Changing a database schema on a production application can be a complicated and risky process. Due to the nature of some of these schema changes and the underlying database engine, the physical change may take many minutes and can block …
Point 8 of the Digital by Default Service Standard that we publish on GOV.UK says that source code for government services should be open and reusable, and our 10th design principle is "Make things open: it makes things better". We …
Recently we talked about resizing checkboxes and radios; I thought I’d give a quick update as to what happened next.
At GDS we’re always looking for ways to make our pages easier for anyone to use. One particular area that comes up in user research is the difficulty people have with clicking on small checkboxes or radio buttons in forms. Our …
At GDS, we often talk about user needs: the idea that services should be designed around the needs of the user, rather than around the needs of government. For many of our development teams, this translates to making sure that the …
On April 17th, deep in the pre-election period, we released a new search feature that allows GOV.UK users to search inside long-form web documents called Manuals.
GOV.UK has on average 12 million visits per week. The vast majority of users simply find what they want or need and then leave. However, some users need to print parts of the site. A very few of those users …
The GOV.UK team recently had a firebreak to repay some technical debt, experiment with things we might not otherwise have the chance to, and prepare for how we're going to iterate the site in 2015. I looked at implementing Content Security Policy …
For much of January, GOV.UK had a firebreak. It’s where teams are given some time to investigate new ideas and clean up technical debt. As part of this we ran a game day. In this blog post I'm going to …
GOV.UK now holds nearly 150,000 documents and services, so it's not always easy for people to find the things they need. One of the ways that people do this is using GOV.UK’s search box, and in this post I'll describe …
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