A brief history of GOV.UK

Let’s briefly explore the history of GOV.UK.

This is a screenshot of an old website called Directgov.

Back in 2010, Directgov was the main UK government website. It was run in a very old-fashioned way!

Major updates were made every six months, but even making small updates was very time consuming. Content was controlled by departmental teams with no central consolidation.

Alongside Directgov, there were many other government websites. There are more than 300 departments, arms-length bodies (ALBs) and agencies that make up the UK government. Most of them had their own websites – and they were all different!

This was a bit of a mess! It was confusing and often simply did not meet user needs – it was difficult to find the information you needed and there was a lot of content that hardly anyone ever accessed.

As part of the UK government’s digital transformation, the Government Digital Service (GDS) was established in 2011.

Initially located within the Cabinet Office and now part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, GDS worked with all departments and organisations across government to lead digital transformation. They delivered standards, tools and guidance to help departments produce good services.

GDS also introduced the idea of multidisciplinary service teams (including user researchers) and agile principles to working in government, which is now the standard.

In 2012, GDS launched a replacement for all those different pages that combined them into a single website: GOV.UK.

Instead of information spread across hundreds of different pages and websites (that were sometimes hard to find), there was now just one website containing all the information users would need.

User research was central to this project and remains one of the fundamental parts of designing and building government services.

As it was explained at the time,

GOV.UK is focused on the needs of users, not the needs of government. It has been planned, written, organised and designed around what users need to get done, not the ways government wants them to do it – providing the content they need and nothing superfluous.

Task

Do you have experience with using these websites? Discuss your memories of Directgov or other older government websites or your current experiences as a user of GOV.UK with your fellow learners.