GOV.UK is the new digital home of everything the UK Government does. Every government entity will eventually have its online presence at GOV.UK, giving people who need information a single place to go and get it. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (SIN’s parent departments) are already there, helping people everywhere to get access to what they need.
At the Design Museum‘s prestigious Designs of the Year awards, GOV.UK won the Digital category and then went on to be named Design of the Year 2013. There is good coverage of this on GOV.UK (of course), the BBC and Gizmodo UK, with the Government Digital Service itself blogging and creating a Storify story about it.
Why is this noteworthy?
First of all, GOV.UK is a triumph for understated, accessible design with the end-user firmly in mind. Most citizens will only need to interact directly with the government a few times a year, when they want to renew a passport or look up their MP or something.
There doesn’t need to be a graphics-heavy stream of new content every day; the aim of GOV.UK is make the information that users are looking for easily findable, and the relevant services efficiently delivered. This not only saves money (the cost of delivering services online is significantly less than delivering them through phone, post or in-person), but also makes the process of interacting with government a lot less time-consuming and stressful.
GOV.UK has attracted a lot of attention internationally, as other governments look to save money and deliver more services online. You will be pleased to hear that, as the Government Digital Service’s gift to the world, GOV.UK is mostly open source and free to reuse. Take a look at the blog post Coding in the open and GDS’s GitHub account for more details, and look out for some classic British design coming to a government website near you soon.