As of today, GOV.UK has a new crown in its logo. This blog post explains why we’ve made the change and how we’ve done it.
In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher features the Tudor Crown, rather than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.
On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings.
Forms of the crown are being gradually updated across government to reflect the monarch’s choice of crown, featured in His Majesty’s Royal Cypher. This includes GOV.UK, the digital home of the government, which is a hugely important part of public life in the UK. The GOV.UK crown is one of many official instances of the crown so it forms one part of this change. For this work, we’re focusing on instances of the GOV.UK logo which do not include the Royal coat of arms or government departments’ crests.
We wanted to create something that was faithful to both the official heraldry and the visual identity of GOV.UK. We redrew a simplified version of the crown, making sure it appeared clearly at smaller sizes and lower resolutions. The different proportions of the new crown meant we had to subtly tweak the GOV.UK logo’s typography and spacing to complement it.
We worked with the Government Communication Service (GCS) and the Royal Household to confirm the final version.
GOV.UK’s crown is an important part of GOV.UK’s brand, which is one of the most recognisable digital services in the UK according to YouGov. It has not been updated since the site went live in 2012, so we had to work out how to implement this change in a consistent and ordered way.
Once we had the new designs, we needed to roll it out across GDS-owned instances of the GOV.UK crown. This included the GOV.UK homepage, the sitewide menubar, and GDS owned apps, like the Identity Checker App.
However, this change is a cross-government effort. Although GOV.UK looks like a single thing to users, it’s made up of multiple different website domains, which are owned by various government departments. These departments are required to update the crown in their locally owned services and channels.
The GOV.UK Design System makes it possible to do this in a consistent way through its centralised open-source codebase, GOV.UK Frontend. The Design System team updated the crown in versions 5.1, 4.8 and 3.15, to make sure that services using older versions of GOV.UK Frontend can update it as easily as possible.
We’re taking a phased approach to implementation, starting with the sitewide menu bar and homepage, and seeing it rolled out across GOV.UK in the next 2 weeks.
With huge thanks to teams across government, today is when the new crown is seen for the first time across GOV.UK.
It first went live on the GOV.UK homepage and in the sitewide menu bar. You can also see it in other GOV.UK domains such as campaign.gov.uk and blog.gov.uk.
Departments are making changes to their services between today and 1 March. During this time, users may see both new and old versions of the crown.
We also want to thank GCS for their support and for leading the wider changes to symbols of state; thank you.
If you’re from a government department you can get support to update to the latest version of the Design System. You can also ask any questions directly to the Design System Team on:
If you want the logo in an image file for internal instances of the GOV.UK crown, please email govuk-design-system-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
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This post was updated on 21 February, 2024, to amend the image comparing screenshots of the GOV.UK homepage on a mobile device. The previous image showed incorrect formatting of the page’s strapline.
]]>GOV.UK has a vast website estate. There are more than 700,000 pages covering an enormous range of topics to deliver our mission of being the single, trusted online home for the UK government.
The majority of this content is created with Whitehall Publisher. Introduced in the early days of GOV.UK, this is an in-house content management system (CMS) which is used by over 2,000 civil servants to upload, manage and amend content.
Over the last year we’ve been making improvements to Whitehall, including simplifying the way images are added. Now we’ve completed a bigger overhaul of the CMS - moving its user interface, the part of the system publishers see and interact with, to the GOV.UK Design System. We did this to make the CMS more accessible, and make it quicker and easier to publish content. This has simplified the publishing process for civil servants and, in turn, means the millions of people that use GOV.UK every single day get vital information more quickly.
Here’s how we achieved this important transition and what happens next.
The GOV.UK Design System is a set of styles, components and patterns that help teams in government create user-centred digital services.
Moving to the GOV.UK Design System brings a number of benefits. The colours, font sizes, and components it contains were built to be accessible for all users, including those who require assistive technologies to navigate online services. Meanwhile updating the user interface makes the codebase - the text written in the programming language that Whitehall was built with - less complex. This will lead to a better experience for developers when they make future improvements to Whitehall.
Replacing Whitehall’s existing styles and components with those found in the GOV.UK Design System was a big task, especially given publishers needed to continue using the CMS to do their jobs. With this in mind, the approach we took was to convert Whitehall like-for-like to the design system. The image below shows how document search has been changed in this way.
