Digital Scotland Service Standard
The Digital Scotland Service Standard (DSSS) is a set of 12 criteria that all organisations delivering public services should work towards.
Typically, senior roles in a service delivery team, such as a Senior Responsible Officer, Service Owner or Product Owner should be familiar with DSSS. Everyone in a service team is responsible for making sure that the service being delivered meets all 12 DSSS criteria.
DSSS applies to small services with a limited number of users (though it's likely with a small team you'll need to simplify some of the tasks you'll need to do to meet the standard), as well as big services serving the majority of the Scottish public.
DSSS criteria are:
1. Understand users and their needs
Speaking to your users over multiple sessions is often the best way of understanding the needs of your users, but it is not the only way. Your users are the users of other services, so you should contact these services to gather the user research they have done. You can also find out a lot about users from data, such as call centre logs, statistics and web analytics, so you should gather these metrics from other services too.
You must test early prototypes of all or parts of your service with your users and use their feedback to improve the design of your service before testing again. Iterating your service with users in this way makes it more likely that your end service will be fit for purpose.
Find out more about getting the right user research on your project. You can also get guidance on user research from GOV.UK
2. Solve a whole problem for users
Beyond users, you’ll also need to look at the organisations that serve these users. If you understand how existing services are designed, you’ll be able to focus on:
- where your service fits in
- how your service can support or impact the wider interaction between users and the public sector
You should not try to fix everything at once or build complicated systems that are difficult to deliver because they try to do too much. The best solution will be a design that balances what users need, what is feasible technically and what works for the organisation, rather than overly focussing on one of these areas.
Find out more about how to design your service.
3. Design and deliver a joined-up experience – making sure everyone can use your service
Users should not be excluded or have a poor experience because of the way government is structured, or because a service is only designed for digital channels. It is a legal requirement that government services must work for everyone.
You should:
- include disabled people in user research
- understand the varying levels of digital skills, connectivity and confidence among your users and how this impacts the design of your service
- consider what support might be required to help people use your service, including whether offline access to your service is needed
Creating accessible services will also benefit other users. For example, using simple words can help people who have a learning disability, but also users who have the reading age of a 9-11 year old (around 50% of the Scottish population).
Find out more about understanding accessibility, building accessibility into projects and developing accessible webpages.
You can also use the Scottish Government Design System to get ready-made design patterns and components for your service.
4. Help users succeed first time
It costs time and money to deal with mistakes that happen when services don’t work well.
To prevent mistakes from happening, you should repeatedly test and improve your end-to-end service with users in an environment identical to your live environment. Delivering your service in this way means that you’re using an agile delivery methodology. You should use this methodology to deliver any digital service, although how you apply it will differ depending on whether you’re a large, heavily resourced service or a smaller service.
An agile method of delivery should also continue after your service is live. Services are never ‘finished’ and making ongoing improvements to the service means more than basic maintenance.
Making continuous improvements in live doesn’t mean a full team working on the service 100% of the time, but it does mean sufficient resource should be available to make substantial improvements throughout the lifetime of your service.
Find out more about prototyping and testing your service.
5. Have a multidisciplinary team
It’s important that people who are involved in making decisions about your service are a close-knit part of your team, so that decision-makers can respond quickly to what’s learnt about users and their needs by the rest of the team.
Start with the assumption that you’ll need a broad range of expertise and that a diverse team is more likely to come up with the best solution.
Find out more about the roles that are needed in a service team.
6. Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy and data
Government services often hold personal and sensitive information about users. If you work for the Scottish Government or an organisation in the Technology Assurance Framework, you have a legal duty to protect the information held by your organisation’s services.
Secure by Design
The Scottish Government follow the UK Government Secure by Design policy. As part of the Technology Assurance Framework you should also follow this policy.
Secure by Design principles
The UK Government Secure by Design principles are the foundation for embedding cyber security practices in digital delivery.
Secure by Design activities
These activities provide good practice guidance that can be tailored to your specific needs. The activities will help you follow the principles. Each activity contains examples and tools.
Cyber security advice
You can contact the Scottish Government Cyber Security Unit for advice.
Further guidance
7. Define what success looks like and publish performance data
To help you understand how users experience your service, you should identify metrics you want to measure, such as error rates and fall out rates.
If you use the Design System’s components and patterns to build your online service, code is already included that will help you track user actions. This will help you understand how well your service is performing. Find out more about the tracking of key metrics on the Design System.
It's also a good idea to measure how many users are using your service against predicted levels, so that you can be confident users are able to successfully find your service.
Publishing your headline data is important because Scotland has a national performance framework to help set priorities and understand how government spends public money. Making your headline data publicly available can help this process deliver better outcomes for the Scottish Government and citizens.
8. Choose the right tools and technology
The technology choices you make will have a huge impact on your ability to create, iterate and operate your service in a sustainable way. To keep costs low, you should look to reuse existing technologies wherever possible.
Find out more about choosing the right technology for your project.
9. Use and contribute to shared digital practices, processes, components, standards, patterns and platforms
As well as looking to reuse technology wherever possible, you should also look to reuse existing components, patterns and standards, such as data and content standards.
Reusing components and patterns means that you can provide users with a good experience in a cost effective way.
The Scottish Government Design System’s components and patterns have already been extensively tested and are ready for you to use in your service. They also contain code that will help you track user actions and understand how your users interact with your service.
10. Make new source code open
Public services are built with public money. So unless there’s a good reason not to, the code your service uses should be made available for people to reuse or build on.
Open source code can be reused by developers working in government, reducing costs for government as a whole. Publishing source code under an open licence means that you’re less likely to get locked in to working with a single supplier.
Regardless of your technology choice - reuse, buy or build - you should be able to open source your code.
11. Operate a reliable service
Users expect to be able to use online services 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so your service needs to operate reliably.
If a service is unavailable or slow, it can mean users aren’t able to get the help they need.
Find out how to make sure your service operates reliably.
12. Ensure sponsor acceptance
It’s important that decisions are understood by those responsible for the service - and that they accept any risks identified by the service team before it goes live.
Senior responsible staff (normally including the project's Senior Responsible Officer) need to know how long the project will last, be kept up-to-date with progress and make key decisions when needed. They'll also need to be able to communicate these things to stakeholders, such as Scottish Ministers, as needed.
To do this effectively, you should have a backlog of prioritised improvements that you’d like to make to your live service. No service is perfect or can stay forever the same, so to make sure your service stays relevant and keeps pace with user, policy or technology changes you should have a list of improvements that you plan to make to your service. This backlog should:
- be in a trackable format that can be easily presented to stakeholders
- include risks and issues that explain why the changes are needed and help prioritise the changes
- be linked to your delivery pipeline – these are the frequent releases, usually of technical changes, that develop your service
- help to understand what resource you’ll need and when to make sure your service stays relevant