The Government Digital Service (GDS) has unveiled a significant design change in the GOV.UK central government website.
It has created grid presentation to replace the three columns previously used in topic pages.
Writing in blogpost, Sam Dub, product lead on GOV.UK, attributed the change to the results of research showing that three columns did not work well on mobile phone screens, and that it presented users with long lists of links that could be overwhelming.
In addition, there were accessibility problems such as not working well with a browser’s zoom function.
Sub-topic lists
With the new design, when a user has selected a sub-topic they move to the next page which has a curated list of links to services and information on an A-Z listing or grouped into categories.
Dub said the new design increased the clickthrough rate to content by 61.6% to 65.1%, has increased the size of touch targets and improved accessibility.
GDS now plans to test a variation of the design that uses dividers instead of the expanding sections.