Converting like-for-like meant the design system’s styles and components would be used, while keeping the existing layout and functionality of Whitehall’s individual pages.
However, where there were no suitable replacements for parts of Whitehall in the design system, the team took the chance to re-imagine how these aspects of the CMS could work, in line with the design system's principles. The image below shows how the document collection user interface has been changed in this way.
For instance, tasks such as reordering content, adding, removing and searching material used to happen on the same page, but now they are on their own page, each with a unique URL.
At GDS we work in an agile way. This means our teams build quickly, test what they’ve built and iterate their work based on regular feedback. So, as we were improving Whitehall, we decided to release the updates in manageable packages as opposed to waiting until it was all complete. Before a release, the team communicated the changes to publishers via Basecamp.
In addition, the guidance to using the application is edited to reflect the latest design and/or functionality updates. Every time a release happens, our users let us know what’s working and what isn’t via Basecamp, Zendesk as well as the Publisher Survey. If anything needs to be revisited the team quickly responds and makes any necessary improvements.
After one-and-a-half years, and more than 10 release packages, Whitehall’s transition to the GOV.UK design system is complete, and all traces of the previous styles and components have been removed. Here’s what some of our publishers across government have to say about the changes:
“There have been a fair few changes to the app, all positive. It’s easier to use, especially for people new to Whitehall; it’s more intuitive.” (Content Designer, Home Office)
“...the fact you’ve made it clearer for colleagues just joining us while, at the same time, not interrupting my work is really positive.” (Lead Content Designer, Environment Agency)
Although the transition has now finished, a dedicated team is exploring how we can further improve and iterate the overall user experience of Whitehall. This offers us the chance to re-imagine many of the publishing app’s existing functionalities from the ground up.
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In our strategy for growth, launched in June last year, we said that we wanted to explore whether emerging technologies can help users when interacting with GOV.UK.
The Government Digital Service (GDS) is running a series of experiments to explore, and test, how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) could improve the user experience of GOV.UK. Chris Bellamy, Director of GOV.UK, has shared more about the work of the AI team, and how we’re approaching this technology — we suggest you read her blog post before this one to have that context.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an emerging technology. It’s only just over a year old, but it has generated a huge amount of interest and discussion. As Chris Bellamy writes: “We believe that there is potential for this technology to have a major, and positive, impact on how people use GOV.UK... [and] that the government has a duty to make sure it's used responsibly, and this duty is one that we do not take lightly.” This echoes the government's recommended approach described in a policy white paper last year.
This meant we took the approach of running a series of phased experiments in a controlled way to quickly gather data for analysis and evaluation of the system, and iteration. Our first experiment was using generative Large Language Models (the technology behind ChatGPT) to solve a problem that’s as old as GOV.UK itself — how we can save people time and make their interactions with government simpler, faster and easier.
Our first experiment was an OpenAI powered chatbot, “grounded” on published information on the site (a method known as Retrieval Augmented Generation). We wanted to see if we could use this approach to enable users to find the information they need by asking questions of GOV.UK content in natural language - the way they would write or speak in everyday life.
We called the system we developed GOV.UK Chat. We took a phased approach to experimenting with GOV.UK Chat, where each phase would last a couple of weeks. At the end of each phase, we evaluated the data to determine our next step.
The first 3 phases were internal. This allowed us to develop the system safely prior to showing it to real users. This included a “red teaming” exercise, where colleagues from across government tried their hardest to break the system or make it not behave as intended.
We also evaluated the performance of the system at each stage, based on expert human assessment of the responses provided and the retrieved GOV.UK sources. Earlier on, this allowed us to identify an initial set of components which, together, produced the best results.
Following Phase 4 testing with a dozen users, with positive results, we scaled up testing by inviting 1,000 users to use GOV.UK Chat within a live private pilot — so we could continue to iterate and improve, and see how people would respond to the system. Collecting more data also helps us have more confidence in our evaluation of the technology.
Prior to each phase, especially Phase 5, we carefully considered what outcome or learning we wanted to achieve and designed the experiment and analysis accordingly.
We look forward to blogging about some of these areas in greater detail at a later date.
As with all GDS’s work, we are committed to protecting users’ privacy and security. For this experiment, we put in safeguards to prevent users from submitting personal data in their query.
We also respect the personal data that exists on GOV.UK pages and worked closely with our data protection colleagues throughout the experiment in conducting a data protection impact assessment and mitigating any identified risks. For example, we removed GOV.UK pages with personal data from the system so they could not be sent to the LLM.
