Navigation — what we would like to learn

[CharlotteDowns]

We have a template and guidance on how share findings about your users which may help you in providing feedback, equally feel free to comment on this post.

What we would like to learn

Providing a design rationale for navigation that works across government

We worked on the Navigation contribution alongside the Navigation steering group (made up of 10 cross government colleagues who have experience in Navigation), as well as the GOV.UK Design System working group who have experience in reviewing our proposals. In this case the experiences of both groups made it difficult to provide a single approach to the component, for this reason we have an intention for the GOV.UK header to contain all GOV.UK wide tools and information and for the Service navigation component to contain all the service specific tools and information. This was mainly informed by our steering group and their user research. We would like users, if they can, to trial this approach and share with us the feedback.

From our research we have found that users often have to make complex decisions around where things go within the header area of their services. In our Help users to navigate a service pattern we have provided some suggestions to assist with this decision making based on what we have learnt and built, however, we would like service teams, if they can, to test our approach and share with us the feedback.

Placement of the service name

We’ve decided not to deprecate the service name variant of the GOV.UK header for now, as we’d like to gather more research.

Users of assistive technologies

We have undertaken accessibility testing of our component internally but always welcome feedback from service teams who have tested with users of assistive technologies.