GDS Podcast #36: Maps in services

We take you from A to B as we find out how the GOV.UK Design System and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs working to help make maps in public services better.

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The transcript of the episode follows:

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Louise Harris:

Hello, and welcome back to the Government Digital Service podcast. My name is Louise Harris. I'm the Creative and Channels Team Leader at GDS and your host for today. Before we dive into the episode, I've got a quick favour to ask: if you are a regular listener to the GDS podcast, please take a second to fill out our quick 2 minute survey to tell us why you tune in, what you like and what you don't. You can find a link in our blog post and the show notes for this episode. Anyway, on with the show. 

 

Today we're going to be talking about maps, more specifically maps in public services. Here at GDS, with a little help from our friends, we've started to explore how to make public sector maps more consistent, easier to use and accessible for users. Sound good? Well stay with us because there are lots of opportunities to get involved in this work. Whether you're in central or local government, wider public sector or even outside. To get us from A to B on this interesting topic, I'm pleased to welcome Imran Hussain, Community Designer for the GOV.UK Design System, and Cathy Dutton, Head of Design at Defra. Cathy, Imran, welcome to the GDS podcast. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Hi Louise, thank you. 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Hi Louise. 

 

Louise Harris: 

It's great to have you both. So I've introduced you to our listeners, but you don't need an introduction to one another because you go way back. Is that right?

 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, we do. We used to work out Defra together, not so long ago actually. Before I came to GDS. So I was the Communities Lead at Defra and I worked with most of the communities in the user centred design space and with Cathy being the Head of Design. We got to work together quite a lot. And it was lots of fun and it's sad that we don't work together anymore. So it's absolutely brilliant to be on this podcast with her again. 

 

Louise Harris: 

Cathy, I hear on the grapevine that GDS sort of semi poached Imran over from Defra - have you forgiven us yet? 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, almost. It helps, we-we still get to work together. So it's all good. 

 

Louise Harris: 

So you've both decided to join forces and try and unpick this kind of a sticky challenge of making maps that are used in our public services more accessible, more consistent and, well, just, better. Imran, I'll start with you because I think you and others in the GOV.UK Design System are gonna have a big part to play in coordinating these efforts. But for those listeners who maybe don't know much about the Design System or design in government in general, can you give us a quick kind of whistle stop tour into what the GOV.UK Design System is, what exists to do and what your role as a Community Designer involves? 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, of course. So the GOV.UK Design System is a suite of tools that helps teams in government quickly build usable, accessible services for GOV.UK. You can find it in more than 3,000 repositories on GitHub, and they use different elements of the Design System. On GOV.UK alone, it's used on over 7,000 individual services. But there's many more outside of it as well. So, yeah, it's vastly used and really, really popular, and we kind of need it in government. My particular role is Community Designer on the GOV.UK Design System team: I work with the community. I kind of create space for collaboration to happen, which is really important because we're a contribution based design system. So most of the ideas for components and patterns and things like that come from the community and the community actually build a significant part of those patterns and components as well. So we just kind of do the finishing touches on the team. 

 

Louise Harris: 

So that, to me, sounds like it's almost as much about the people as it is about the tech or the design stuff. Right? So it's about creating that environment where a sense of community can really take root. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, that's that's absolutely, really important. 

 

Louise Harris: 

Thinking about this maps work, is that something that's kind of come up from the community? 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's completely come from the community. And it just came about because it kept coming up on Design System calls. It kept coming up in our forums, people asking about what's the best practice with how to do things maps-wise. And we keep getting help desk tickets around maps as well. We-we've got 2 levels of users on the Design System team. We've got you know, the end users, which are the general public that will use these maps, but our primary users, I guess you could say, are designers and user researchers; and yeah, whether they're interaction designers, service designers or content designers across government who use these components and patterns. So it, it clearly came up as a need and we didn't have the relevant components and patterns to be able to serve their needs at the time, so we-we started this collaboration. And it-it was Cathy that really kind of kicked it off because they, they came up with some things and just kind of said: 'hey, where do we share this?' [laughs]. So now we're creating a space where everyone can share things. 

