Finding services on government websites: progress, pain points and potential

Being bold

We pressed on and delivered on what people told us they needed most. News releases dropped out of prominence on the homepage and departmental landing pages, replaced by information and signposting for services. Users responded positively in their actions and their feedback.

Yet, for years after GOV.UK’s launch it continued to look like an oddity when screenshotted next to many other government and public sector sites in the UK and around the world. News and marketing-style content still dominated and people had to dig deep for services.

We kept studying the data, talking to users, making iterations and posting about our rationale, and over the years we grew in confidence that, by prioritising informational and transactional services, we had done a good thing as far as users were concerned.

There was some variety in the supplementary categorisation, used alongside the top-level topics. Some, additionally, allowed browsing by alphabetical order, responsible departments, life events and user types; but there were no stand-out common patterns.

While the number and naming of the top-level topics were similar across the sample, it was in the sub-category topics (the secondary and tertiary levels) that we encountered the greatest variance: in terms of numbers of categories, how things are organised within the sub categories, and what things are called. There’s lots of obvious and subtle reasons, which are to do with the polity, laws, culture and geography of the places: examples included ‘Ports and harbours’, ‘Withholding tax’, ‘Sex work’ and ‘Ring of Fire’. Some sites had tens of sub-topics, while others had hundreds.

Helping users navigate governments

There was also a lot of variety in how local governments linked out to services provided by central governments. People who engage with local governments also need to engage with national governments. Sometimes it’s clear which government does what, but sometimes it can be vague (think about registering a birth, which is something you might do through a local government where the service is owned by the central government).

Most city sites in our sample did link up with national sites; but they employed a wide range of design patterns and content rules to do so. There were some cases, however, where the local governments didn’t link out or include information on services provided by other governments in that country. Again, the bases for these decisions were not particularly clear, as very few sites carried a clear proposition explaining to the user what was in and out of scope for the site.

Surface-level improvements

When it came to the language used to name and explain things, we were pleased to see a good many sites using active, verb-based naming conventions for services and plain, concise language to explain the detail of their scope and how to access them.

But we also saw a lot of convoluted graphic and interactive design, poor internal search results (even for the most common of tasks such as waste collection and finding contact information), as well as some very long and obscure web addresses suitable only for machines.

We also saw a common pattern of hiding information and tasks behind log-ins, or things that were available in an app but not on the companion website or vice-versa.

Most disappointing was seeing vital information and forms stuck in Word documents and PDF attachments on websites that otherwise claimed to be providing ‘comprehensive online services’ for citizens in ‘smart cities’. This suggests that while clearly signposting services is a good start, there is still much important work to be done to make it easy for everyone to get those services in accessible, reliable and secure ways.

Benefits of working in the open

Although we documented our observations for Kyiv by identifying apparent trends on peer sites and applying judgement based on our experience, we could not assess whether these sites were performing well. This is largely because very few governments share insights into user feedback, performance data, or the decision-making processes behind iterations, new developments, or the abandonment of designs and functionalities.

In this sense GOV.UK remains an oddity. The team behind GOV.UK still stands out as one of the only examples where information about what users think and experience on the site is openly shared alongside the resulting hypotheses and decisions in blog posts and change notes on code repositories. Which is unfortunate, because there is clearly a community of practitioners out there ready to connect with one another. We’d like to see more teams developing these websites openly, fostering a community of practice.

Ready to lend a hand

Since 2015, Public Digital has helped a number of governments consolidate, improve and transform their web estates, including governments in Peru, New York, Nova Scotia, Edo State, as well as public sector organisations across the UK. In doing so, we’ve seen the benefits of making connections between government teams.

While we’ve seen great progress being made, there are evidently many public (as well as private) sector organisations who still struggle with sprawling, inconsistent, incoherent and costly web estates. These are solvable problems with benefits that extend beyond digital channels into deeper aspects of designing and operating public services.

If you’d like to talk more about tackling these challenges and to learn more about how we can help, please get in touch.