GOV.UK Notify

GOV.UK Notify is sending emails, text messages and letters for 1,000 public services – in central and local government, the NHS, emergency services, schools and colleges in every corner of the UK.

This helps millions of people stay informed about the things that matter to them. It reduces the number of people who call up to find out what’s going on.

I worked in the discovery phase of Notify. Early on we identified that the main users of our service are different to most government services. The main users are not the millions of people receiving the messages. They are the people working on the service teams: technical architects, service managers, developers, designers, product managers, business analysts and user researchers.

In this phase of work we tried to understand how different teams within government currently notified the public on applications, changes to registers etc. We observed a lot of different techniques (some better than others let's say) and there was not a consistent way for government teams to notify their users. This is exactly why we do user research: to find out what people are doing now to solve their problem, understand what needs they have, and to understand how we can best help meet those needs. 

Notify has now sent over 40 million notifications and is being used by 166 different service teams within government. You can look at more of the statistics here. And, here is a short video explaining Notify.

Notify has sent 2 billion notifications saving government loads of money and improving the experience of millions of real people.