 

Louise Harris:

Oh, that's really cool, Imran. Cathy, it sounds like maps is something that Defra's been thinking about beforehand. 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yes, so maps is something that comes up in discussion in Defra a lot. We have weekly drop in sessions that are often around like how we can do maps better. They've been a lot of our services, like flooding and farming, and we did our first accessibility drop-in session last week as well. And the whole top--a lot of topics were about how, how we can make maps more inclusive. So because we speak about it a lot, we try to start documenting some of the stuff we talk about so we don't just repeat the same conversations. And I think it was last summer we started to create our own version of like what mapping standards could be or the beginnings of map standards and guidance - really high level stuff, just like when to use a map, some of the findings we've got, some of the best practise bits - and we, we put them on GitHub. And then for me, that's been really useful because part of my job is speaking to all the designers. So whenever we have someone new join or whenever someone gets in touch and says like: 'we're doing a map, where do we start?', I can kind of point at the, at the standards. And that's how we got involved really. I think I came to one of Imran's calls on a Friday and was just like we have this thing, how can we share it across government because it's not a pattern or component? Or how can other people in government input and improve it for us? 

 

Louise Harris: 

And how has that been then? Being able to tap into that wider community across government and see you know, this-this baby that you've been creating in Defra, how has it been watching that grow?

 

Cathy Dutton: 

It's been really good so far actually. The mix of people on the panels that Imran's put together has really helped because we've got, like our efforts were mostly from interaction designers, service designers and content designers. So it's been good to get people from different backgrounds, software development, data specialists and get their input and see what, where they're coming from when we talk about maps. That's been really useful. It's been really good for our designers as well. There's a few Defra people on the panel. So just getting them exposed to like different ways of thinking or different, different, what's the word I'm looking for, constraints around mapping or how we do good maps has been really helpful. 

 

Louise Harris: 

And have there been you know, themes coming through in terms of what teams are kind of struggling with when it comes to maps? 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

I think so, yeah, there's one particular one in Defra that, we, we kind of go to shape tools quite early and trying to make a shape tool on a map like draw like something out, a position on the map is really hard to make inclusive and accessible. And so that seems to come up quite a lot and could be one of the biggest challenges. We've tried to just start saying it in a different way to see if that maybe helps and just say like a lot of stuff in Defra is: 'can I do this activity in this place' and just trying to find different ways that people could do that. But if we do need a map, obviously it's useful to have standards.

 

Imran Hussain: 

And we-we've just been talking about standards recently, and there was a few different areas that came up like Cathy said, because we've got that really multidisciplinary steering group. We talked about: we wanna include features on architecture, what technology, user interface, data visualisation and accessibility. So those are the different areas that have come up already in terms of any sort of standards or principles that we will design. 

 

Louise Harris: 

There’s already quite a lot of energy and interest in exploring this issue. Do you have sight of your end, end goal at this point?

 

Imran Hussain: 

For, for me, it's always based on what the community want to do. So we asked the community and we've put the steering group together, and what people want is really practical things that they'll be able to use in their work. So it's nice to have, you know, the things that Cathy mentioned about getting people together, getting them to learn from each other, we do absolutely want that to happen. I think people want to have real, tangible products or things that they can kind of use. So in a, in a, we've got like a short term and long term aim that we've been talking about amongst the steering group. And the long term aim is to kind of set best practice and develop specific things that people can use. 

 

In the short term, what we're going to do next is probably get together and set some best practice and create some principles, some design principles for maps across the public sector. And we see that as the first step where we get everyone pulling in the same direction. People understand what good looks like and hopefully start changing their practise to try and work in with those kind of principles. Once we have those and we kind of help proliferate those around in the public sector, then I think what we will try and do after that is start to create those specific patterns and components that people can then utilise in their services. So you know, we've shown people what good looks like, what the principles are, then we start getting more specific with: let's design this element of mapping and get that same community in to give us their best practise and we'll create a component that everyone can use. 