We conducted follow up surveys of users’ experience with GOV.UK Chat, as well as getting human experts to assess the accuracy and completeness of a sample of answers produced by the system.
Analysis of the survey data (n=157) revealed that most people liked using GOV.UK Chat to find the information they needed. Nearly 70% of users found the responses were useful and just under 65% of our users were satisfied with the experience.
From the testing we also gathered insights on how these results could be improved. For instance:
Our results also highlighted known issues associated with the nascent nature of this technology. Overall, answers did not reach the highest level of accuracy demanded for a site like GOV.UK, where factual accuracy is crucial. We also observed a few cases of hallucination - where the system generated responses containing incorrect information presented as fact - mostly in response to users’ ambiguous or inappropriate queries.
Accuracy gains could be achieved by improving how we search for relevant GOV.UK information that we pass to the LLM, and by guiding users to phrase clear questions, as well as by exploring ways to generate answers that are better tailored to users’ circumstances.
We also found that some users underestimated or dismissed the inaccuracy risks with GOV.UK Chat, because of the credibility and duty of care associated with the GOV.UK brand. There were also some misunderstandings about how generative AI works. This could lead to users having misplaced confidence in a system that could be wrong some of the time. We’re working to make sure that users understand inaccuracy risks, and are able to access the reliable information from GOV.UK that they need.
These findings validate why we’re taking a balanced, measured and data driven approach to this technology — we’re not moving fast and breaking things. We’re innovating and learning while maintaining GOV.UK’s reputation as a highly trusted (according to internal polling) information source and a ubiquitously recognised symbol in the UK.
Based on the positive outcomes and insights from this work, we’re rapidly iterating this experiment to address the issues of accuracy and reliability. In parallel we’re exploring other ways in which AI can help the millions of people who use GOV.UK every day.
Teams across government are investigating how best to take advantage of this new technology, and the AI Safety Institute has been established to focus on advanced AI safety for the public interest. GDS is working closely with the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and No.10 on the experiments. CDDO has today published the Generative AI Framework, which provides guidance across government departments.
We believe our GOV.UK Chat experiment can act as a “pathfinder” experiment for colleagues across government and the private sector, as to how to evaluate this technology safely.
If you’re interested in the work, please get in touch with the team via govuk-enquiries@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk
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At the Government Digital Service (GDS), we’ve been thinking hard about how we can use generative AI and large language model (LLM) technologies to improve the user experience of GOV.UK. This builds on a decade of innovating with new technologies, including AI and machine learning, at GOV.UK. And it helps directly contribute to GDS’s mission of improving and safeguarding the user experience of digital government.
We believe that there is potential for this technology to have a major, and positive, impact on how people use GOV.UK - for instance making it easier to find answers to their questions from the 700,000+ page estate of GOV.UK. However, we also know, as with all new technology, that the government has a duty to make sure it’s used responsibly, and this duty is one that we do not take lightly.
To make sure we were both investigating new technologies, while being cognisant to the risks, we decided the best way to understand how the new technology can deliver value is through real experiments, starting small and scaling incrementally. We’ve set up the GOV.UK AI Team, which brings together a multidisciplinary team to design, build and run a series of experiments using AI that can be tested with a variety of different users.
The first of these experiments was to see if a LLM-powered chatbot can reduce complexity, save people time and make interactions with government simpler, faster and easier. The chatbot responds to user questions in the style of GOV.UK, based only on published information on the site.
Following initial testing, with positive results, late last year we scaled up testing to 1,000 invited users - so we could continue to evaluate, iterate and improve. Watch the video to see a demo and hear from the team, and read our blog post detailing our approach and findings.
As with all our work we’re committed to protecting people’s privacy and security, particularly with this new technology. We will always uphold our high standards when it comes to data protection, following privacy by design and data minimisation principles. We do this by methods that include removing GOV.UK pages with personal data from the tool; limiting the tool to invited users; instructing these testers not to input personal data; and screening inputs for personal data.
For our upcoming experiments, we are set to explore and evaluate ideas contributed by colleagues, users and various government departments. We are continuing to develop the accuracy of the chat while partnering with other government organisations, aiming to establish rapid feedback loops to assess and iterate going forward.
