(I know a few people who worked on various parts of it and for what it’s worth: they’re all legit. They care, and they’re good. It should come as no surprise that the site turned out the way it did, if they’re hiring these sorts of people.)
Having looked up the relevant part, let me transcribe it for you:
> "One of the first things that struck Jen and me as we entered the GDS office on an upper floor of an old office building high above a busy London street was a large sheet of butcher paper covering the picture window in the lobby. In the paper was a small cutout through which you could see the people on the street below. The cutout had a large arrow pointing to it, labeled "Users", reminding everyone when they walked in just whom the unit was meant to serve."
I found it really drove home the service's users-first approach. Following that anecdote he elaborates on the service's "10 commandments" (the 10 GDS Design Principles). They're also quite interesting, but I'm sure a search engine lookup can help you there. I really recommend the book if you want an optimist's outlook on the future of technology, government and economy.
I don't know if it was recorded or not, but if it was it's an interesting insight into getting things done in the UK government.
I imagine working for a government is interesting from an incentives perspective too, simply because the optimisation is not about profit in the market sense.
Related: GDS (the GOV.UK people) was a huge inspiration to us from the start. Both 18F and USDS (another Federal Gov org focused on digital transformation) have strong connections to GDS, and there's lots of conversation between the groups.
Specifically the posts like this https://gdstechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-prog...
My only complaint is that they're sometimes too dogmatic about the one question per page thing, which is actually a pretty stupid UX commandment as soon as you get to complex logic flows.
I think they've relaxed a bit on that though, I didn't notice it last time I was doing my company tax return.
One of the "downsides" of it being a government site is that it needs to be usable for everyone. Which can be a bit frustrating for power users.
Except, I knew which type I had to submit and it was telling me the wrong one. I was obviously answering one question wrong. But I couldn't go back and I could see my previous answers, I could only start again.
That's basically a ten page glorified wizard with no back button, which is actually a big UX no-no. Must have gone through the damn thing 5 times before I finally got the right form.