GovTech Barbados
These are the standards by which public-facing digital services in Barbados will be assessed before they are published and made available to the public.
The checklists in the “How to do it” sections contain ideas about how you might practically check if you are building services in line with the standards.
Users should continuously be engaged and involved from the initial design all the way through development, implementation, and improvement of the service.
From the start, service teams should
speak with, observe, and understand users and their needs before and while building the service. The realities, preferences, cultures, characteristics, expectations, challenges and behaviours of users should determine how the service is designed, organised, and delivered.
observe users in the context of how, where and when they will really use the service, not just in ideal ‘lab conditions’.
This will ensure that users use the service as it meets their needs. If the service is not built with users in mind, there may be low adoption of the service, and resources used in building the service would have been wasted.
Resources
Establish a multidisciplinary team that can discover, design, create and operate the service in a sustainable way.
The digital service is run by a multidisciplinary team (or teams) of experienced digital professionals who discover, build, operate and maintain the service. The team will likely include;
Senior decision-makers should also be a part of the team so that the team is empowered to quickly respond to users’ needs.
The team’s shape will change over time. The core team(s) should have the skills to consider and support all delivery channels (including those with limited or no internet access) and may also engage vendors and specialists (e.g. in gender and inclusion, etc) to support their work. Team members should work from the same location as much as possible.
Why it’s important
This will ensure that all skills needed to optimise every stage of service development will be present. For example, if you just have builders in your team and no user researchers or designers, you run the risk of creating a service that is not user-centred.
Resources
The service should be inclusive of the different demographics of the Barbadian public.
Ensure that everyone who needs to access the service is able to, regardless of their educational background, academic literacy level, digital literacy level, financial status, geographical location, gender, age, access to technology, physical ability or the language that they speak. The service should exclude no one. The Barbados Design System developed on the basis of research and experience of the digital service teams at GovTech Barbados should guide the approach to designing service user interfaces.
Make sure that the digital service, where online, should require as little Internet data as possible, ensuring accessibility even for communities with limited access to internet connectivity, and those who are unable to afford expensive data plans.
Ensure that digital services are always built in a way that even the users who don’t own internet-enabled devices or who lack digital skills can still access them. The needs of users without internet-connected devices should be considered and catered for in the service design and delivery.
Making your service accessible to users with disabilities is important for delivering inclusive services. Avoid excluding any segment of society that your ministry, department or agency (MDA) is intended to serve.
The government exists to serve all citizens. The services the government runs must do the same. Therefore, members of the public who need to access these services should be able to.
Resources
Use visual, audio, and written language that is familiar to Barbados’ residents and other users of the service.
The users of the public services in Barbados are not all proficient in reading and writing of the English language. You should ensure that all users of the service, regardless of background, ethnicity, and language are able to access the content in the service.
This will ensure that more users are able to access the service
Resources
The service should be simple and intuitive to use.
The service should be designed so that the experience is as straightforward as possible, with simple words, symbols, images, number of steps and navigation. Users must be able to use the service as they intended from start to finish, the first time, with minimum help.
Every interaction that users have with the service should be reliable and move them closer to the goal of addressing their problems.
This ensures that users have a successful experience using the service, and do not need help doing so. It also reduces the long term operational cost of running the service because users are able to complete their transactions without error, or the need to ask for help.
Resources
Put the right tools and technology in place to deliver and sustain the service.
The service should be built using tools and technologies that should be easy to use for both citizens and the government. This increases the likelihood of building a sustainable digital service that can be continuously iterated and improved, and also reduces the likelihood of vendor lock-in through tools and technology that are not commonly used, or for which the skills required are hard to find.
When you make a decision about technology, you’re making a significant investment. The choices you make will have a significant impact on your ability to create, iterate and operate the service in a sustainable way.
This ensures that the service is built using the most cost-effective tools and technology. It also helps to get the most value for money when engaging vendors to build a service. Sometimes choosing the wrong tools and technology means that a service has to be scrapped after it has been built, leading to a huge financial loss. It ensures that the service can be scaled cost-effectively.
Resources
Build using and connecting to platforms that already exist as much as possible.