Innovation is not new for GDS. The creation of GOV.UK itself was an innovation over a decade ago - bringing together nearly 2,000 government websites into a single home for the UK government online. And since then the teams across GOV.UK have sought to take advantage of AI technologies to keep up with changing user expectations. For instance, we used algorithms for related links, machine learning to increase accessibility of the site and innovative data analysis during COVID-19.
As part of this culture, we have been given the space to experiment in a controlled environment. Building fast, and iterating quickly, means data and feedback can be rapid - and easier to scale.
This is a new technology that brings a new set of risks that need managing. We’re working closely with colleagues across government, particularly in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) and No.10, to ensure our experiments are conducted safely and securely. CDDO has published the Generative AI Framework today which sets out guidance for government departments on the safe, responsible and effective use of generative AI.
As always, we’re going to share our work, particularly with our cross-government data science colleagues so please watch this space. If you’re interested in this work, we’re looking for individuals and partners to join us on this programme of AI experiments, so please get in touch via govuk-enquiries@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk if you’d like to be involved. We’ll be recruiting full time Data Scientist, Data Engineer and more positions in the team as we build our capabilities in this area. Please search Civil Service Jobs to apply.
]]>GOV.UK is at the centre of life in the United Kingdom. Millions of people visit us on a daily basis to do everything from tax a vehicle to apply for a passport.
But every month there are moments when page views around a particular topic increase markedly. These can be driven by a variety of factors, including sudden events, historic milestones and government announcements. GOV.UK’s Data Insights team monitors these trends using tools such as Google Analytics, feedback and email subscription lists. This data, collected with a user’s consent, gives us crucial guidance about what our users are looking for and how we can develop GOV.UK to continue to meet their needs in future.
In 2023 there were peaks around travel advice triggered by natural disasters, a new way of alerting the public to emergencies, the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III and more. This post gives a month-by-month rundown of some of the biggest surges in traffic GOV.UK saw throughout the year and the reasons behind them.
The 31 January Self Assessment deadline is the best known and most reliable seasonal peak of traffic on GOV.UK. Annual patterns are similar, with traffic increasing as the deadline nears. The total number of visits to Self Assessment content in January 2023 reached 11.3 million - 13% up on 2022. In addition, searches for ‘self assessment’ rose by 190% compared with December.
Traffic to travel advice pages always reacts quickly to disturbances and natural disasters. This happened for the Turkey-Syria earthquakes on 6 and 20 February. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s travel advice was the most popular page with 92,000 visits, while advice on how to make charity donations safely was the second most-viewed with 24,000 visits.
Visits to GOV.UK always surge around the Budget, with this year’s - taking place on 15 March - seeing traffic peaks exceeding figures for all previous Budgets. There were 528,000 visits to Budget content, with traffic being highly focused over 3 days. Queries using GOV.UK’s own search function on 15 March were also dominated by Budget terms and the key themes. Several less familiar acronyms surfaced in our list of new search terms as people looked them up - these included OOTLAR (overview of tax legislation and rates), LTA (lifetime allowance), MPAA (money purchase annual allowance) and CCUS (carbon capture, usage and storage).
The national test of the Emergency Alerts Service took place at 3pm on Sunday 23 April amid much media attention. This followed local tests in 2021, with a message being sent out referring people to the alerts page on GOV.UK. Server logs recorded over 2 million hits on the alerts pages between 2pm and 7pm, and there were over 7,300 responses over 2 days to a survey on the alerts pages.
The popularity of Coronation content rose in May when Their Majesties King Charles III and Queen Camilla were crowned at Westminster Abbey. There were 330,000 visits to Coronation pages on GOV.UK, up from 143,000 in April, and interaction with content peaked the day before the Coronation. On this day the Coronation Medal received the most attention, accounting for 77% of the total page views. And during the ceremony itself, an overwhelming 99% of visits to Coronation pages used mobile devices.
Financial help for households drove traffic to GOV.UK in June when a £150 Cost of Living payment for qualifying disabled people began to be issued. The initiative was covered by the BBC and local media, leading to peak traffic to the Department for Work and Pensions’ press release about the payment which was published in May.
This month the chief traffic trend was P800 tax letters, sent out each year from mid-June onwards to tell people whether they have paid too much or too little tax. These letters encourage users to visit a short URL - gov.uk/p800refund - which redirects the user and includes a tracking code. By July there had been 1.17 million arrivals on GOV.UK using that short URL.
