Performance Platform

GOV.UK Performance was a new approach for making government work better by improving access to accurate and consistent performance data.

The government has been collecting, analysing and reporting on performance data for many years. Today, government data sits in lots of different places, and is often hard to find.

GOV.UK Performance had the potential to save government employees a lot of time, while also improving the quality of data collected, and its effectiveness in improving government services.

What’s more, making all that data public means that government employees become more responsible and accountable - both for the quality of the data itself, and for the performance it represents - such as how much a service costs.

My role on GOV.UK Performance was to learn about the people currently using performance data within government, and to share that understanding with the rest of the team. I was also there to help identify potential new users.

My work involved three parts:

First, I did a lot of contextual research. I ran in-depth interviews with key users (our primary users were the civil servants who deliver government services), and held workshops to prioritise what people’s needs were.

Second, I ran usability sessions and tested prototypes with these people. Throughout the project, I was working closely with the design team and product manager to help them make evidence-based decisions based off the findings of these sessions.

And third, I met with potential new users to discover how we could make our service work better for them.

We were spending a lot of time trying to work out which metrics matter to civil servants. To find the answer, we ran a lot of product audits with our users. You can see more about that process here, but broadly the output was

  1. How good is it?

  2. How much does it cost? 

  3. How much does it save when more people use digital channels? 

During my interviews and workshops, I was asked several times if there could be a ‘private’ section to the Performance platform - ie. dashboards of data that the general public couldn’t see.

After some serious debate among our team, we decided that creating that particular feature would clash with our principles of transparency, accessibility and accountability; hidden dashboards felt similar to old ways of working, such as password protected excel sheets.

What’s more, we believed that allowing government services to hide their data would work against our primary objective: to make government work better by improving access to accurate and consistent data.

GOV.UK Performance is an ongoing project. The team had a lot of good ideas (take a look at our work on the Dashboards for User Journeys). But, I don't think the implementation matches the promise of what could be achieved (maybe I'll write a post about that some day).