The Government Digital Service (GDS) has redesigned the home page of the GOV.UK website with an emphasis on making it more suitable for mobile devices.
It is also planning other changes to be made on an iterative basis.
Kuba Bartwicki, lead designer at GOV.UK, and senior interaction designer Monica Crusellas outlined the changes in a blogpost, saying this is the first significant change in the look of the home page since 2014.
It has been underpinned by a trend towards more people accessing the site by mobile devices, with the estimate on the proportion rising from 20% a decade ago to 60% and rising now.
Bartwicki and Crusellas emphasised a bolder design that should be clearer on mobile devices, with increased font sizes and spacing throughout the page. The number of boxes has been reduced and the layout simplified, and the volume of text reduced be removing content that did not have a clear user need.
Bullets and spacing
There have also been some navigation changes, such as providing a bulleted list of popular links and increasing the spacing between sections
“We think that these changes make GOV.UK easier to read and browse, and we’re thinking about how they can be brought to other areas of the site,” they said, adding that the changes are based on analytics of the behaviour of users of the site.
Changes to the content and to the page structure of GOV.UK are also in the pipeline. Plans include moving search higher up, renaming ‘topics’ to ‘services and information’, and turning grids into lists.
