Work

Making official information easily accessible to every citizen

The Opportunity

When millions of citizens depend on your services, ensuring that they can access the information they need, when they need it, is key to the success of any public sector digital transformation project.
Running the GOV.UK website, the public facing portal for UK Government, and making it easier to navigate and use is the responsibility of the Government Digital Service (GDS) who needed to add additional engineering teams to complement its in-house designers and developers.

Our Approach

We initially provided digital engineers to the team tasked with making it easier for the public to find information on GOV.UK. We were looking at the education area, which was the first part of the site to be improved in this manner.
We were involved in designing new ways of navigating the website, defining how best to display information and building new pages. We ran both one-to-one user tests and large-scale comparative A/B tests to ensure the changes were beneficial, and weren’t adversely impacting any user group. All this work followed agile approaches, meaning we were continually assessing analytics and user test data and making improvements.
Our engineers were key in creating a flexible new framework for performing such tests at scale with the aim of using this approach across the whole GOV.UK website in the future.
The success of our involvement in these projects and in the evolution of the GOV.UK search engine led to GDS asking for our help on developing GOV.UK Verify, a tool for confirming that users are who they say they are, and we significantly grew the number of Softwire engineers at GDS to support this flagship delivery.
As well as the project work, our engineers have spent time on the support team responsible for ensuring GOV.UK is available to users round-the-clock. At the time of writing, our people remain involved with GDS, contributing to a number of ongoing projects.

The Impact

Data shows our work has helped make GOV.UK easier to navigate, manage and enhance
On the search side, exit rates from the search results pages have decreased by an estimated 200,000 per year, while the annual number of results clicked has gone up by around 1.17 million.
As planned, the innovative A/B testing framework we built has been used elsewhere on GOV.UK, enabling GDS to easily carry out large-scale testing of new features and improvements, while GOV.UK Verify is in use and continues to be rolled out to support and transform more local and central public sector services.

Our Work

More impactful results