In digital, data, and technology in DfE, we’ve published a Plain Language standard.
The Plain Language standard ensures that users can:
- find the information they need
- understand what they find
- act on what they understand
The standard incorporates our ways of working and best practise for user-centred design in government. It should not create any more work for content designers, or anyone working on content.
A department-specific standard to support delivery
There are lots of different standards that we need to meet when building digital government services.
While services are typically assessed against the 14 points of the government Service Standard, sometimes, we use other standards to further assure our services.
For example, this can include:
- accessibility conformance
- data protection
- personal data handling in user research
The DfE Plain Language standard provides a framework and a departmental commitment to use plain language in our services.
Our working hypotheses is that a standard which formalises the use of plain language will support teams to advocate for its use.
Applying standards and guidance
In DfE service teams, we follow and apply GDS Service Manual guidance, and work to meet the Service Standard. But not all services or websites go through assessment checks.
We know that existing guidance can be challenged or that people might not know it exists. The Plain Language standard aims to help us to meet our commitment as a public body to build services that everyone can use.
How we designed the standard
When the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published the Plain Language standard, content designers in DfE mapped out how we work to meet it and identify any gaps.
We shared this work with the DfE content community, user-centred policy design colleagues, and across government with content designers at HMRC and GDS.
We also explored the idea of whether having a language-based standard could support the work we do as content designers.
What we learnt
Our research showed that a Plain Language standard could support or add to GDS guidance and help people advocate for using plain language.
We also knew that other disciplines have standards, for example, Tech Code of Practice (TCoP), which support service delivery.
The scope of our standard could be a minimal viable standard to support raising the quality of services.
Scoped the standard
We ran a workshop with DfE senior content designers and content designers across DfE and GOV.UK to explore what a DfE Plain Language standard could look like, how could we measure it, and when it would be used.
We took the first draft to the wider DfE content community to ask if they could:
- apply the standard
- identify what guidance might be needed
- identify any gaps
We heard, ‘a standard gives more clout than guidance’ and that it could be shared with stakeholders and contractors, to support and reinforce our ways of working.
We also received challenge about overly formalising the content design process and that sometimes government needs to use jargon.
Meeting the standard is about working to GDS guidance and best practice.
We do recognise that as a government department we must use jargon sometimes, the jargon is what users recognise, rather than plain, simple wording. This is why we acknowledge that if there is a business, or user need, we always focus on writing clear content, directed by user research.
We iterated the standard, shared it with GDS and had a second community crit. We refined guidance for tools we use to support meeting the standard and considered cross-government content discussions about questioning how helpful a reading age is, so we removed it.
The Plain Language standard was approved by our standards forum in February, as part of a wider standards piece of digital, data and technology work in DfE. We’ll be working with our senior content designers to understand how useful the standard is to support service delivery.
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