TECHNOLOGY INSIGHT
GOV.UK’s content headache
Mike Nicholas MCIPP AMBCS comments on developments
G OV.UK has been criticised repeatedly since its creation some five years ago. Indeed, I’ve had cause to challenge inaccurate fundamental guidance, and to despair at the very poor search functionality and the dumbing-down of information. It seems that the Government Digital Service (GDS) acknowledges deficiencies and accordingly, following research, has begun work on GOV.UK’s content operating model. It is to be hoped that this work will address all the issues and achieve significant improvement. This article draws on a recent blog by Trisha Doyle, head of content design for the GDS and responses from Government department colleagues (http://bit. ly/2gYVnGY). It is admirable that GDS engages in open discussion and aims to deliver a better GOV.UK. (Please note that where in the article ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ are used these refer to the GDS and sometimes to Government departments/colleagues where applicable.) One of the biggest problems faced by GOV.UK’s users is difficulty finding the things they need on the site. The GDS’s aptly named Finding Things team has been working on how to address this problem. Part of the answer is to build better search and navigation for GOV.UK, which the team is doing. Research, however, has revealed conclusively and repeatedly that the problem isn’t just the site’s ‘finding’ functionality, but also the sheer volume and low quality of all the things. GDS could build the best search and navigation in the world but if there’s lots of content that’s poorly titled, duplicative and written in a way users don’t understand, they will never find what they need to complete their task. Some 73% of the content on GOV.UK is looked at by less than ten people a month.
That’s a problem because civil servants’ time is being wasted producing content hardly anyone is looking at and users’ time is being wasted sifting through hundreds of pages on the same topic. ...following research, has begun work on GOV.UK’s content operating model And because content teams across Government don’t have time to maintain their content – instead they’re being asked to produce and publish new content – it means content becomes inaccurate, and old content gets mistaken for current. And when users can’t find what they need to know, understand it or trust it, they make mistakes and hit the phones. The research can be distilled into several themes including the following. ● The division between citizens and professionals is arbitrary – The content operating model is designed so that the central GOV.UK content team manage content aimed at citizens (around 3,000 pages), using a content management system (CMS) built for that central team’s workflow, and Government colleagues manage the rest (now over 300,000 [pages]) in another CMS built for collaborative devolved publishing. Though the split was appropriate for the transition of Government’s websites to a single domain, it’s not helping users who need to complete a task. For example, users could start on a ‘mainstream’ (citizen-facing) guide, but in order to complete their task end up in a seventy-page PDF written in departmental specific language and jargon.
Users – regardless of being a professional user or not – have a clear need to understand how to do stuff, simply. ● Content is co-located but not coherent – Although transition to GOV. UK has worked with everything in one place it’s far from coherent. Almost without exception, content was and is produced by departments and agencies in isolation of one another. So though it makes sense to Government it’s really hard for users to navigate. We need to do the hard work to make it simple, so users can find what they need easily and complete their tasks. ● Content needs to be a part of service design – Guidance content on GOV.UK and services are seen as separate things. They’re often managed as two separate things, in separate directorates by separate teams with limited or no interaction with each other or sharing of user needs or goals. Users interact with Government to complete a task and that task is sometimes just to find something out, so content is often the only bit of the service they interact with. To really start building coherent services that meet user need, the silos between transactions and content have to be bridged. What’s next The transformation of GOV.UK has started but to sustain the change required, we need to reach far deeper into service delivery, infrastructure, governance, planning and in-house capability. There are three really important things that help us decide what we do next. ● The content operating model has to be designed around Government publishers’ needs. Their work is vital, so we need to do the hard work to make publishing to GOV.UK simple, so content designers can focus on designing content that meets user needs.
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | March 2017 | Issue 28 40
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