and after changes
- Identify and manage security, safety and fraud risks
- Document shared decisions and consider risk responsibilities across agencies
- Plan to modernise legacy systems or manage inherited security risks
Reduce duplication through reuse
Reuse proven tools, platforms and patterns, and share knowledge to deliver consistent, reliable services.
Actively sharing knowledge and transferring skills will leave things better than when you found them and deliver a reliable, consistent digital service.
What you need to do
- Ensure you have explored the technical landscape across other agencies. Reuse platforms and capabilities where appropriate
- Use State Digital Assets where appropriate
- Focus effort on what’s unique to your service
- Design APIs and services others can use
- Use and contribute to the NSW Design System
Build privacy into services
Government must protect the personal information it collects and uses. Not meeting these obligations damages trust in government services.
What you need to do
- Apply privacy by design from the start, and maintain it throughout the lifecycle of the service
- Complete and maintain a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA)
- Understand consent requirements and be transparent about data use
- Separate and restrict access to identifiable and de-identified data
Adapt and improve as you go
Agile ways of working focus on delivering value to users early and often.
Learn from how customers use a digital service to quickly make changes and address problems found.
What you need to do
- Use agile methods to test, learn and adapt quickly
- Keep decision-makers informed and share accountability for evidence-based changes
- Apply agile governance to reduce risk and improve quality
- Release and test updates regularly
- Use funding models that support early value and returning to discovery when needed, as outlined in the Discovery phase
Feedback
Contact us with your feedback on what we're doing well and where we can improve.