How we work
Firebreaks on GOV.UK are similar to Google’s 20% time or Spotify’s hack week. For 1 week every 3 months, teams disband and everyone is given a chance to have some self-directed time to improve GOV.UK. We’ve had 3 firebreaks now: …
This post explores how we plan who works on which team on GOV.UK, and how that process has evolved throughout 2017-2018.
GOV.UK was built rapidly to meet a tight deadline. The push to get GOV.UK out of beta into live, transitioning 326 government websites onto the single domain, and closing down Directgov and BusinessLink resulted in a significant amount of technical …
On GOV.UK, we’ve just completed our 7th wave of usability benchmarking. It’s something we do every 6 months to get an insight into whether our efforts to improve GOV.UK are having a positive impact on the overall user experience.
I’m a content designer on GOV.UK and Sarah is a content editor at the Student Loans Company (SLC). Last quarter we worked together on improving content around applying for a means-tested student loan. As part of the process, students enter …
We’ve been using A/B testing across 2 teams to make measurable improvements to common user journeys on GOV.UK. What is A/B testing? A/B testing is a method to compare two versions of a page against each other to determine which …
In July we wrote about our new way of working and what we’re learning from it. We also wanted to write a bit more about what we’d actually delivered too, so here it is: 2 week blitz Our new roadmap …
We’re embarking on a huge programme of work to design a single taxonomy and transform our operating model and the content that is published on GOV.UK. The aim of this work is to make it easier for people to find …
The Government Digital Service (GDS) Transition team has been an industrious bunch since we formed in September 2016. For a team of just 4 people (2 content designers, a content lead and a policy and engagement manager), we’ve achieved a …
As a performance analyst on GOV.UK, my job is to assess how well the site is performing, and track the effects of changes we put in place. Sometimes people think this mostly involves monitoring trends. That's important, but the interesting …