The shift to mobile and tablet devices
When will more people visit Gov.uk using a mobile or tablet than a PC?
Mobile and tablet traffic to the Admissions website almost doubled during 2013. Mobile/tablet traffic is rising all the time. But often the largest rises in mobile/tablet traffic occur immediately after Christmas as people rush to use their shiny new gadgets. The graph in this blog post from the Government Digital Service demonstrates this trend well.
GDS predicts that mobile/tablet traffic will be larger than desktop traffic by Christmas 2014. It is interesting to see this prediction just after we featured a blog post from the BBC about the importance of responsive design for their BBC News worldwide websites. Gov.uk and the BBC both offer very different types of website to ours, but it is still interesting to see how important mobile is becoming for all types of websites.
Shifts in the devices people use to access the internet should come as no surprise, but the pace of change might. And I do not expect this switch away from PCs towards more personal, portable, touchscreen devices to slow down anytime soon.