Government Digital Service (GDS) was set up to radically change the way public sector services are delivered, and it partnered with ThoughtWorks to achieve this goal. Over the course of a 7-year partnership, ThoughtWorks was involved in the design, build and execution of over 11 different projects as the Government implemented its digital transformation.

GOV.UK: Standardising user experience

The chief broker in GDS' mission is the GOV.UK site which acts as the principal point of contact for citizens to interact with the UK Government. Prior to GOV.UK, the Government was frequently experiencing two million searches per month across over one thousand websites that it owned, all of which had a very different look and navigation. GDS’ mission is to provide the best possible user experience for citizens, and they intended doing so by bringing together all the disparate departmental sites into a single, easy to use platform. 

In October 2012, GDS’ flagship product, GOV.UK came to life. In addition to saving GBP 70 million through merging the websites, GOV.UK was the UK’s first major public website leveraging cloud infrastructure. 

Continuous delivery has helped move deployment cycles from once every two months to seven times a day. In its first year, more than 1,500 application changes were released to GOV.UK. Due to its tremendous success, this cloud-first approach is now spreading across UK Public Sector departments. As all code is published online, it is also open to other governments across the world who are able to benefit from GDS’ bold thinking and delivery.

A year on, GOV.UK had over 1000 publishers using the platform and six million unique visitors every week.