Live stage

In the Live stage, you actively maintain and monitor your service.

You track the analytics and do user research to identify potential improvements.

# Before you go live

Before you can make your service live, make sure the service meets the user needs you found in your Discovery, Alpha and Beta stages.

To go live, the user must be able to complete the full end-to-end journey.

Keep talking to the end-to-end service team. Also make sure operational and support staff are across changes.

The team must:

• secure the service’s information
• prove that your Public Beta service is functionally complete and performs better than any existing services
• continue to accurately measure and report the success of your service
• plan for the transition or integration of any existing services that meet a similar user needs to yours
• will be able to add redirects for URLs in the old service that will be deleted
• can support the service and be able to keep iterating it and improving it until it’s retired.

# What to do in Live stage

In Live stage, the team:

• continues user research
• monitors the status of your service
• maintains uptime and availability
• practices vulnerability and penetration testing
• tests the service’s performance
• maintains quality assurance.

Any improvements you make in Live stage must be:

• based on user research
• accessible
• quality assured
• work with the browsers and devices used by the people who need the service.

Repeat the service design and delivery stages (Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live) to work on problems or opportunities in the service.

# Share what you learn

Tell other team members about your solutions, research, guides and tools.

Share your work through:

• team showcases
• improvements to our design system
• contributing to this handbook.