The Brexit checker: preparing for change

In September 2019, Number 10 commissioned GDS to develop a tool to help citizens and small business owners understand what they needed to do to prepare for Brexit.

 

What I did

As a senior content designer, I was a key part of the small multidisciplinary team tasked with solving this challenge. 

 

• With no time to do a discovery, we worked collaboratively - and quickly! - with HMRC, Defra, DWP and other key government departments to develop the Brexit checker, which returned targeted guidance for individuals and business about what they needed to do to prepare for Brexit.

• We enabled users to subscribe to updates about areas that directly affected them. 

• We put in place a fast updating system, whereby policy owners could flag information concerns. In addition, we ran user testing, and analysed online user feedback to better understand how people were using this new tool.

• On the basis of this, we iterated the checker to improve the questions and the functionality.

 

The results

When we retired the checker, it had been used over 5.6 million times.