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Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Environment Agency, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, Natural England, Animal and Plant Health Agency

How we built the new Defra service manual with AI and community collaboration

Posted by: Chris Leo, Posted on: 23 April 2026 - Categories: AI, Defra digital, User centred design

How the AI capability and enablement team used agentic design to build a community-driven resource to help digital practitioners find the standards they need.

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A day in the life of a Service Designer in Defra

Posted by: Hannah Rutherford-Roke, Posted on: 14 November 2022 - Categories: Defra service design, Defra services, User centred design
A lady, smiling, with short orange hair, large earrings, and a green and black patterned blouse.

Interested in joining Defra as s Service Designer? Hannah Rutherford-Roke tells us about her role as a Senior Service Designer and why she chose to work for Defra.

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How showing the thing helped us simplify our MVP

Posted by: David Thomas, Posted on: 14 March 2018 - Categories: Defra digital, Digital transformation
Printed out sheets representing pages of the service.

...application. We then put these screens on the wall underneath the full process, to show how much less we could do. We managed to reduce 72 pages to 22 pages,...

Read more of How showing the thing helped us simplify our MVP - 2 comments

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Recent blogs

  • How we built the new Defra service manual with AI and community collaboration 23 April 2026
  • Making digital services more sustainable: introducing a 15th service standard point 21 April 2026
  • Doing content-first design at Defra – part two 20 March 2026

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