Public Sector & Education
Digital work for public bodies and education, where accessibility is a legal requirement, procurement is formal, and the audience includes everybody rather than a target segment.
Overview
Public sector and education services cannot choose their audience. A commercial site can design for its likely customer; a public service has to work for someone on an old phone, on a poor connection, using a screen reader, who may be under stress and unfamiliar with the process. That is a genuinely harder design problem.
Accessibility here is a legal obligation with published standards, not a nice-to-have. It is also considerably cheaper to build in than to retrofit, which is the argument worth making before a procurement rather than after an audit.
Who this is for
- Government departments, councils and public bodies
- Universities and colleges recruiting students
- Publicly funded organisations subject to accessibility regulations
What actually makes Public Sector & Education different
Not general business problems. The things that change how the work has to be done in this sector.
Accessibility as a legal standard
Published conformance requirements apply, and are increasingly enforced. Retrofitting accessibility costs several times what building to standard does.
An audience that is everybody
Old devices, poor connections, assistive technology and low digital confidence all have to work. Designing for the median user excludes the people who most need the service.
Procurement that shapes the work
Formal frameworks, published requirements and evaluation criteria mean the specification is written long before delivery, so getting it right matters more than usual.
Plain language obligations
Public information has to be understandable by people who are not specialists, which is a discipline in itself and rarely resourced as one.
Long-term maintainability
Public sector systems outlive the suppliers who built them. Anything that cannot be handed over cleanly becomes an expensive dependency at the taxpayer's cost.
The services that matter most in Public Sector & Education
The parts of what we do that address the constraints above. Everything else is available too.
UI & UX Design
Designing interfaces around what people are trying to do: research first, flows before screens, and prototypes tested with real users before anything is built.
Read moreWeb Development
Marketing sites built to be fast, editable by your team without a developer, and still maintainable in three years.
Read moreContent Strategy
Deciding what to publish, for whom and why, then building a plan the team can sustain. Usually less content than you are making now, doing more.
Read moreKnowledge Transfer
Getting what one person knows out of their head and into a form the organisation keeps: documentation, handover and the tacit knowledge nobody writes down.
Read morePerformance Optimisation
Making applications faster where it is actually slow: measured first, fixed at the cause, and verified against real user data rather than a lab score.
Read moreDigital Experience Design
Designing the whole digital journey rather than individual screens: the transitions between site, app, email and support, where most of the friction actually lives.
Read more
Common questions about Public Sector & Education
The things people ask before they get in touch. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
What accessibility standard do you build to?
WCAG 2.2 AA as a baseline, built in from the design stage rather than audited afterwards. That means keyboard operation, contrast, focus order and screen reader behaviour considered as the interface is designed, which is both cheaper and considerably better than remediation.
Can you work within a public procurement framework?
Yes. We would also say plainly when a specification asks for something that will not serve users well, since the specification is usually written before anyone has researched the actual need.
How do you handle the requirement to hand over cleanly?
Documentation, tests and decision records as part of delivery rather than at the end, and a preference for widely used technology over anything that would narrow who can maintain it later.
Is marketing appropriate for a public service?
Communication is, and it is often under-resourced. The job is usually making people aware a service exists and helping them complete it, which is closer to service design and plain language than to advertising.
Thinking about Public Sector & Education?
Tell us what you are trying to change. If we are not the right fit we will say so, and point you somewhere better.