Dan Howarth

GOV.UK proposition

That press release looks to me like a breach of the GOV.UK proposition, which states content should not advertise or give commercial advantage to an organisation: www.gov.uk/government/p...

Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot: DBT evaluation report An evaluation of the Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), which took place from October to December 2024.

DBT published an evaluation of its use of Copilot, earlier this year. It found no evidence that time savings led to improvements in productivity: www.gov.uk/government/p...

There’s also the additional time needed to review automated notes and circulate any corrections

Nice, Ben. What do you mean by a ‘singular IA’ – sort of unified navigation schema?

Sludge Toolkit Learn about sludge and how to identify it in your customer journey. Use our resources to boost the customer's experience to make services more fair and inclusive.

ah “sludge is the barriers that make it difficult to find and use government services”. Nice: www.nsw.gov.au/departments-...

Is sludge a metaphor for the problematic content blob? Or actual sludge?

and for adding One Team Gov North!

What’s the difference between gentle and nice?

Service design: Here’s an as-is journey for 2 cows in Mural. Death of 1 cow is out-of-scope as we’re focusing on the happy path

Peaceful?

People sit in rows, smiling for the camera.

A bordered square rotated slightly clockwise, inside which are the words, "One Team Gov".

Work in or around the #PublicSector? Fancy a breakfast time natter, and optional co-working day?

The last 3 #OneTeamGov North #Manchester meetups of 2025 are on Tuesday:
🐝 21 October,
🐝 18 November,
🐝 16 December.

Sign up via www.eventbrite.com/o/hosted-by-...

Unlocking content potential: a report on organising structures and capability | Lauren Pope: La Pope Ltd A survey of over 70 content teams, exploring the organising structures they use, and how they help or harm content capability.

I've just published a report sharing the findings from a survey into the prevalence and effectiveness of different organising structures for content teams. (Thanks if you took part!) lapope.com/2025/09/22/u...

Many orgs drown in strategy documents. They can't find alignment because they've said too many things in too many documents.

Their way of fixing it is paying someone to go in and create one document to rule all documents.

Let's listen to Giles and stop creating more strategy documents! 🙌

Running is inherently foolish. But probably better than other forms of self-harm

It’ll hurt but go for it 💪

Concept and functionality were superb. Actual documented needs: Not so much. Take-up was low from depts, governance was lacking. Real shame Maslow was decommissioned, but never lived up to its potential

It’ll bag her a week on Celebrity Big Brother, though

Think these explorations you’re talking about would help a lot of people, me included

Nice! Would love to take a look if you’re up for sharing?

Like you said in your post on Tuesday, content design is having an existential crisis. If there’s no rigour in the hiring process or how the discipline is practiced, it’s screwed. We need to demonstrate the value of good content design, and then properly assess people’s ability to do it

Depends what you mean by adhere to standards. In that sort of environment, it’s likely standards will be lacking

Agree though we need to assess approaches to tackling problems and ways-of-working. In latest round of interviews at DBT, candidate led a crit on a piece of content. Felt like a much more natural and holistic way of observing their approach

Agreed, writing tasks blow. But there are few other reliable ways to gauge ability to write to style and standards. It’s not detectable from applications and portfolios are lacking. Writing and editing is a till a big part of the job. Completely disagree that AI can get you 90% there

I’m not sure any UX discipline is evolving. Skills required to make it work, like experimentation and data analysis, have always been lacking from the core skillset. Content design is no different. I’m not sure it’s ever worked as a discipline

Human artists, use only one piece to convince people to follow you.

Leaving my depth here, but I assumed you were talking about blockchain use cases beyond paying with crypto

Transactions kept forever on a public ledger, though? Probably not much in it for customers who prefer discretion

I’m not a pro-AI person, but that’s quite a broad brush you’re painting with. There are interesting AI-generated products, exploring the edges – just as there are trash, thoughtless products created by humans

It’s the intent, innit. People have always ripped off other people to sell stuff, AI hasn’t invented that

Come on lads, it’s the final rep