Jan 31
A few minutes ago we released the first phase of the beta test of GOV.UK – the next step on the journey towards a single domain for central government. As Mike Bracken, HMG Executive Director for Digital said, our aim is to deliver simpler, clearer, faster services for users and savings and innovation for Government.
Read more about the beta of GOV.UK
We have released the beta of GOV.UK, testing a simpler way to get to government services and information…
As a Product Analyst in the GDS Delivery team acquiring data is critical for telling us if our products are meeting user needs and how improvements must be made to content and services. Our team analyses not only search data but data from comments left on pages, feedback to our helpdesk and customer surveys.
Read more about search data & user needs
Back in April last year the Alpha.gov.uk team talked about Google being the homepage*:
“Since for the vast majority of people their web journeys (finding out the date of the next bank-holiday, or reporting a lost passport) start with a search engine rather than a direct visit we should think of Google as the homepage and we should also feed Google, Bing and other search engines nice friendly urls.”
Read more about Google as homepage
Directgov has had a mobile website since 2005. To put this into context, the top selling device that year was the Nokia 1110 (pictured below) – so as you can imagine we were quite limited with what we could achieve.
Read more about mobile & GOV.UK
Our goal is to make GOV.UK the best designed, most accessible Government website to date. To realise this aim we maintain a relentless focus on user need, therefore what browser people use when they access GOV.UK is critically important. It boils down to a simple question; what are we going to support and why?
Read more about browsers
I really enjoyed being able to get to UKGovCamp 2012 last Friday where I had a chance to outline some of our thinking around GOV.UK.
Read more about UKGovcamp12
Design rules are the basis for every decision we have made in the development of the beta of GOV.UK and hosting is no exception. The key design rule is not to be locked in to a single supplier and to make it trivial to swap hosting partners.
Read more about hosting
My name is Joshua Marshall, and I’m a front-end developer and the Accessibility Lead for the team working on the beta of GOV.UK.
Most of my focus has been on making sure that both the public facing website and the internal tools we’re building to support the site are as accessible and usable as we can make them. Now that we’re well into the development of the GOV.UK project I wanted to give an update on the work we’ve been doing.
Read more about user testing accessibility
Sonal Shah, White House social innovator and former Head of Global Initiatives at Google.org gave an inspirational lecture about innovation in the US Government at Portcullis House on the 18th January 2012.
Read more about Sonal Shah
