GDS highlights a series of changes to the government’s online infrastructure, which the technology unit says will provide more accurate and visually easy-to-use responses.
A series of updates to GOV.UK this year – including the implementation of Google’s artificial intelligence technology – have enabled users to find information and services “quicker and more intuitively”, according to the government’s digital service.
The most significant change was the introduction of an autocomplete feature in the government website’s search bar. This new feature uses a “Google Vertex AI Search model…trained on users’ anonymized search queries,” according to a recently published blog post by GDS.
“Autocomplete predicts search terms as users type, helping them find the information they need faster and with fewer keystrokes,” the blog adds. “Our goal with autocomplete is to make searching GOV.UK faster and more intuitive, especially for users who are unfamiliar with the exact terms to search for.”
To support this new feature – which provides suggestions once a user has typed three characters – various design updates have been made. This includes “moving content down when autocomplete suggestions appear… showing only five suggestions to avoid overwhelming users and avoiding unnecessary scrolling… (and) highlighting keywords suggested in bold.”
GDS has also moved search filters from the left side of GOV.UK pages to a position in the center, where “filters and sorting are in a single panel above the search results.”
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The blog adds: “This central location keeps the layout clean and reduces visual noise, allowing users to focus on search results, while still having easy access to filters and sorting if they choose to use them . »
The filters themselves have been updated in an effort to make them more user-friendly. These changes included “replacing the single free text date field with separate day, month and year fields to make the date entry format clearer and reduce the risk of errors (and) simplifying filter names to make them clearer and more intuitive. “.
Once again, functionality tweaks are supported by design tweaks, such as underlining and increasing the font size of search results, which also makes “the number of results less visible, as there is a large amount of content on GOV.UK and the results “the sheer number can overwhelm users”.
With the changes now in place, GDS will “continue to closely monitor performance data and user feedback to ensure these improvements work well for users.” Anyone wishing to provide such feedback is encouraged to email the GDS team responsible for GOV.UK research.
“Searching the GOV.UK site is one of the main ways people find information on GOV.UK. It is used more than four million times per month. In our growth strategy, we stated that we wanted to improve search on the site to make it faster and easier for users to access government information and services,” adds the blog, credited to GDS product manager Catriona Fraser and lead interaction designer Monica Crusellas. . “We have now made several changes to the GOV.UK search interface – where users enter, filter and read search results – to create a simpler, more user-friendly experience.”
