Following the first unification process of the government departments’ pages five years ago, the Government Digital Service (GDS) will audit and reorganise the content by theme, ending the previous structure by organisation.
In a process that will finish by 2020, the new version of GOV.UK will restructure the information by theme, rather than organisation. Additionally, the navigation will be improved for usability and the content will be checked to ensure they have useful titles. The website will also have a new campaigns service and an improved email subscription service.
GOV.UK went through a first stage of reorganisation in 2013, when the content of the websites of the 25 central government departments were unified into a single website. This reorganisation, which has now unified the websites of more than 300 organisations, resulted in the closure of multiple domains.
The HMRC site was one of the sites transferred to GOV.UK. Ever since the HMRC site was migrated the usability and changes to the content, which was rewritten for the new website, have been largely debated.
The government website has been criticised for misleading taxpayers with incorrect and over-simplified information. Last year, the Admin Burden Advisory Board (ABAB) released a survey to evaluate the difficulties in finding information and navigating the website and register the numerous users’ complaints.
Over the years, AccountingWEB members have complained about the difficulty of finding information and various issues with the quality of the advice within the government’s website, such as mistakes and poorly worded and misleading information. These issues lead many users like AccountingWEB member Jekyll and Hyde to look for alternative online services for reference: “Over the last few years HMRC's website has become too unreliable for right advice, or dare I say misleading facts. So I have come to the position where I do not wish to use HMRC's (or the new Gov) website any longer.”
According to GDS's digital engagement lead Angus Montgomery the usability issues were caused by the way the departments were moved to the GOV.UK website: “The site was built around the departmental content that came onto it. That doesn’t really work for users.”