Classifying and measuring tech debt in GOV.UK
GOV.UK was built rapidly to meet a tight deadline. The push to get GOV.UK out of beta into live, transitioning 326 government websites onto the single domain, and closing down Directgov and...
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Making it easier for users to sign in to services
Last quarter, a multidisciplinary team explored how we can improve the transaction (or ‘start page’) content format. A start page marks the point in the user’s journey where they move from finding out...
View ArticleWhat we learned from a large scale content audit
We’ve been working closely with the Department for Transport (DfT) and its agencies to support them to improve their content and make it easier to find on GOV.UK. Here's what we’ve learned from doing...
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How we do team selection on GOV.UK
This post explores how we plan who works on which team on GOV.UK, and how that process has evolved throughout 2017-2018. Background At the beginning of 2017, there were 168 people on GOV.UK split into...
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Bringing email back in house
Over three quarters of a million people use GOV.UK emails to find out when content is published or updated on the site. We used to use an external service to send these. We've built a system using...
View ArticleWhat we learnt from creating API documentation
One of the objectives of our Q2 mission was to create documentation for the GOV.UK content application programming interface (API). This is a public API that allows machines to access and republish...
View ArticleIncident roundup - part 3
This post is a roundup of 5 incidents that GOV.UK encountered between August 2017 and February 2018. It follows on from previous posts about: 3 incidents that happened between May and June 2016 5...
View ArticleFirebreaks on GOV.UK
Firebreaks on GOV.UK are similar to Google’s 20% time or Spotify’s hack week. For 1 week every 3 months, teams disband and everyone is given a chance to have some self-directed time to improve GOV.UK....
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Running a content improvement project
In the first 2 quarters of 2017 to 2018, some of GOV.UK’s content designers led improvement projects with government departments on specific content areas. The goal was to improve our understanding of...
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Changes to organisation pages for both publishers and users
Over the coming months, we are working to improve sections of GOV.UK that relate to government departments and agencies (what we define as ‘organisations’). These sections of GOV.UK haven’t changed...
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