What government services can teach your business website

Government services have one job that most websites never face: they have to work for everyone. Not just the confident, the tech-savvy or the people in a hurry. Everyone, whatever their age, ability, device or confidence online.

I've spent the last eight years designing UK government services, and that constraint changes how you think about design. It strips away anything that doesn't help someone get a task done. And almost every lesson it taught me applies just as well to a small business website.

Clever design is simple design

In government, the cleverest design is usually the simplest. Nobody wins awards for a tax form, but a form that people complete first time, without phoning for help, is a genuine achievement.

A big part of that is reusing what works. Government services share a common set of tested patterns, so people don't have to learn a new way of doing things every time they visit a different service. There's no prize for reinventing a date field.

The same applies to your website. People arrive with expectations from every other site they use. Put the navigation where they expect it, label buttons with what they do, and don't make them learn your website before they can use it.

The principle underneath it all is simple: the website should work for the user, not the other way around.

Plain English, whatever the subject

Government content is written in plain English at a reading age that works for the widest possible audience, however complicated the subject. Tax, benefits and legal rights are complex, but the words used to explain them don't have to be.

Plain English isn't dumbing down. Experts prefer it too, because they're busy and they want to understand things quickly.

One lesson surprises people: more guidance doesn't mean more clarity. Every extra paragraph of help text is something else to read, and it often raises new questions instead of answering the original one. In government services, we only add guidance where users show us it's needed.

For your website, that means:

• write the way you'd explain it to a customer face to face
• cut anything that doesn't help someone decide or act
• add help where people actually get stuck, not everywhere they might

Your users will tell you the truth

Government services are tested with real users throughout, from the first rough idea to the live service. That's because the people who design a service are the worst judges of whether it works. We know too much.

It doesn't matter how strong a designer you think you are: your users will soon tell you otherwise. In almost every round of testing I've been part of, something that seemed obvious to the team turned out to confuse the people it was built for.

You don't need a research lab to do this for your website. Watch three or four real customers try to do something on your site, such as find a price, book an appointment or get in touch, and say nothing while they do it. You'll learn more in an hour than in a month of internal debate.

There's no such thing as an edge case

"Edge case" is a phrase I try to avoid. It suggests some users matter less than others, and that the people who don't fit the typical picture can be dealt with later, or not at all.

In government, everyone is a key user. A service has to work whether someone uses a keyboard instead of a mouse, a screen reader, voice control, a small phone screen, or simply does things differently from the person who designed it. Left-handed people included.

This is what accessibility really means. It isn't a checklist you tick off at the end of a project. It's designing from the start so that anybody who comes to your website can use it, however they interact with it.

And the people you might call edge cases add up. Some customers have a permanent disability. Others have a temporary one, like a broken arm, or a situational one, like browsing one-handed on a busy train. Design for them and you make the website easier for everyone.

Why the effort pays off

All of this takes more thought than throwing a template together. So where's the return?

It comes in the moment a customer uses your website and it just works. They find what they need, understand it first time, and get in touch without any friction. That's an experience people remember, for all the right reasons.

A website that works like that is doing its real job. It's not just a brochure; it's raising the profile of your brand every time someone uses it. And it starts the long process of building trust, because it shows people you're a company that cares about them before they've even spoken to you.

The short version

• Keep it simple, and reuse what people already understand.
• Write in plain English, and only add guidance where people get stuck.
• Test with real customers, because they'll show you what you can't see.
• Treat every user as a key user, and build accessibility in from the start.

That's the standard I've applied to government services for eight years, and it's the standard I bring to every website I design and build. If your website could be working harder for your customers, tell me about it.