Tell the story of your service
The people on the assessment panel do not know your service like you do. In an assessment, you’ll only have around 40 minutes to describe:
- the problem you’re trying to solve
- how your service fits with other products and services
- what tasks your users need to do
It’s important to present your service in a clear and engaging way.
Describe your service
Everyone in the team should be able to describe your service if asked. You need to agree how to describe your service in one or two sentences.
This is a good example:
The Apply for a veteran’s ID card service allows users to confirm that someone has served in the UK armed forces in a one-off, simple process, so veterans can access the services they are entitled to.
Tell an engaging story
Do not simply list the 14 points in the GOV.UK Service Standard.
As you describe and demo your service, tell the panel about things like:
- how users responded in user testing
- an area where you improved accessibility
- a design challenge and how the team worked to solve it
- reusing patterns or approaches from other government departments
If you have analytics, include some of the numbers in your story. For example, by improving content on the start page you increased the number of users completing a form successfully by 11%.
Consider letting a few of your team tell the story of your service. The panel will appreciate hearing from the different experts on your team.
Find more tips on telling an engaging story on GOV.UK (opens in a new tab).
Collect things as they happen
You should not need to spend a long time preparing for your assessment.
Do enough to make sure you can tell an open and honest story of the work you’ve done and what you’ve built.
You can reuse things from your show and tells. It also helps to record things you are doing as they happen, for example:
- create a folder for photos from workshops and site visits
- select short videos from user research sessions
- take before and after screenshots when you improve something
Make sure you have consent from anyone featured in a photo or video.
Published March 2023