Robin Whittleton
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  • Improving forms with new radios and checkboxes

    13 December 2016

    A screenshot of a form using our new radio buttons.Over the last year on GOV.UK, we’ve been looking for ways to make our forms easier to use by improving the checkboxes and radio buttons that people need to click on.

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  • Gaining understanding of the browsers people use

    21 October 2016

    Screen showing GOV.UK homepage

    GOV.UK gets a lot of visits from people in the UK and further afield. We keep a record of all visits and use this data to support as many users as possible.

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  • Why we use progressive enhancement to build GOV.UK

    19 September 2016

    Picture of laptop keys

    There seems to be a common belief among front-end developers that progressive enhancement is either old fashioned or has simply been replaced by single page applications. This is a problem of perception. We’d like to explain why we use progressive enhancement to build GOV.UK.

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  • New browser testing recommendations

    3 February 2016

    We recently updated our browsers and devices list with our current testing recommendations. As a general rule (although there are of course exceptions) we recommend testing pages and services against the top 95% of browsers used to access GOV.UK. This latest version is an update to reflect the current spread of browsers.

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  • An update on our radio buttons and checkboxes work

    5 October 2015

    Checkboxes

    Recently we talked about resizing checkboxes and radios; I thought I’d give a quick update as to what happened next.

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  • Making radio buttons and checkboxes easier to use

    27 August 2015

    At GDS we’re always looking for ways to make our pages easier for anyone to use. One particular area that comes up in user research is the difficulty people have with clicking on small checkboxes or radio buttons in forms. Our standard library of form elements does contain them in a clickable grey box, but because the relation between the label and the control has to be manually coded, every website that doesn’t do this trains people to only click directly on the control. It would be nice if we could adjust the size of checkboxes and radio buttons to make them larger where appropriate.

    Continue reading “Making radio buttons and checkboxes easier to use”

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