Hi, everyone. Hope you all had a good Easter long weekend. Last week was a short week so I did one day of resource-sharing – apologies as I said I’d do two in the last roundup. I briefly forgot it was going to be Good Friday.

You may have seen some info about Delib’s comms strategy during the coronavirus crisis. If you missed it, see here.

In summary, Delib has a lot of knowledge to share regarding bringing participation processes online, which a lot of public bodies are having to contend with at the moment. We started sharing these resources last week, and this email rounds them up in one place.

On Wednesday, we shared some links on the topic of survey and service design:

  • 1. Delib’s article explaining the importance of service design principles when it comes to consultation, featuring examples. Keeping the user experience simple and intuitive means a lower drop-off rate and increases quality of responses.
  • 2. When it first came out, GOV.UK’s design system was revolutionary. Many governments around the world have since drawn upon it. Their Service Standard contains ways in which teams can make sure the user is at the heart of all services.
  • 3. 10 Principles for Design in a Crisis: this excellent article is by Louise Downe, author of the equally excellent book Good Services. (I recommend that as well.) Principles include:
    -Do no harm
    -Speak the truth
    -Prioritise the most vulnerable
  • 4. What’s in a question? A lot, as it turns out. Poorly written questions have a huge impact on response quality. Account manager Tim wrote a great article on the dos and don’ts of question design for consultations.
  • 5. Essex County Council have a dedicated service design team which has drawn strongly on the GOV.UK service standards I shared earlier. This is a great blog post about some of the specific work they were doing early last year.
  • 6. We interviewed Jason Kitcat, who had a hand in implementing the service design team itself, as well as many of the digital & agile methodologies that inform Essex CC’s service design approach.

That’s it for now. This week’s topics will be accessibility with a focus on alt text and how organisations are consulting on the coronavirus crisis. They’ll be shared on Delib’s Twitter and LinkedIn. If someone you know would benefit from receiving this information via email, here’s a link to the signup form.

Lastly, this is a new way of delivering information and is subject to constant revision as we learn. If you have any suggestions, Dani is Delib’s content editor and welcomes any feedback – follow her on Twitter or send her an email.

Take care, everyone, and have a good week.