A thousand things at once: Bulk transactions and data collection in digital services
As part of Services Week 2025 and off the back of a successful and informative session at UKGovCamp, we ran a webinar, hosted by Simon Worthington, to explore digital services that let users do a thousand things at once!
Picture this: you are designing a service where users need to manage potentially many hundreds of things. The normal design system patterns don’t scale well to this size. Asking a user to fill out a multi-page web form for each thing is clearly too time-consuming and impractical. What they need is to tell your service about hundreds of things, all in one transaction. So what design pattern do you reach for?
Listen to this webinar, as we explore bulk transactions in digital services and how to collect data from users in human friendly ways. We'll look at case studies from around government and share some insights into how users think when they're dealing with data.
You can also see the 🟨 slides on Google Slides or 📑 the slides as a PDF.
We've also just published two companion posts that go into some more detail:
Data Upload Design Kit
At the end of the talk Simon mentioned the Data Upload Design Kit. It's where we're trying to build repeatable patterns and components for spreadsheet upload in services.
We forgot to mention that it's also a plugin for the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, so that designers can build and test spreadsheet-based prototypes without help. Here are some useful links:
Intro and installation guide: https://register-dynamics.github.io/data-import/
Demo (in a hypothetical pensions service): https://data-importer.register-dynamics.co.uk/
We'd really like your input and feedback about it! If you or any of your colleagues would like any help getting up to speed with it, please just send me a message – I'd be happy to help.