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.
Digital, Data and Technology
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 …
Using HTML5 for GOV.UK
We took a decision early on in the project that GOV.UK should be forward-looking and exploit modern browsers. Browser technology evolves rapidly, so constant iteration will allow GOV.UK to exploit new technologies as they reach maturity.
Pulling the servers' strings
We're already talked about why we chose Amazon Web Services for hosting the beta of GOV.UK, and how we approached some of the decisions that came with it. Cloud hosting gives us the flexibility to rapidly iterate our infrastructure as …
Where are those APIs you promised?
All of the editorial content on GOV.UK is available in full via an API. It's the same API we use to communicate between the editorial tools and the apps that produce the pages you see. As I said several months …
Using search data to meet user needs
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 …
The mobile question: Responsive Design
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.
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 …
Quantitative testing Betagov content and layout
Posted by:
Nick Breeze - Lead User Researcher, 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 …
Mobile's role in bridging the digital divide
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 …
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