https://dataingovernment.blog.gov.uk/digital-marketplace-service-assessment/
Digital Marketplace - Service Assessment
The Digital Marketplace will provide a new single place for the public sector to access and buy from the G-Cloud and Digital Services frameworks.
Department / Agency:
CO / GDS
Date of Assessment:
15/5/2014
Assessment Stage:
Alpha Review
Result:
Pass
Lead Assessor:
J. Thornett
Service Manager:
I. Majic
Digital Leader:
P. Maltby
Assessment report
The Digital Marketplace has been reviewed against the 26 points of the Service Standard at the end of the Alpha development.
Outcome of service assessment
After consideration we have concluded the Digital Marketplace service is on track to meet the Digital by Default Service Standard at this early stage of development.
Reasons
The Digital Marketplace team have shown that they are:
- focussed on meeting the needs of the users and have a really good understanding of the range of research activity that is needed to maintain this focus throughout service development
- a multi-disciplinary team working in an iterative, agile way to achieve their goals
- already considering the impact of data privacy and security implications of the future service
- building a service with the look and feel of GOV.UK and are looking to re-use existing design patterns and code libraries where possible
- thinking about a future vision of the service which would enable increased channel shift so that more activity around the buying and selling of cloud services could be undertaken through digital platforms
We were particularly pleased about the user-centred nature of the development so far and the clear understanding of how the service needs to improve in an iterative way, based on further user research and testing.
Recommendations
As the service moves into the next phase of development we recommend that:
- the GOV.UK content style guide is used and the content designer works closely with the central content team to ensure all content on the service is consistently written to the highest standards
- the team review the analytics tools being used on the new service to ensure the configuration is suitable and there is a mechanism in place for collecting and analysing the necessary data through the public alpha phase
- more analytics data is gathered from the old (currently live) service to better understand existing usage patterns such as distribution of pageviews over time, usage on different devices, and other indications of user need
- discussions continue with the Performance Platform team to agree suitable benchmarks on existing services and the most useful metrics to measure and publish to assess ongoing performance of the new service
- the plan to make source code openly available for re-use is kept on the backlog and factored into the next phase of development
