Tag: Personalisation

Last week A-level results dropped.

And a video popped up in my YouTube subscriptions from GOV.UK suggesting that students download the GOV.UK app to search GOV.UK for what to do next.

It’s a bit odd when we already have an app for searching the web. A browser.

OK, I accept that’s a cheap shot from someone who is GOV.UK-app-sceptical at the best of times. So let me acknowledge that the published ambition is bigger than search: personalisation, proactive support, services inside the app and agents that help people do things.

But the video got under my skin because it’s just showing off search behind authentication inside an app.

Search is useful. Guidance is useful. The app needs to offer search. But if the selling point on results day is that the app does something any browser already does perfectly well, without the hassle of a download and a login, then let’s be honest: that’s a weak answer to the question of what the app is actually for.

Authentication is useful if what you get in return can actually know something about you, remember what you were doing and help you get on with it. If all you get is public search, it is mostly friction.

But the thing bothering me isn’t really that GOV.UK has put search in an app. 

It’s that the app gives us a good view of the much more interesting problem underneath. Government increasingly has bits of information, infrastructure and services that could make somebody’s journey through a moment like results day genuinely easier. Yet the person still too often experiences those bits as separate institutions, separate forms and another search box. 

So this is really a post about the plumbing, and what becomes possible when we finally join enough of it up.

Obviously it wouldn’t have helped anyone to watch a fake video of a future that doesn’t yet exist. But there is a good future that could exist.

And results day is a good test because results aren’t just information; they’re an event.

These results trigger things. Lives change on results day. A university offer became a confirmed place, or it didn’t. Clearing suddenly mattered. That might change student finance, or make a different apprenticeship or job (im)possible. The interesting thing about the grade is what it unlocks.

That’s the bit I’m interested in. Not putting the result somewhere digital for the sake of it, but allowing something newly true about somebody to change what they need to see and do next.

So, am I saying the GOV.UK video should have shown results being revealed in the app? 

On that I’m not so sure.