By talking to other Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) the service team should establish if MDAs have built or are building something similar. When there are similarities, the team should build on and improve what already exists, especially in the case of components like payment gateways and existing databases where there is likely to be common user needs, and in the Design System where there are reusable resources. The team should also ensure that it liaises with MIST to adopt any Digital Public Infrastructure that’s been put in place by the government (e.g digital identity, payments and data exchange / interoperability platforms)
This reduces duplication of effort across the government. This could also help teams build services faster and cheaper. Interoperability would also allow for data exchange between MDAs, which improves the overall experience of interacting with the government.
Resources
Plan for, and design sustainability and scalability into the service from the start.
The team should plan for integration of the service with ‘business as usual’ and ensure that there is the team and funding in place for it to continuously adapt and improve over time.
The continuity of funding, tooling and teams is essential for a service having a long term and lasting impact.
Resources
Work in the open and collaborate with other government ministries, departments, and agencies
Your ways of working should contribute to openness and collaboration between government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that are delivering services.
This means publishing source code in open code repositories in a secure way, working in the open and regularly showing the progress you’re making on your service, even as you are still building it so that other MDAs and even users can learn about the service and provide helpful feedback.
This will help facilitate knowledge exchange and capability building within the Government of Barbados. Publishing source code in open code repositories will make it easier for other MDAs to build similar services in the future.
Resources
Build a service that is responsive to changing user needs
The team must design and deliver the service in such a way that they can easily adapt the service as more is learned about users’ needs.
When building and running the service, create a mechanism for receiving continuous feedback from users. The learnings from users’ feedback should be used to improve the service.
Running a live service doesn’t have to mean a full team working on the service 100% of the time when the service is live. But it does mean being able to make substantial improvements throughout the lifetime of the service. Make sure you have the capacity, resources and technical flexibility to iterate and improve the service frequently.
There should always be a continuous cycle of building, getting feedback, drawing learnings, and service improvement.
Services are never “finished”; they must keep improving. Iteration isn’t just for the early stages of a service’s development. Using agile methods means getting real people using your service as early as possible, and then making improvements throughout the lifetime of the service.
Making improvements means more than doing basic maintenance like fixing bugs in code, deploying security patches and keeping documentation up to date. If that’s all you do, you’ll be fixing symptoms rather than underlying problems. And over time, the service will stop meeting user needs.
Continuous improvement means you can respond to changes in user needs, other data availability, third-party services, technology, social norms or government policy throughout the lifetime of the service. So rather than having to be replaced, the service stays relevant until it’s ready to be retired.
Resources
Have and comply with trust and safety requirements
The legitimacy of the service must be convincing, clearly indicating to users that they are transacting with the government. This means adopting and following the Barbados Design System for a consistent user experience.
The service should abide by national and international security, data protection and confidentiality standards. Users should feel a sense of safety and confidentiality when using the service.
The team should be equipped to understand both general and specific security risks related to the design, operation and use of the service and to effectively manage them on an ongoing basis.
It enhances the social contract between the government and users. It also ensures that users can easily detect imposter and fraudulent services.
Resources
Have information about the service available where your users can easily learn about it.
The service team should ensure that citizens, residents and other stakeholders who need to use the service are adequately signposted to it, particularly via major search engines.
It should also be easy for the user to learn about any alternative channels through which they can access the service if they cannot access it online.
For a service to solve users’ needs, the users must first know that it exists. Usually, those who want to access a service online think about it as an action that they would like to perform e.g. “apply for a permit to play loud music”, “pay tax”, “register my baby’s birth”, “get a document notarised” etc.
Resources
Work out what success looks like for your service and identify metrics to measure it.
Identify and define metrics which will tell you what’s working with the service and what can be improved, combined with user research. Measure the performance of your service and understand what outcomes it is delivering. Report results to your stakeholders openly and regularly to encourage continuous improvement.
Iterate and improve your metrics and performance data collection practices as you learn more about user needs.
Remember that the value of the service stems from how it solves users’ problems, not from numbers of users.
Having performance metrics based on your definition of what good looks like means that you’ll know whether the service is solving the problem it’s meant to solve for your users.
Resources