Blurring boundaries
Hello, I'm Paul, also known as @psd and I've just joined GDS as a Technical Architect. First impressions are important but soon forgotten, so here are some of mine from the first day of working with the team.
Content design
You can find more information about content design as a profession in the Digital, Data and Technology Capability Framework.
Smart answers are smart
Inherent to the content strategy of the citizen beta of GOV.UK is hiding complexity and building tools before writing content. Much of the detail of government policy is difficult for normal folk to grasp and understand - and the proposition of …
Creating videos for GOV.UK
UPDATE (23 April 2015): The videos linked to in this blog post have been removed as part of the normal process of updating GOV.UK to better meet user needs. “You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté.” I wanted …
Writing simply: language choices for the GOV.UK navigation
Hello, I’m Russell Davies, I’m helping out at GDS with the way the site looks and feels and how we explain it to users. This is clearly way less important than getting the site to work properly and to the …
What does "Google is the homepage" mean in real life?
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 …
Browsers we support and why
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 …
Ben Terrett on designing GOV.UK
This continues a story I started on my own blog where I wrote about my previous job as Design Director at Wieden & Kennedy London. This is the one where I write about joining GDS as Head of Design. Later …
Quantitative testing Betagov content and layout
Posted by:
Nick Breeze - Lead User Researcher for Goverment as a Platform, Government Digital Service, Posted on:
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Categories:
Content design, Data, 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 …
It's all about the words
When people talk about web design they sometimes take good editorial work for granted. We've already talked about how we are identifying user needs and content titles for gov.uk but this post looks at how we are developing our editorial approach.
A few design rules for Alpha.gov.uk
Back in February when we were kicking off the alpha project, we spent the first couple of weeks scouring search logs and analytics for the various central government websites; thinking about who our users were and generally discussing the kind …
Related content and links
Government’s authentication and digital identity solution
Read GDS’s recent blog post for an update on our one login for government programme, including live beta, onboarding and feature development.
Be part of the transformation
If you’re interested in joining us, check out all open opportunities on the GDS careers site.