At the second meeting of the Govt.nz peer advisory group, held on 25 March, agency reps and Govt.nz team members discussed a number of issues.
Mobile internet use
The most interesting discussion was around responsive design and the increase New Zealand has seen in mobile plans — 2.8 million bundled plans (data, voice, text) and 450,000 data only plans as of July 2013 (Source: Statistics New Zealand Internet Service Provider Survey 2013).
This increase in mobile use is being seen in web analytics data with a few agencies noting that mobile use of their sites was at 17%.
Over the Christmas holidays, some agencies also had seen a marked increase in mobile traffic. One agency reported that parts of their site got around 50% mobile traffic.
This led to discussions about not just providing website content responsively, but also about how to present complex forms and calculators so that they work on mobile devices. This is more than just scaling the forms, but redoing the content on the forms so that it’s suited to mobile.
The group will meet again in April.
Contribute to this work
If you’re part of a web or comms team within the Government and would like to join the group or suggest ideas on what we could cover, email info@digital.govt.nz.
