On digital archaeology and government services

I’m working for a Government department again. A fairly classic brief: we‘re designing a replacement for a 25 year old service used by a relatively small number of people but it captures an important set of data from a specialist group of users.

It is basically digital forms. The old one being impenetrable grey forms on small grey screens with cryptic acronyms and truncations on all the labels. It comes with an 880 page manual. Getting stuck in was very much one bite at a time, this elephant isn‘t going to eat itself.

One fun quirk is that it was built on Oracle, so every field can be used as a database query. I guess that’s what things look like when you are a database company?

It‘s been a lot to digest, the service is extremely niche, with specialist language and knowledge underpinning all of the parts. The whole thing is vast but familiar: licences issued give permission to do a thing with a natural resource, and that resource needs to be measured, accounted for, reported back to Gov, and charged for. There are many regulations that must be complied with, and ultimately enforced if they aren‘t.

The discovery took place months/years ago so there are hours of detailed user research videos to be immersed in, and playbacks of findings, boards of notes, sorted, grouped and signals to pick out. It really is like picking up the threads of history. Luckily it wasn’t many years ago, so the people are still around to help understand things. And it has taken quite a long time to understand things - or at least, enough things to crack on. Which I‘m eager to do! Let‘s go…