It is great to see consideration in the government context for: content life cycle, using analytics, search keyword analysis, and interviews with internal staff to provide insight into user behaviours and desires... then actually acting upon them.
We started looking at feedback from users, data from Google Analytics and talking to the team at the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA).
We soon found that:
- users are searching for different things compared to 4 years ago
- the way content was originally designed no longer matches how people use it
- there were some seriously ugly URLs in use
So we set about fixing these issues.
They thought about mobile use
We found that mobile users are less likely to use [related links] them, so we've made sure that the body text has relevant links in it.
They thought about URLs
They reduced the complexity and even got redirects in place for the old ones. This is often overlooked and gives many web teams hours of frustration.
They dedicate time to continuous improvement of content
The GOV.UK content team tries to spend 20% of its time doing improvement work like this.