The GOV.UK team in the Government Digital Service (GDS) has made a number of updates to the search interface for the central government website.
They include a new autocomplete feature, a streamlined design for filters and sorting, and improved readability of search results.
The updates have been made public weeks after GDS revealed that it had launched a new AI powered search engine for the site.
Product manager Catriona Fraser and senior interaction designer Monica Crusellas have outlined the changes in a blogpost, saying they are aimed at providing a simpler and more user-friendly experience.
They said the biggest change is the addition of an autocomplete function to the search bar on the site, designed to help users who may not know the exact terms to look for. It is powered by Google Vertex AI Search, the model integrated into GOV.UK in February and which is trained on anonymised user search queries.
There have also been adaptations in the accessible autocomplete Javascript component, and design changes such as shifting content down when autocomplete suggestions appear, and showing the suggestions after only three characters are typed.
Filters and sorting
A second upgrade has been in the filters and sorting, with both now in a single panel above the search results. This has been done to keep the layout clean and “reduce visual noise”.
There have also been changes aimed at improving the usability of the filters, including replacing the single free text date field with separate day, month and year fields to reduce the risk of errors, and simplifying the filter names to make them clearer and more intuitive.
In addition, there have been design changes to make the search results clearer and more consistent with the rest of GOV.UK. These include underlines added to the titles of search results, an increased font size and a less prominent results count. The last change has been made as it was felt the large amount of results can overwhelm users.
The changes followed a round of user research, the results of which included that the suggestions of autocomplete were used in 55% of searches, and for these the click through rate was 92%.
“Now the changes to the user interface of search are live, we will continue to closely monitor performance data and user feedback to make sure these improvements are working well for users,” Fraser and Crusellas said.