In August we noticed an increase in visits to content about EU Settled Status, which allows people to live, work and study in the UK indefinitely. Traffic levels reached 140,000 visits a week, the highest levels since November 2021. The increase is likely to be associated with an announcement on 17 July that from September 2023 people with pre-settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS) would automatically have their status extended by 2 years before it expires, if they had not obtained settled status.
The confirmation of a future ban on XL Bully dogs brought people to GOV.UK this month, with searches for the breed exceeding 2,000 and peaking between 15 and 19 September.
As the seasons turned and autumn began in earnest in October, so did the latest series of named storms. Storm Babet brought high winds and heavy rain to much of the UK, with eastern Scotland being affected particularly badly. GOV.UK was a vital source of information during the severe weather, with our ‘check for flooding’ page seeing a 1,244% increase in engagement, and the ‘check the long-term flood risk for an area in England’ page experiencing a 117% growth in traffic.
Weather again brought users to GOV.UK in large numbers as November arrived. Announcements of school closures in response to Storm Ciarán led to a 4,000% increase in unique page views to the School Closures page.
And as temperatures dipped at the beginning of 2023’s final month, weather stayed on the agenda, but in a different way - in line with winter seasonal trends, engagement with our Cold Weather Payment pages increased by an average of 939%. The pages provide information about what people need to do to get the payments and when they will receive them.
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GDS exists to make digital government simpler, clearer and faster for all - based on the principle that good online services are better for users, and cheaper for the taxpayer. That’s why our product teams working on GOV.UK regularly evaluate the tools we offer to make sure they’re still fit for purpose and providing the right information quickly, every time it’s required.
One of these tools, Find a Licence, allows people to search for and find licences that they might need for their business, home or another activity. Individuals starting a business need to know which licences they need, so they can operate safely and legally. For example, someone opening a restaurant may need a licence to serve alcohol, a licence to advertise their business, or a licence to play music in the background.
The legacy Licence Finder tool was created 10 years ago, but analytics indicated that it was in need of some improvements. So we set out to develop a new version, focusing on the part of the user journey where people are seeking out licences.
Since launching the new Find a Licence tool the data has shown some highly encouraging results. User satisfaction is up markedly and, by engaging with the Department for Business and Trade and simplifying the content management, we’ve increased the number of findable licences by more than half. This post explains how we delivered this successful outcome for users and what happens next.
Reviewing analytics identified a number of issues with the previous licence finder, which prompted us to prioritise this work. We knew the licence finder was not working as it should. We could see that people were dropping out of the journey and not reaching the final page, and we knew we could improve the accessibility.
Secondly, the previous content maintenance model was inefficient. Departments had to raise a ticket and GDS developers had to hardcode content. These dependencies meant it was complex and expensive to keep the tool up-to-date and accurate.
GOV.UK has a strategy to ensure that more people get better outcomes from government by making it quicker and easier for users to access information and services. In line with these goals, we drew up a list of the essential requirements the new solution needed to meet. We wanted to be certain that it:
It was also essential for us to form partnerships with other departments across government in order to develop the tool. We collaborated closely with the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), who are responsible for the overarching policy around licences, business and trade, as well as with another 30 government departments, arms length bodies and devolved nations to empower them to own and maintain their licence content.
GOV.UK’s responsibility was developing a solution, from discovery - the process of understanding the problem that needs to be solved - to live, when the new service would be rolled out.
After analysing the tool that already existed, we carried out user research to understand pain points and user needs, which we translated into prioritised requirements. We created a prototype, which we tested with users, and then iterated, based on user feedback. We prioritised 4 areas of iterations: search functionality, design, accessibility and content.
Some of the iterations we implemented included improving the relevance of search results and improving the user experience for mobile users. We validated iterations by testing the solution with users, before launching a minimum viable product (the simplest version of a product that still has sufficient features to attract users and gather feedback).
The new Find a Licence tool launched in July. Since the launch, analytics suggest the tool has resulted in an improved user experience, with the numbers showing that 431 licences are now findable with the tool, compared to 263 previously - a rise of 64% - while user satisfaction has risen by 20%.
Results like these demonstrate how taking a user-focused approach, and cutting the complexity of our processes behind the scenes, can help more people to get the right support from government. But there’s still more work to do. Departments will be adding and updating their licence content over the next few months, and we will be monitoring analytics in order to identify usability issues and rolling out iterations where necessary.
