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GOV.UK has entered the Chat: our vision for GOV.UK Chat

A white text box is displayed in front of a light blue background. The text box reads "Hello, I'm GOV.UK Chat"

GOV.UK has entered the Chat: our vision for GOV.UK Chat

Learn about our plans for GOV.UK Chat, the AI-powered chat system we’ve built as an easier, quicker way to interact with government.

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What we learned from the 7th round of GOV.UK benchmarking

Posted by: Michael Holland, Posted on: 17 January 2018 - Categories: Content, How we work, User insights
A snippet showing tax code information

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.

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Incident report: GOV.UK outages

Posted by: Tim Blair and Graham Pengelly, Posted on: 8 January 2018 - Categories: Incident reports

This post is about two severity 1 incidents caused by problems with our third-party suppliers, and how they were resolved. The incidents affected the availability of GOV.UK.

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Pair writing with Student Loans Company

Posted by: stefannicolaou, Posted on: 14 December 2017 - Categories: Content, How we work

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 …

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Incident report: country drop-downs in smart answers

Posted by: Ikenna Okpala and Kelvin Gan, Posted on: 13 December 2017 - Categories: Incident reports

Between 8 and 9 August 2017, there was a problem with all GOV.UK smart answers that ask users to select a country from a drop-down menu. This post explains what caused the issue and how we solved it.

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Incident report: High 5xx rates on Local Links Manager

Posted by: David Basalla, Posted on: 4 December 2017 - Categories: Incident reports

This post outlines a recent production issue on GOV.UK and how it was resolved. We’ve blogged in the past about what happens when things go wrong on GOV.UK, and also how we categorise and prioritise incidents.

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Simplifying how we publish GOV.UK start pages

Posted by: Tom Hughes and Joshua Low, Posted on: 27 November 2017 - Categories: Best practice, Content, Working with us
Tom and Josh working together

When a new digital service is ready to be launched, GDS works with the department or agency behind it to create a starting point for the service. This is the point where a user moves from finding out information on …

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Using A/B testing to measurably improve common user journeys

Posted by: Mark Mcleod, Posted on: 14 November 2017 - Categories: How we work
diagram of a/b testing process

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 …

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What we delivered in the first 3 months of our new roadmap

Posted by: Jen Allum - Former Director, GOV.UK, Posted on: 16 October 2017 - Categories: How we work

...We therefore used content within the environment theme to test ways of creating a taxonomy by collaborating with our colleagues in the Better Use of Data team. We made it...

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Incident report: broken Smart Answers

Posted by: Kelvin Gan, Posted on: 27 September 2017 - Categories: Incident reports

...Imminence. This provides structured geographical data, such as postcodes. We added a more informative error message for problems with fetching information about postcodes. Now users won't see a mostly blank...

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Benchmarking and performance measurement of content transformation

Posted by: Katie Taylor, Posted on: 22 September 2017 - Categories: How we work, User insights
the content transformation team stand up meeting

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 …

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Inside GOV.UK

A blog about running and improving GOV.UK, for anyone who is working on GOV.UK or interested in how the digital home of the UK government works. Written by the Government Digital Service team.

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Graphic showing 3 mobile phone screens with GOV.UK app on them. Title "GOV.UK Public beta"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.

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