Edges - 11 to 14 August

Published: 16 August 2026
Tagged: weeknote

Grainy digital photo of half a large oak tree in silhouette, and the evening sun, which is too bright to tell if the moon is eclipsing it.

“…don’t you know that your time will come?”

Work

This week I’ve tried to focus on finalising the upcoming changes to framework content, ready for publication at the end of this month. There has been some pretty in-depth discussion about some of them over the week but by Friday afternoon I think we are 95% done.

We aim to give capability leads around government a preview of all the changes so they can see how much work might be needed to update their own systems. So that means sharing the details as a spreadsheet early next week.

The site migration continues in parallel. This week we’ve been able to start testing both the content management system and the rebuilt frontend. Lots and lots to do, but everyone seems to be on top of their stuff. The new product and service leadership people in the team are really making a difference to our momentum.

As part of this, we talked to the domains team about changing the URL to remove the out of date term ‘ddat’. As the site is not a true transactional service, it’s also a little odd to have it on a service subdomain. But there are several GDS products in this boat (see Design System, and the excellent new version of the GOV.UK Content guidance, and until a more sensible URL home is found, it’s what we’ve got to work with.

Early in the week our user researchers gave the team a ‘pre-playback’ of their findings on how the framework is being experienced in different use cases across government - job descriptions, pay allowances etc. I helped shape some of the hypotheses recommended for further exploration before it all starts going out for proper playback.

The research overall is pretty powerful stuff. As ever, real quotes from people bring home the impacts of the difficult processes used in some places. I’m hopeful that this fresh dose of reality can help us improve things from our position.

On Thursday, as part of onboarding new service owner, we mapped out ‘all the big things around us that are changing and how they might affect us’. This includes new-PM-things like devolution, as well as things like the replacement of Civil Service Success Profiles. Personally, I’m intrigued by the opportunities made possible by ‘designing for the edges’ like local government users, so will aim to keep this in everyone’s mind as plans evolve.