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GOV.UK is designed to help people access information and services quickly and easily, without needing to understand the structure of government. The GOV.UK proposition supports publishers within government by outlining what information and services belong on GOV.UK. This helps reinforce GOV.UK’s role as the single, trusted home of government information.
The proposition takes the form of an overarching document which defines what should, and what should not, go on GOV.UK. We’ve blogged in the past about changes we’ve made to the proposition in response to changing needs - and now we’re iterating it again. Here’s what we’re doing and why.
As user needs and departmental requirements evolve, so must GOV.UK. The GOV.UK proposition is reviewed and updated regularly in order to ensure it is aligned with the GOV.UK strategy. These changes can range from factual corrections or clarifications to substantial additions or alterations depending on our work and goals.
In June we unveiled the GOV.UK strategy for growth, which is a blueprint to expand the GOV.UK offer beyond traditional web experiences to new channels and platforms. The strategy's aim is to reach people wherever and whenever they need government information, embracing new technologies to meet evolving user expectations.
For example, we want to develop our presence on social channels, such as YouTube, create new content types, and expand our use of existing formats such as video. Improving the user experience around specific, targeted journeys, and reducing the complexity of our publishing tools, are also among our goals, which we have already started delivering on with the most significant update to our homepage in years.
In support of the strategy, a review of the GOV.UK proposition was undertaken, resulting in a number of changes to align with the evolving multi-channel offer.
We’ve made 5 changes to the proposition, which are as follows:
We’ll review the GOV.UK proposition regularly to ensure it continues to align with the GOV.UK strategy.
We are always happy to receive feedback on changes to the proposition. For suggestions or to get involved in the development of the proposition, email govuk-enquiries@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.
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The GOV.UK homepage is a really popular web page, used more than a million times each week to access essential UK government information and services. Alongside search engines like Google and our own internal site search, it’s one of the main ways into government content. It’s also used to communicate the purpose of the site and to create a sense of trust between GOV.UK and our users.
Our strategy for GOV.UK is all about growth: we’re expanding into new channels and trying to reach new audiences where they are. We want to make it easier for users to access information and services, helping them to achieve quicker and better outcomes. We last looked at the homepage a couple of years ago, but we have not changed it significantly since 2014. We want to make sure that the homepage is as useful as it can be for all users and that it continues to reflect the innovative spirit of GOV.UK. Today we’re launching the first of many significant changes to the homepage, including:
We are making improvements iteratively so that we can learn and tweak as we go. This post explains the changes we have made so far and what we plan to do next.
The visual design of GOV.UK is bold, simple and accessible. We’re building on a rich history of public sector design in the UK, including in our use of typography, which references road signage in the UK. But good design doesn’t stand still and needs to evolve as expectations change. For example, a decade ago, only 20% of visits to GOV.UK were made from mobile devices. Today, this number is over 60%, and continues to grow.
In response to this, as well as to other changes in user behaviour, we’ve made the design of the homepage bolder and clearer on mobile devices. We redesigned the header area and increased font sizes and spacing throughout the page. There are less boxes on it and the layout is simpler. We also reduced the amount of text on the page by removing content that did not have a clear user need or that wasn’t used much.
We think that these changes make GOV.UK easier to read and browse, and we’re thinking about how they can be brought to other areas of the site.
GOV.UK is made up of mostly words and links, and arranging these into clear, usable layouts takes a lot of work. This is especially true on the homepage, where almost everything is a link, as many users begin their journey here.
We know that pages full of links can be hard for users to scan, so we made some improvements to make the homepage easier to navigate. This includes turning the popular links into a bulleted list and increasing spacing between sections. These changes make the page easier to scan and to identify when one section ends and the next begins.
Knowing what users are doing on GOV.UK helps us improve it. For example, if the most popular link on the page is at the bottom of it, that’s probably a good indicator that it should be moved further up.
We get insights like this from analytics on page use, with a user’s consent, and from talking to our users. Over the last couple of months, we’ve been tweaking the homepage in response to these learnings. Doing it iteratively helps us carefully monitor the impact of our changes, so that we can reverse them if their impact isn’t what we expected. The changes include:
We’re monitoring the impact that our changes have on what people do on the homepage. For example, we have already seen an increase in the number of people using search on mobile since we moved it higher up.
