Common criteria for services right across Australia adapted from UK Government.
Australia’s new e-government unit, the Digital Transformation Office, has set out criteria that digital services right across government must meet before they are launched.
The criteria, which were adapted from the UK Government’s Digital by Default standards, will apply to all new services and existing ones with more than 50,000 transactions per year.
The DTO’s first requirement is that agencies research and understand user needs when they are designing services. They must “identify the people who will use the service, understand what they do, how they do it, when they do it and why”, says the Digital Service Standard released this week. Services should have a common look, feel and tone that fits the users’ needs.
The standard is in alpha phase and will be continuously improved as agencies provide feedback on it.
Services must be built in an “agile, iterative” way with continuous improvements through user research and testing, according to the standard. Even before it is launched, it should be tested on common browsers and devices using dummy accounts and a representative sample of users.
Another top demand is that agencies pull together a “sustainable multi-disciplinary team” with diverse skills to design, build, operate and iterate the services.
The team must be able to work with new technologies and know when to stop spending on old systems. “It may sometimes be necessary and most cost-effective to write-off previous financial investments,” the service standards say.
The team must use data to measure the performance of services and report it publicly. Agencies need to provide “ongoing assurance, supported by analytics, that the service is simple and intuitive enough that users succeed [the] first time unaided”, it says.
The source code should be publicly available for others to reuse wherever appropriate, and agencies should use APIs to make its content and services reusable by other agencies.
Agencies will have to “integrate” new digital services with existing telephone and counter services. They should assist those who cannot use online services, but do away with non-digital channels where appropriate.
Agencies have to take the right security, privacy and legal measures to protect the personal data and information the service will be providing, using or storing.
From the middle of 2015 agencies will have to ensure that services and information they are building or redesigning comply with these standards, said David Hazlehurst (pictured), who is acting chief executive of the DTO.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 09.04.2015
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