It’s time for the next update of the GOV.UK roadmap.
It’s been a busy time for GOV.UK since our last roadmap iteration in May. Over the summer and autumn, we’ve seen lots of our product teams launch new tools, make high priority content updates, iterate services, improve experience for users and more.
Let’s dive into what we’ve been up to, and what’s coming next.
Celebrating delivery
Teams working on GOV.UK have achieved lots of delivery milestones in the past few months. This means that lots of our work has either moved off the roadmap as it’s been delivered, or moved into the recently shipped column.
This includes:
- rolling out a new navigation bar across GOV.UK following a successful A/B test
- launching a prototype tool to help people understand the next steps to take for their new businesses as part of our whole user journeys work (within 4 weeks there were 3,000 users of the product)
- shipping a travel abroad step by step, which has seen more than 1 million views since March, by people wanting to plan travel within new post-Brexit and COVID-19 rules
- launching a new cookie banner, optimising experience for users whilst remaining compliant with legislation, and adding this to the design system
- automating more of our performance reporting across critical areas, allowing teams to understand usage to better create guidance and products
- updating high priority content, including to the COVID-19 landing page
- initial updates to the GOV.UK homepage
All of this work happened alongside the critical work of keeping GOV.UK technically robust, accessible and accurate.
Working towards our GDS mission
GDS has set itself a clear vision: to build a simple, joined-up and personalised experience of government for everyone.
The work done on GOV.UK contributes to mission 1 and 2 of GDS’s strategy: “GOV.UK as the single and trusted online destination for government information and services” and “Joined-up services that solve whole problems and span multiple departments”.
What’s coming next
As we build on our work to date, we’ve got some exciting projects coming up including:
- ongoing improvements to the design of the homepage
- developing our whole user journeys work to expand beyond ‘Starting a business’ to see where else we could improve people’s experiences with government
- finding more ways to automate analysis of user feedback to help respond to user concerns faster
- thinking about how the website and mobile technologies including apps, reflects developing user needs
- working on features to help create a personalised experience of GOV.UK if users choose to use them
Roadmap design iterations
For this third edition, we’ve kept our design changes to a minimum.
We’ve removed the social media sharing buttons from the roadmap as we found they were not used much. And, we updated the “Big numbers” style to match what is in the GOV.UK component library. This ensures consistency in our design and our codebase.
We removed “the crown” from the bottom of the roadmap as it was solely decorative and it pushed aside the second data point further to the right of the page. In doing that, users who rely on the operating system’s screen magnifier may not be aware of that second data point on the page. In addition, the crown is removed when viewed on mobile.
Get in touch
We’re always keen to hear from people interested in our work. We love using the roadmap to spark conversations with people across government, industry, academia or anyone else who wants to chat. You can email the team, leave a comment below or reach out on the GDS social media channels.
We’re anticipating the next update of the roadmap will be in spring 2022. Subscribe to the blog to keep up to date with our work in the meantime.
3 comments
Comment by Jack posted on
I think for we should be given back the option of printing in pdf as well as html, as sometimes the HTML versions don't print correctly, and also sometimes you want to save to your computer rather than actually print, e.g. when making a self assessment payment through the gov.uk website, the confirmation used to be a pdf, now the pdf option has gone.
Comment by GDS Team posted on
Hi Jack,
If you want to print something as a PDF, you can save a page as a PDF and then print it. You can find how to do this online e.g. here's how to save a document as a PDF on a Mac (https://support.apple.com/en-bn/guide/mac-help/mchlp1531/mac).
Comment by Jack posted on
Hi,
I know how to save a webpage as a pdf, but the formatting is not as great as when you have the option for saivng as pdf.
Currently you get all the parts of the website printed/saved with as well, rather than just a the e.g. receipt of payment.
As per my original comment, even if the ability to print as HTML has been added, no problem, but why remove the existing save as pdf option.