There are more changes to come, too. For example, we know that we can improve how we adapt content in response to trending user needs. We’ll be testing new design patterns to help users find relevant information more easily.
Want to join the team? We’re hiring
GOV.UK is an essential part of living, studying and working in the UK. For its millions of users, GOV.UK appears as a single website, where people can move seamlessly from one page or service to another.
However, behind the scenes, GOV.UK is made up of many applications that work together to produce the public-facing website. Between these applications and the computer hardware that runs them, there is system software that acts as a go-between. We sometimes call this system software the "platform" on which GOV.UK runs.
With a system software end-of-life deadline approaching, we took the opportunity to evaluate what platform was best for GOV.UK and its needs.
This was GOV.UK's largest software infrastructure project since its launch. This blog post describes how we decided what to do, how we did it and ultimately how we made GOV.UK more secure, cheaper to run and easier to scale. By doing this, we directly contributed to GDS’s mission “to make digital government simpler, clearer and faster for everyone”.
The software that runs the GOV.UK website makes use of other software "underneath" it, such as an operating system (OS) and some configuration management software to manage and keep track of changes. From 2014 to 2023, our OS was Ubuntu, and we managed our configuration with Puppet.
By 2021, this infrastructure software was approaching the end of its supportable lifespan. Though we still have commercial support in place, running an old operating system meant we were spending ever more engineering effort working around compatibility issues whenever we needed to update other software that GOV.UK depends on, such as Ruby-on-Rails.
We considered whether to upgrade to recent versions of Ubuntu and Puppet (running on virtual machines), or to take the opportunity to modernise by running GOV.UK in containers.
For GOV.UK, the main advantages of containers are scalability and lower maintenance. We were using complex automation to deploy many different applications onto the same set of virtual machines, which made it difficult to add more machines ("scaling up") in response to increased website traffic. We were also spending a lot of engineering time updating the software on these virtual machines.
Moving to containers means that when we need to respond to surges of traffic, we can add capacity easily. During our work on COVID-19, we saw how important it was to be able to withstand these traffic spikes.
Upgrading the existing infrastructure would have solved our short-term problem, but would have represented a much smaller return on investment and taken at least as much effort as containerisation.
The team of engineers had varying degrees of experience working on projects like this, and had to get up to speed with a new technology to progress with the project. To establish healthy ways of working we, as team leads;
By giving engineers responsibility for managing and prioritising their own stream of work and protecting them from other distractions, it allowed them the time and space to try things out. It also helped build their confidence to work autonomously.
One of our engineers suggested a bold idea which would prove a catalyst for the project's success: what if we were to perform a trial-run on the real, live website? At first this sounds like an unnecessary risk: why not wait until the whole system is fully working in a test environment?
By limiting the scope of our trial-run to just those components of GOV.UK that serve web pages to the public (as distinct from the other parts that help people update the content of the site), we were able to:
During our trial runs, we solved problems as a team by mobbing on them. Mob programming as a team further helped build trust and confidence for individuals. By working through minor issues together as a team in a safe environment, it increased people’s ability to experiment with different solutions to solve problems.
Once the team was fully confident everything was in place, we selected a week to switch over when there weren't any big planned government announcements. We reviewed our run book and roll back plans to ensure they were accurate and up to date. We made a list of useful contacts such as technical support and escalation contacts. We informed publishers and other stakeholders, allowing them time to ask questions.
On the day, we mobbed on the go live activities and kept a log of status updates. We kept our stakeholders updated regularly.
The launch went smoothly and the public-facing website continued working without any visible change, as we were hoping.
We’ve seen a positive impact to the organisation and our users, for example:
In the GOV.UK Platform Engineering team, we're working hard to get rid of a few behind-the-scenes odds and ends that are still running on the old Ubuntu/Puppet infrastructure so that we can finally switch it off. These are things like:
Once we've done that, we'll realise the rest of the value and savings by switching off the old infrastructure and no longer having to maintain it.
Now that GOV.UK is hosted on a modern, container-based infrastructure, there are a lot of exciting improvements that we can make to further increase developer productivity, reduce running costs and add even more resilience. Many of these things would have been difficult or expensive to achieve with the previous system. For example, we could:
Want to know more? Richard Towers, Lead Developer at GOV.UK, will be speaking at DevOps Day on 22 September about "A history of GOV.UK's infrastructure: the long voyage to Kubernetes"
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Recently Christine Bellamy, Director of GOV.UK, published our new strategy for growth. It sets out how we want to better help people access the support they are entitled to, the information they need and services they're after by expanding the range of channels, content and interactions GOV.UK provides. All of this work supports GDS’s mission: to design and protect the user experience of government.
