Nov 28
We’ve been monitoring the volume of traffic to GOV.UK since launch. We want to ensure that the people who used to rely on Directgov and Business Link can still find the reliable and authoritative information and services they need.
As the GOV.UK dashboard shows, and some followers have commented, the numbers of visits and unique visitors have fallen since the first week after launch. So what’s been going on? Read more
Nov 22
The search engine optimisation landscape is changing. As I have blogged previously, we are doing our best to make sure we use the same search terms as our users to make content easier to find. Now that Directgov and Business Link are no more, and GOV.UK has shaken off its beta-warning shackles, it’s time to see if we’ve achieved this.
If you search for Directgov on Wikipedia, or ever happen to browse through our press releases, you’ll see a version of our history that’s based pretty much around landmark achievements and major events.
And that’s fine. We are one of the UK’s most-visited websites, after all (slightly larger than Tesco and smaller than Flickr, according to Alexa), and the biggest government site.
Since our launch in 2004, we’ve saved taxpayers lots of money and helped people find stuff more easily by incorporating the content of hundreds of other websites; answered the questions of six million visitors during the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak; and covered budgets, jubilees, and changes of government.
But it’s an alternative, quieter, sort of history I want to talk about here – one which has, I hope, done more than anything else to help pave the way for our colleagues in GOV.UK. Read more
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
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
I am Nick Breeze, one of the Senior Insight Managers at GDS and I work in the team responsible for testing content being developed for gov.uk.
Recently we completed quantitative usability testing to compare the performance of content and layout from Directgov with that of the forthcoming beta version of gov.uk.
Read more about quantitative testing Betagov
Yesterday I spent a hugely interesting and informative day meeting colleagues in Glasgow. One of the highlights for me was being able to congratulate David Hall (pictured) from the Scottish Government on the launch of the DirectScot.org experimental prototype two days ago. He’s kindly written the blog post below explaining more:
Read more about DirectScot
This is a guest post from the GDS mobile team:
The GDS mobile team made a trip to Chiswick last week to OpenMarket, providers of our SMS delivery platform and shortcode number, to find out a bit more about how we could be making better use of SMS technology.
Whilst you might assume that the role of SMS in the digital world is dwindling, it’s important to remember that only 74% of adults have access to broadband at home, compared to 91% of adults who have a mobile phone. In the UK, 129 billion text messages were sent last year, that’s risen by 2000% over the past decade. You can read the full report on the Ofcom website.
This post was contributed by Joanne Inskip, Senior Customer Insight Manager at the Government Digital Service:
At the start of 2011, the GDS Customer Insight team were given the task of developing a research methodology that could:
Directgov was launched in April 2004 to allow people to access public services and government information in a single place. We know that people care little about the structures of government and do not want to go searching around the internet so the original aim of Directgov was to join up services online.
