How Focusing on User Experience Helped GOV.UK Win Design of the Year

By Sarah Chambers Published: January 4, 2016 “The goal of self-service sites is to help users find answers themselves, forestalling the need to contact a real person.” Most of us have experienced the struggle of seeking help on a Web site, only to end up in a link-clicking loop that leaves us more confused than we were to begin with. The goal of self-service sites is to help users find answers themselves, forestalling the need to contact a real person. Take a look at WebMD for a good example of such a site, as described on the Kayako Blog, in “How WebMD Moms Are Shaping the Future of Support.” When such a site is done right, it leads you straight from symptoms to diagnosis to cure. However, if self-service sites are done poorly, they’re hard to navigate and offer no effective way to find the information you need or to learn about next steps. The only thing that’s left to do is to call a customer-service agent, who hopefully will have the information the user needs. Great UX design can solve this problem. In 2013, the UK Government Digital Services (GDS) team won Design of the Year for its self-service Web site GOV.UK, beating contenders in fashion, architecture, and product development. One of the judges even remarked, “It creates a benchmark … all international government Web sites can be judged on.”

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