In this blog post, I'm going to explain how we developed this strategy.
It's been an intense couple of years on GOV.UK. We've been right at the heart of the government's response to the pandemic, developing and maintaining new content and services to help millions of people find information and access support.
During this period, GOV.UK received its highest ever traffic levels and we started to push the boundaries of our proposition - playing a more proactive and interactive role than ever before. By summer 2022, our work on COVID-19 had largely stabilised, which gave us some space to think strategically about what this all meant for GOV.UK's future, and how we could best meet our users’ needs. This also coincided with GOV.UK's 10th birthday (there's nothing like a milestone to prompt reflection) and the arrival of our new director, Christine Bellamy.
We set ourselves the goal of describing an achievable but ambitious future GOV.UK proposition, the impact it would have, and the changes needed to deliver it. We focused this on the period until 2025 - mainly to align with our internal funding and planning cycles.
We took an iterative, hypothesis-led approach to the project, which took around 15 weeks.
The first phase was gathering past and present data and research about GOV.UK and its wider context. We then analysed this to create a picture of where we are now and the challenges and opportunities facing GOV.UK.
We looked at site performance data, polling data and user research to understand how we were performing for users at a macro level. This showed us that GOV.UK's usage is flat or declining compared to pre-COVID levels and that certain user groups are relatively underserved; for example, satisfaction with GOV.UK is lower amongst younger users.
We supplemented this analysis by speaking to stakeholders across government to find out more of their needs and perspectives. For instance, some departments told us that they are still reliant on call centres for informational needs that could be met by GOV.UK and that not everyone who is entitled to access their services is currently doing so. We see this supported in research like that from Policy in Practice, which reported that £19 billion of support goes unclaimed annually.
We also assessed trends in our wider landscape, such as international governments and industry. This confirmed that technology advances are changing users’ online behaviour. People are spending more time on their phones than ever and recent breakthroughs in AI will change things again.
Next, we gathered hypotheses for how we could address the opportunities and challenges we'd identified in our analysis. For instance:
Cross-functional teams in GOV.UK evaluated the potential benefits and feasibility of the hypotheses. This exercise wasn't about being 100% sure that our hypotheses would work out. We just wanted to know enough to be able to make a judgement about relative priority and decide where to invest in further exploration and testing.
From this work, we were able to recommend specific workstreams to progress, which you can read more about in Chris' blog post. Like any good product team, we will work in an agile way and learn as we go. We will be evaluating our efforts for these objectives as the work continues.
As with any strategy project, engagement is really important to develop something of high quality and to generate buy-in and it's something we did throughout this project.
This is especially true of GOV.UK. Although GOV.UK looks like a single thing to the user, it's actually made up of multiple domains owned by other government departments. In our strategy, when we say 'GOV.UK' we mean GOV.UK as a user sees it - that means everything that exists under the GOV.UK brand. So our strategy has to be a joint one with shared ambitions across the departments who contribute to GOV.UK every day.
For us this meant engaging extensively with our stakeholders across government, speaking with over 50 people and at cross-government fora. We paid particular attention to colleagues in policy and communications teams, as well as digital teams, to make sure we understood government priorities, and how GOV.UK could help to achieve those even more effectively in future. Our strategy was ultimately signed off by the Digital and Data Board in March this year - a group of cross-government permanent secretaries.
To enable delivery of our strategy, we needed to update the way we organise ourselves. We set up a new team structure at GOV.UK, with each team working on objectives and key results (OKRs) aligned to the strategy.
We also developed a product flywheel (a product strategy model which identifies and encourages virtuous circles that improve user outcomes) and defined the metrics we'll be using to track progress. These include overall traffic and traffic sources; levels of usage, satisfaction and findability; and brand recognition. This will help us to make sure we're having the effect that we hope to, and to plan and prioritise work aligned to our strategy.
At the same time, we're doing more work to continuously build our understanding of GOV.UK's current and potential users, including those we seem to be underserving, to better understand their needs and the barriers they face, so that we can target interventions.
Now we're in delivery mode and in the next blog post in this series you'll hear from Rob Rankin, Head of Product, about our programme roadmap in more detail.
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