 

Louise Harris:

You talked a little bit, Imran, about us having 2 users of the Design System; we've got our ultimate end users: so the people that live in our communities, my friends, your friends, our parents, our colleagues who are gonna be needing to use government and public services; and also our kind of primary users in this context: the service owners and designers and content designers that are going to be building these services and maybe using maps. What's the impact for them if we don’t fix this work?

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, the biggest, the biggest problem is probably making maps that are accessible and inclusive because it is, they can be quite complex. As soon as you have a map, suddenly you've got layers, you've got keys, you've got things that fly in and out. So it's been, it's been about making them accessible and making them work on mobile devices as well, where some information is hidden. We always have, like one of our standards, one of the first 3 parts of our standards I think, is that if we use a map, you have to make the information available outside the map as well. But that is also quite tricky depending on what the information is. So that's something that we always come back to is like, how can we make maps inclusive? 

 

And then I think as well, we've started talking a lot about sustainability in, in, in Defra, in design in general. And so like maps are quite data heavy. So they're probably not the most efficient way we can use data either so that's something we're starting to talk about more and more as well. And then even just like as you're prototyping ideas, you really want to prototype stuff like quick and use throw away code and testing and try again. We haven't found yet a really quick way to test maps because i-it's quite an effort to do a map in a prototype. And so even just that kind of stuff is a problem. Like if you want to quickly test something, how do you quickly test a map? And we always start without a map, is our default anyway. Start with the, the very bare minimum and see if there's actual need for a map. 

 

Louise Harris: 

Yeah, it's really interesting, and I think there's, there's maps and there's maps, right? I think some people might immediately jump to maps as navigational tools, getting us from A to B. But actually, as you've talked there, sometimes they're conveying data about a particular area.

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, I guess flood, flood is a good example. So the flood maps: you can find out your risk of flooding on a map. I think it was traditionally with icons on maps, which is another, another problem for, for inclusivity. So in that service now, they've done a really good job of using the map as like a secondary tool. So you can find out everything you need to find out about your flood risk. And then if you want to do it on a map, you can. And so that's like working well in that area. Yes, some maps are interactive maps and some aren't, some are just information. The interactive ones are harder, like if we're talking about the shape tool again. We're still trying to work out how you would make a map where you've got to draw shape on it. How can you do that outside of the map? And if you have 2 ways to do it, is that more efficient or is there 1 way? I'm always wary of like 1 ways, 1 way, like there's never one solution for everything. 

 

Louise Harris: 

Well it sounds like that's why you know, working towards these standards is such a good first step because it’s, it’s a pretty big problem, pretty broad area that maybe no one’s got quite right yet.

 

Imran Hussain: 

I think it's important to recognise there's a lot of good work out there currently. So there's lots of departments doing really exciting stuff. And i-it was just by chance that I knew Cathy and she's happy to discuss these kind of things with me, that she came and she shared her work; and they told us about, they-they did some great work with accessibility and tried to apply some principles that usually wouldn't apply to maps - like hover over text and highlighting text and things like that. They tried to apply that to maps, and a lot of people don't. But it-it's just by chance that I found out about the work she's doing and we were able to share it. So a-and part of the problem is that if we don't create that space where people can share and feel comfortable sharing and they think that it's going to actually go somewhere, then it'll just stay in silos in different organisations across the public sector and we'll have pockets of best practice. There'll be no consistency and it'll only be people in the know that find out about it and try to implement those kind of fixes. So it's a real great opportunity. 

 

I mean, it's really intimidating to try and fix maps, which I keep joking about: 'oh, Imran, what are you doing on maps?'. We're trying to fix maps in the public sector, but it literally is as wide as that, it's an open goal, you know? There's...no one's got together so far and put the effort into building a set of standards or deciding what good kind of looks like. So as far as I'm concerned, anything that we sort of achieve will be a step forward from where we were before. There's lots of great stuff out there, we're just, you know, I'm, I'm really just kind of collecting it together. I've, I'm, I've got no expert in [laughs] maps, no expertise whatsoever in maps. I'm not a designer, but I'm, I'm good at collaboration. So like, I'm just gonna get all these brilliant minds, put them in one place, get all the goodness from them and will try and put it into a nice, accessible, quite easy to understand format that everyone can kind of share. 

