GDS sheds light on a range of amendments to government’s online infrastructure, which the tech unit claims will provide answers that are more accurate and easier to engage with visually

A range of updates made to GOV.UK this year – including the implementation of Google artificial intelligence technology – have made it “quicker and more intuitive” for users to find information and services, according to the Government Digital Service.

The biggest change has been the introduction of an autocomplete function to the search bar on the government website. This new feature uses a “Google Vertex AI Search… model trained on anonymised user search queries”, according to a newly published blog post from GDS.

“Autocomplete predicts search terms as users type, helping them find the information they need faster and with fewer keystrokes,” the blog added. “Our goal with autocomplete is to make searching on GOV.UK quicker and more intuitive, particularly for users who may not know the exact terms to look for.”

To support this new functionality – which provides suggestions once a user has typed three characters – various design updates have been made. This includes “shifting content down when autocomplete suggestions appear… displaying only five suggestions to avoid overwhelming users and prevent unnecessary scrolling… [and] highlighting suggested keywords in bold”.

GDS has also moved search filters from the left-hand side of GOV.UK pages to a position in the centre, wherein “both filters and sorting are in a single panel above the search results”.

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The blog adds: “This central location keeps the layout clean and reduces visual noise, allowing users to focus on search results, while still having easy access to filters and sorting if they choose to use them.”

The filters themselves have been updated with the aim of making them more user-friendly. These changes included “replacing the single free-text date field with separate day, month, and year fields to make the format for entering dates clearer and to reduce the risk of errors [and] simplifying the filter names to make them clearer and more intuitive”.

Once again, the adjustments to functionality are supported by design tweaks, such as the underlining and increasing the font size of search results, as well making “the results count less prominent, as there’s a large amount of content on GOV.UK and the results count can overwhelm users”.

With the changes now in place, GDS “will continue to closely monitor performance data and user feedback to make sure these improvements are working well for users”. Anyone that wishes to provide such feedback is invited to email the GDS team responsible for GOV.UK search.

“GOV.UK site search is one of the main ways people find information on GOV.UK. It’s used more than four million times a month. In our strategy for growth, we said we wanted to improve site search to help make it quicker and easier for users to access government information and services,” ,” adds the blog, credited to GDS product manager Catriona Fraser and senior interaction designer Monica Crusellas. “We’ve now made several changes to GOV.UK’s search interface – where users enter, filter and read search results – to create a simpler, more user-friendly experience.”