New website design for parliament

The Kitsoft team developed the new adaptive design that helps to organize a large amount of content from different departments. Users can find the information they need easily. The UX of the website gives equal opportunities for all ages and social groups.

Ukrainian parliament site is the third after the USA and Great Britain in terms of the number of views — Research.

Before developing the design, we conducted a detailed analysis and identified the following facts:

1. Around 40% of Ukrainians visited the government’s website from mobile devices. This is a 130% increase compared to last year, taking into account that the old version of the website was not adapted to different devices.
2. Only 57% of users access the site through the main page, and the other 43% visit other pages. This figure will get higher if you consider related websites. Therefore, there is no need to overload the home page.
3. More than half of the users come from search services and a few through social networks.
4. About 300 million people worldwide have vision problems, 43% of whom suffer from refractive errors (data of 2010). Accordingly, about one and a half million Ukrainians have vision disabilities.

Analysis of the main page of the old site revealed 51 significant violations of accessibility, 86 comments, and 33 recommendations following the WCAG 2.1 standard.

The new website of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine is a reliable source of legislative news. The design follows modern technologies, and corresponds to the habits of users in line with the principles of convenience, relevance, and inclusiveness:

• Functionality. The main page reflects the work of the parliament, and the rest of the information is structured in appropriate sections;
• Adaptability. Tailored to mobile devices, search algorithms, and convenience to spread the information;
• Inclusiveness as a standard. Inclusiveness means accessibility, respect, and security. In the new design, we focused on contrast, size, brightness.

These solutions meet the standards of the Design System for State Websites of Ukraine, which was developed by Kitsoft and approved by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. The design system is a set of principles, recommendations, and best implementation for the website design development and interfaces for government agencies and missions of Ukraine

"There should be no special needs, but there should be special decisions. The new design helps the website to forget about special needs”, — Lygin Artem, UX Designer of Kitsoft

We took the time to organize a large amount of information on the website so that the user can easily navigate through the site and easily find the necessary content.

On the main page, we focused on the first three slides. What The user receives on the website is the most important information about the work of the parliament.

The block of the plenary session is active. The site displays information about the plenary session: it can be viewed online, or you can read the results later, and also materials about the Conciliation board, or watch the broadcast of the conciliation board, etc.

There are seven stages of this block, changing according to relevance.

The results and structure of voting are presented in the voting board.

According to statistics, the broadcast of the plenary session has a certain popularity and is separated into a unique section, which corresponds to the general context.

The block of electronic registration results immediately makes it clear how full the parliamentary hall is.

The calendar of events is equally suitable for desktop and mobile devices.

The news center is a completely new section in which all news and multimedia are collected. In this section, we tried to show the full potential of the Verkhovna Rada staff as producers of content and primary sources, without compromising other activities.

Laws are on the main page and sorted by date of adoption.

Other content. The government’s website is filled with a large number of links to third-party resources, materials, documents, archives, catalogs, etc.

Previously, these links were contained in the form of items and subitems on the navigation menu, which overloaded the site. This had a negative impact on search engine optimization, and the user found it difficult to navigate.

We have designed a set of solutions for similar hub pages, which will contain grouped content and form a convenient channel for this information.