April 2026
A good April. Got over to Ireland for a week and on a work visit to Copenhagen for a few days, which along with the longer evenings has got everything feeling a bit more fun.
Planning
After wrapping up the ‘managing government communications’ discovery, we’ve had a few weeks of planning and trying to get a team together for alpha. We’re pretty much there now, and we’ve got a couple of brilliant designers joining the project from other teams at GDS.
The general plan is to have a couple of streams of work. One’s trying to understand how government departments send messages, digging into the technical infrastructure and policy requirements there. And the other is looking at how the future experience of receiving messages from government should look like, in a more joined-up app-based world. Somewhere in amongst all that is how notifications and reminders work too.
Prototyping native apps
Linkedin/Bluesky is currently awash with people using AI to make small, single application web apps and prototypes. It’s actually pretty cool to see, albeit plenty of the examples I’ve seen don’t seem worth the water. I wish I had a bit more time for doing this kind of thing.
I’ve been trying to work out how we can use AI to prototype more advanced native experiences for the GOV.UK App, and I haven’t really found anything that compelling. The options seem to be to make React/HTML web apps (which don’t work the same with native accessibility features etc), or to pretty much build a real app using an Apple developer account and get it into Testflight etc. Neither feels ideal, and Figma has loads of shortcomings for this too. Feels like a real gap in the prototyping market, have I missed something?
Design in the news
- Tinder and Zoom offer 'proof of humanity' eye-scans to combat AI
- Google to punish sites that trap people in with back button tricks
- Trump's victory arch design for US capital moves forward