The context

The Digital Service Standard for Wales was published in March 2022 and the team had been developing a service manual to help teams meet it. In late 2025 the team I was working with at the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) had an ambition to scale the service assessment offer. They wanted more teams to volunteer for service assessment and more individuals to volunteer as experts for the assessment panel.

The problem

Our first round of research uncovered a fundamental stumbling block – that teams did not know how to embed the Digital Service Standard for Wales into their ways of working. The service assessment is based on this standard so if teams weren’t working to the Standard why would they want to be assessed against it?

In this example, we looked at how we might address this barrier so that we could help the team move closer to their ambition – increasing the number of service assessments across Wales.

OUR AIM: Find ways to encourage teams to use the Standard

Based on insights from the first experiment we thought that embedding the Standard into key points in the design cycle would be an easy way get teams familiar with the requirements.

We mapped the cycle and then designed some tools that could work alongside the service manual.

My role in the work

I led the design of the tools we created to test as part of the alpha. I was responsible for:

• using my content design skills to create checklist questions from the Digital Service Standard
• creating an initial checklist prototype in Miro
• designing a higher fidelity checklist prototype in Figma
• designing a sample checklist outcome report and created it in Figma
• mocking up a web page in the CDPS style
• writing the research guide in collaboration with the rest of the team
• leading the user research sessions with participants from across Wales
• analysing and sharing insights from the research

Clip from our Show & Tell of me explaining what we did

The Outcomes

We learned that a checklist was something that could be used by teams to help embed the Digital Service Standard. Participants showed us that it could be even more valuable than we initially thought. They told us that a checklist like the one we designed could be used to help teams to: 

• raise awareness of best practice 
• get a shared understanding of how to work 
• shape project direction 
• measure quality consistently 
• communicate quality to leaders 

This work became a key part of our overall recommendations for how the service assessment offer from CDPS could scale.
You can read more in this blog post about shaping the future of service assessments on the CDPS website.

Lessons learned

• Although we uncovered the need for teams to be supported before they could be assessed, stakeholders didn’t change their focus on increasing service assessment numbers. We still needed to deliver on that goal.
• We didn’t get the opportunity to test the physical accessibility of the prototype with a diverse audience. Next time I would prioritise that.
• A few people in the research wanted to start using the checklist straightaway. It would have been good to have a version that participants could keep and offer continued feedback.