A magical teardown of the British Government's Self Service

1. A teardown of the British government’s
magical customer support journey.
We went down
the rabbit hole

2. The British government has an
amazing self-service website
called
GOV.UK

3. It won them
awards...

4. Their design process is
well-documented, and widely
admired.
‘Every superfluous page we create is one
more dead end for an angry, frustrated,
confused user ’ - @GovUK team seeking
the irreducible core
Tom Loosemore
@tomskitomski

5. Home Page

6. Homepage features a BIG search
bar - this encourages users to
search first

7. Popular articles are
featured here, so
they are easily
accessible.
Ben Terrett,
Director of Design,
stated that these
articles are chosen
strictly by data.
The articles with
the most
pageviews get
featured.

8. Note: there’s no visible contact information on the front page. This is because
GOV.UK wants to funnel me down closer to my category first, and hopefully find
an answer before I contact them.

9. Unfortunately, you
need to type all the
way through and click
enter to search.
Predictive or
auto-complete search
would give the user
confidence that
they’re had searched
for the right thing
Let’s search
first...

10. Holy cow,
that’s a lot
of results!

11. Holy cow,
that’s a lot
of results!
Ah, there’s a filter.
Makes it more
targeted, and easy
to find what I’m
looking for

12. That’s better

13. Search results
include a
concise
explanation of
what the
article will
help me do, in
real terms (not
just intro text)

14. I didn’t find what I was looking for, so
back to browsing….

15. Keywords under the titles add some
helpful context, so I can identify my topic
of choice

16. While the categories
are clearly grouped,
there’s a lot of them.
Could they narrow it
down at all?

17. Let’s click

18. Browsing doesn’t
pigeonhole you into
one topic, so it’s
easy to go in
another direction if
you’ve made a
mistake

19. Articles are
arranged A-Z, which
doesn’t make a lot
of sense - how will I
know what my
question starts with?
They could try and “promote” most popular/helpful questions in a category
by featuring them at the top.
By using the 80/20 rule - 80% of users will be helped by 20% of the
content - they can make it much easier for the majority of their users to get
help.

20. Still with us? Hmm?
OK, good?

21. Let’s look at an article!

22. Article is broken down into segments and
steps (so you know what you’re getting)

23. Suggested articles along
the sidebar help users
explore closely related
topics in case they need
to. Nice feature!

24. Gov.uk often links out to
off-site resources, which is
unusual. Most people want
to keep their visitors
around as long as possible.
BUT using the best
possible resource to solve
problems more efficiently,
is selfless.
They’re providing great
value to the visitor by
making it as easy as
possible to solve a
problem, no matter what.

25. Articles highlight
and call out
important info,
which is great
for readers who
just scan.

26. All articles are
up to date
Users are able
to report issues
with pages so
the writers can
audit

27. Cool Feature - Self-Assessment
From GOV.UK’s design principles:

28. This guides users to answers instead of making
us dig through long documents looking for
information that's relevant to us

29. Convenient! I
can change my
answers as
needed, go a
step back or
start over

30. A clear answer
that means
something to
me!
Links for next
steps are
provided!

31. Cool feature - BETA tags!
From GOV.UK’s design principles:

32. BETA in action:
...always be iterating. Users love to see
improvements happening!

33. Contact
information is
only provided
when needed
for next steps

34. Even a search
for contact
information
funnels us to
other articles
that may be able
to help
This saves the
time of both the
visitor and the
employees
taking calls

35. Unfortunately, the next step still forces
the user to filter further, adding a click
and a decision point to their journey — at
this point, they could probably just have a
list.
...especially since it’s the same number.

36. P.S. While clicking through their entire site, I did
get invited to take a short survey!
You can tell a lot of feedback went into the
design, and they are continuing to improve.

37. Find them here
Final thoughts
GOV.UK made an amazing site for their users to
easily get help by sticking to their forward
thinking design principles.
It’s worth bookmarking the design principles that
guided this project.
Truly impressive!

38. There’s more
where that came
from.

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