 

Louise Harris: 

And what do you think Cathy? It sounds like it is an intimidating area for designers to be looking at and thinking about. But it’s obviously something that you at Defra have been doing.

 

Cathy Dutton: 

I think 'cause, just from being in Defra for like the last 5 years, I've seen how much like because I'm not a map expert either, but there's people in my team that really are. And it's taken them years of working on like flood services and working on maps and spatial information. The knowledge they've built up and the research they've collected and stuff, it just, it's, it's taken them so long and I kind of feel like now they are really, real experts in mapping and that helped us do our standards. But then I think it was just like if every other--I thought that if every other department was doing the same thing, like it just makes sense that that's something we should just do collectively. 'Cause I know that we were lucky enough to have funding to spend a lot of time looking at inclusive maps. But if that can help people who haven't got as much funding or time to sort of start from a slightly higher position by using our-our standards or even them helping us with our standards, then that just seemed like a thing we should be doing. So I'm just, I'm just basically trying to share the great work that the people in my team have done that I didn't do anything of. They all did it and just, it just felt like it was good enough to share. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Yeah, we're, we're, we're both just here to take credit for other people's work [laugh from Cathy], really. [laughs] 

 

Louise Harris: 

Aw, I, I think you’re both far too nice to take credit for anybody's work. It feels to me like you’re championing this work. 

 

So we’ve got GDS involved, we have got the lovely folks at Defra involved. Imran, are there any other organisations that are kind of throwing their weight in at this stage?

 

Imran Hussain: 

What I can tell you is we, we originally planned for 60 people at the first workshop and it sold out within 2 days. So we-we had to invite 100 people to the first workshop and it sold out, the next batch of tickets sold out within like another day. So there's a lot of demand and a lot of people are willing to take time aside from their job to kind of participate in this and really make this a thing. So we're really, really grateful for that. I think there's more people, like I said, hearing about it all the time. And the people who work in this area are very, very passionate, and I'm really lucky that we found something that resonates with people. 

 

We're central government so there's a lot of departments from central government that get involved, especially the map heavy departments. There's quite a few people from HM Land Registry, for example. But there's also people from wider public sector. So there's really good representation from local gov, who use maps in their services quite a lot. You know people finding schools, or trying to find their way around. There's a lot of map usage over there. But even just recently, someone from the police GIS service reached out to us on Twitter and see if they could kind of get involved, and someone from Ordnance Survey did as well. So it's, it's growing all the time and as far as we're concerned, the more people we can get involved, the better. Whatever principles we create, the more voices we have, the more robust they will be and the more applicable they will be to different sectors. So that's, that's really, we want to cast a wide net, get as many people involved as possible, really collaborate and come up with products that everyone can use.

 

Louise Harris: 

So it sounds like we're in good company already, but for our listeners who might be interested in this, is it just designers that you think can contribute to this body of work or are you looking for expertise from other disciplines as well? 

 

Imran Hussain: 

No, absolutely. It's, we need people from every single kind of discipline to really help this kind of work. Obviously it's really helpful having different types of designers: service designers to understand user needs; interaction designers to really help with implementing fixes for those user needs; we need developers to help design components and patterns. But I think, like user research, for example, is a really key part of this making sure we're meeting people's needs and we understand those needs. So you know, having user researchers as part of it; content designers to help us write guidance; like--and as we said, we're dealing with architecture, technology, data visualisation, so professionals in technical architecture and people who are experts in data and mapping - it's all really, really useful and everything will enrich the work that we're kind of doing. And I mean the--right now is an absolutely brilliant time to get involved because we're still scoping all the problems. So we've, we've set design principles as our first kind of goal. But longer term, we're still kind of scoping exactly what direction we're going to take. So anyone who gets involved can really help shape this collaboration and really input their viewpoint and perspective and that will enrich the overall project. So, yeah, we're very excited if anyone wants to get involved and we'd love to have more voices, as I said before. 

