The beginnings of a content strategy for GOV.UK
GOV.UK has done some significant things to improve the content that government publishes.
User insights
Rediscovering campaigns on GOV.UK
In 2 years GOV.UK has changed a lot. However, the campaign format (as used for the fire kills campaign) hasn’t seen the same improvement as other areas. So we launched a discovery phase earlier this year to understand more about …
Possible new categories for this blog
We’re planning to update the categories that Inside GOV.UK blog entries can be tagged to. We have 30 categories right now - some of which are duplicates (eg 'search' and 'search & navigation') or too vague (eg 'GOV.UK'). We’ve looked …
Improving Self Assessment on GOV.UK
Posted by:
Andy Harsant, Jane Eastwood and Spencer Ball - Content Designer, Race Disparity Unit, Posted on:
-
Categories:
How we work, User insights
GOV.UK is the new home of HMRC information since we completed transition of all government agencies and arms-length bodies in December 2014. This means that millions of users now come to GOV.UK for information about Self Assessment tax returns. This …
Rethinking the GOV.UK policy format: what our users told us
We're changing the policy format to better meet users' needs and get people to what they need faster.
First HMRC manual on GOV.UK - give us your feedback
...to make them more user-friendly and bring them in line with GDS design principles. Between the backend and frontend sits the newly developed “write API” that allows HMRC editors to...
Improving how we use HTML publications - part 2
...wishlist included: better tables, eg adding table editor more flexibility with numbered points the top publication header to be more response to the scale of documents to reduce the size...
Using HTML publications on GOV.UK - part 1
...comply with open standards Better for search There’s so much great metadata in HTML publications. We should, of course, make sure that PDFs we publish have this same metadata, but...
Who looks at GOV.UK during Christmas?
While most of us are tucking into a turkey, or watching the mandatory re-run of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, some people take the time to go onto GOV.UK. Traffic on the site was at 20% of normal levels, but that …
Analysts have user needs too
Performance analysts are at the heart of helping GDS digital teams understand user needs. But we’ve become increasingly aware of the user needs in the rest of government for data, analysis and reporting. We’ve been working to support these needs …
Related content and links
Read about the GOV.UK app
The GOV.UK app went live in public beta in July 2025. Find out what’s been happening, and what’s coming next, on the GDS blog.