HMG Cabinet Office - Future Borders
A government service in support of legislation for post-Brexit exports
““People who work as hauliers don’t like change. It needed to be simple for the dinosaurs in transports - like my father-in-law. He told me that he loves it, and he is old-school.””
Challenge
Check an HGV is ready to cross the border, as a service name, doesn’t speak trippingly on the tongue but does meet the Government Digital Service (GDS) standard of ‘what it says on the tin.’ In support of legislation spun up around the impending exit from the EU, this service was created to allow export hauliers and traders to apply for a free Kent Access Permit (KAP) in an effort to mitigate traffic problems at the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel that could spill into the surrounding areas of the county.
As per GDS guidelines, the service went through the usual phases of Discovery, Alpha, and Private Beta before being released to Public Beta mid-December 2020 in anticipation of Great Britain leaving the EU on January 1, 2021. An active User Research team was in regular contact with industry representatives, testing several iterations of independent screens and complete flows to ensure we met our goals of the service being easy to understand and use.
Process
I joined an integrated, tactical team of a service designer, interaction designer, user experience designer, and user researchers to support our development partners. Regular touch points, in the form of daily stand-ups and regular check-ins with representatives from several government departments, including policy and legal teams, kept everyone involve in the programme aware and able to respond quickly to requirements and user feedback.
Part of my role involved developing close working relationships with policy and departmental representatives, as well as our translation partner (the service was localised into 8 languages in addition to English), to find workable solutions that met agency needs and kept the service on track. By attending user interviews with industry volunteers, I was able to gain valuable feedback about the content as I was crafting it, and was able to simplify the requirements without compromising policy needs.
Outcome
While the Check an HGV service was live it issued over 500,000 Kent Access Permits in nine languages and was successful enough that it was retired four months sooner than expected. We also designed complicated documentation questions so effectively and elegantly that our patterns have been adopted by the Government Design Service (GDS) and are now available for anyone to use from their pattern library.