 

Louise Harris: 

And Cathy, I want to come to you now because while you're involved in this work, you've also been a partner to the GOV.UK Design System in the past as well. So maybe you could share a little bit about what that was like, what it involved for you so that people who are maybe thinking about getting involved or want to know a little bit more, can understand what it's like and why it's great. 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Yeah, the Design System working group - I think it's still called that - I was on for a couple of years. It's a quite a small panel of people, I think, from all different departments in government. And they basically just review submissions to the Design System to make sure that, I think it's around like checking quality and making sure that we're consistent, but also like making sure that everyone kind of--well I thought it was like making sure everyone felt like a part of the Design System as well, because it's like, it's a central tool but it's for everyone. So that's kind of the reason I love being on that panel, was that like you felt like you owned a little piece of it and you could contribute and have a little voice, so that was really nice. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

I'm sorry, Cathy.

 

Cathy Dutton: 

[laughs] Yeah. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

I'm sorry, I'm apologising because Cathy had been on the working group since the start and I was the one that asked her to leave even though we're friends. [laughs] 

 

Louise Harris: 

Absolutely savage folks. Savage. 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Wasn't that the first thing you did? 

 

Imran Hussain: 

It was. It was though. Sorting out the working group. [laughs] No. But yeah, it's, it's really nice to have this relationship with people across kind of government and like knowing Cathy, I knew she'd take it in the right way. She, she did always say: 'hey, if, if you want fresh blood to come in, please let me know'. And it, and it just gave us an opportunity at the time to really rebalance the working group to be more representative of the wider population. So we brought in lots of different roles. We brought in a more equal gender balance. We thought about neurodiversity and made sure there were people with different ways of thinking on the, on the Design System working group so we could represent their needs. We also thought about race, ethnicity, background, all sorts of things. And we're getting better. It's still not perfect, but it's much, much more representative of the wider population. And what we are starting to do, what, what we've said is people who leave the working group, it doesn't mean they're gone. I-it just means we're giving other people an opportunity to come in. So we're starting to kind of rotate our members a lot more. So people will come in, they'll stay on it for like a year, a year and a half, and then they'll pop back out and they might pop back in.

 

Louise Harris: 

And Cathy is the proof of the pudding of that, 'cause she may not be a part of the working group anymore, but she's a big part of what you're trying to do to fix, fix maps in services. So thanks for letting us drag you back Cathy [laugh from Cathy]. 

 

Louise Harris: 

And if people are interested in, in getting involved or about find--in finding out more, what should they do? 

 

Imran Hussain: 

I think the main things are: I-I'm quite available, so feel free to kind of like, get in touch with me, I'm on all the Slack spaces that I can get onto [laughs]: local-gov Slack, like cross-gov Slack. On Twitter as well, my usernames: @ImHuYorks - I-M-H-U-Y-O-R-K-S. But just get in touch and I can like add you to any of the platforms that you will have access to. The main chatter is going on, on cross-gov Slacks. There's a map in services channel.

 

The other really easy way that anyone can sign up though, is to join the Design System mailing list. So if you Google GOV.UK Design System, pretty much on the homepage near the top, it'll say: 'do you want to get updates?'. And you can join our mailing list. And that's the way that any information about collaboration, workshops will come straight into your inbox and you'll get pinged about it before it happens. So that's probably the easiest method for most people to get involved. 

 

Louise Harris: 

Sounds good. We'll make sure we include links to all of those pages and sign ups in the blog post that goes alongside this podcast, too. 

 

So there you have it. We really want you to get in touch and help us on our journey towards improving the usability, accessibility and consistency of maps in public services. Thank you to my 2 guests, Imran and Cathy, for expertly guiding us through this really important topic, championing this work and, please forgive me folks, getting this important user need on the map. If you've enjoyed today's episode, and want to learn even more about the GOV.UK Design System - and let's face it, why wouldn't you? - you can tune in to our February 2020 episode of the GDS podcast where you can hear GDS's Tim Paul talk more about the roots of the Design System and its impact.

 

And you can find all of our other episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all major podcast platforms and transcripts are available on Podbean. So thanks for listening and thank you both again. Goodbye. 

 

Imran Hussain: 

Thanks, Louise. Bye. 

 

Cathy Dutton: 

Thanks, bye.