AI for the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Immediate help for UK citizens in sticky situations, powered by AI
You know those meetings which could have been an email?
The UK government department FCDO, commonly called the Foreign Office, deals with phone and email enquiries from British citizens about all kinds of things - from taking pets abroad right through to births, deaths, and marriages.
Much of the time, the answer to less vital questions were already on GOV.UK: they just needed help to find it.
But all the questions, big and small, were stuck in the same queue.
The solution: a new way to contact the government.
Artificial intelligence couldn’t be trusted to write the answers to users’ questions, but it could be trusted to pick the right ones from a bank of carefully-written answers. Those answers had to be written by an expert - a content designer.
1 solution to create
300+ pages to tackle
The agency, Caution Your Blast, needed a skilled content designer to refine the service so that people would click on the right link: often they would be drawn to contacting admin teams, where their emails might get lost - or emergencies would be overlooked.
Using the double diamond, Agile sprints and good old user research I worked in Figma, Miro and in good old Word documents to iterate and perfect the design.
Meanwhile, the FCDO’s contact details were on over 300 embassy, high commission and consulate pages on the bespoke GOV.UK CMS Whitehall. They needed someone to add their new AI tool to all of these pages, replacing existing phone and email addresses.
After auditing the content I edited and scheduled the pages, keeping track with Excel and using 2i techniques to make sure everything was absolutely perfect.
The result?
Quick answers, happy clients
In the space of only four months, I’d audited the entire portfolio of content, 2ied the lot, smoothed out the service (working closely with an interaction designer and user researcher, of course!) and rolled out the service worldwide, editing hundreds of pages on Whitehall.
The project was the first AI-powered citizen-facing service to go live on a GOV.UK domain. Users can now get answers in three seconds instead of three days - while people in genuine, complicated trouble abroad get the help they need immediately.
Meanwhile, I learned enough about AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to give a talk about them at 2024’s prestigious Growing in Content conference.