7 ms·

I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. Their

I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. Their websites might not look the part, but they excel (again, in my experience) in their practicality, accessibility and ease of use. And that is exactly what you would expect from a government website.

ignoranceprior 6y ago
In the US, 18F does a good job: https://18f.gsa.gov https://18f.gsa.gov
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Agreed. I like the US design system more than anything else out there: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/ It’s incredibly well thought out and designed.
zucker42 6y ago
What's wrong with their aesthetics? I've always found their simple design to be quite nice.
- skrebbel 6y ago
  I think he means they don't look particularly "high tech" or something. Which I'd say is a feature.
  - mytailorisrich 6y ago
    It's simple and clear. The aim is to convey information, not to be fancy and bloated, indeed.
    - blackhaz 6y ago
      And gov.uk's clear design looks better than most of the wild wild web out there, to be honest.
  - tclancy 6y ago
    I believe it is: given the focus and care on accessibility for all users, there's a limit to how many whizbang widgets are ok to use.
  - g_p 6y ago
    Gov.UK had a good article a while back (appeared on HN) where they pointed out the importance of designing for no JS. All official gov.uk sites that I'm aware of will work without JavaScript. They had an analysis showing how many % of their visits had broken JS support and therefore the need to build for the lowest common denominator.
    - gm3dmo 6y ago
      https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressive-enhancement https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... When a team builds a service using the service manual as a guide so many things become so much easier. Need to explain something to a non technical manager? The service manual has got you covered: > Progressive enhancement is a way of building websites and applications. It’s based on the idea that you should start by making your page work with just HTML, before adding anything else like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript.
      - g_p 6y ago
        That's the one, progressive enhancement. A great principle, and nice to see they even think about Lynx accessing the sites [0] The post I was thinking about with the analysis of why JS/CSS shouldn't be assumed to work was [1]. [0] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhancement-to-build-gov-uk/ https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres... [1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
- npsomaratna 6y ago
  I was about to ask this myself. I think their simple design is quite intentional—and it perfectly fits it's purpose. Addendum: plus being accessible (essential for any govt. service).
bartread 6y ago
> I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. It is a neverending source of wonder to me that, whilst our government may be a shambles[0], our government services are so fantastic. They really are very impressive and, for the most part, very easy to use. Clearly a group of people have invested a lot of time and effort into this, and to me they demonstrate very clearly the value of investing heavily in user experience. Also, the site is almost never down, which is good for somebody like me who tends to remember that they need to do thing X at random-o-clock at night. [0] Not intended as an especially partisan statement as I have been known to vote Conservative (and over the last few years have criticised both Labour and Conservatives pretty equally), but I think it's tricky to argue that, as an example, sending 3 million kids back to school for 1 day before changing your mind demonstrates competent leadership.
- acta_non_verba 6y ago
  This is the main advantage of western democracies, right? Institutions and the day to day running of the country are separate to the executive.
  - iso1210 6y ago
    I believe they're known as "Unelected bureaucrats"
- thu2111 6y ago
  I think you're seeing differences between job cultures more than politicians vs civil service. Politicians are doing crazy stuff and reversing direction 24 hours later all over the world because that's what public health "experts" are doing. The WHO is notorious for it, they have routinely made contradictory announcements within days or weeks of each other in 2020 and this will probably continue in 2021. Public health is just making it up as they go along and this is reflected through politicians, who basically just do whatever they're told by their "expert" committees even if it makes them look foolish. gov.uk is run by software engineers, presumably pretty good ones. They make decisions based on data and know how to interpret it. One thing that has become super clear to me in 2020 is the huge quality gap between CS culture and public health culture, at least in research. Public health research papers and especially epidemiology papers contain not just severe errors all the time but are flat out deceptive in ways I just never see in the output of CS research or the software industry. For example I never encounter bogus citations in CS papers but that happens all the time in epidemiology papers. Public health research superficially looks and feels like science but when you scratch the surface the scientific method has gone AWOL, good data practices have gone AWOL, basic logic and integrity has gone AWOL. It's just a disaster zone.
helij 6y ago
I on the other hand find the design of gov.uk websites one of the best out there.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
I agree UK services are ahead of other countries I've experienced but they are still terrible in my experience. That said I know very well some contractors that worked on gov.uk and they're top notch. That's probably were the technical excellence come from. The bureaucracy and process are the problems. They're much worse than any UK private company or UK bank I had to work with. HMRC is terrible, there are tons of error on the payslips, they mess up tax codes all the times, part of the website uses a previous UI and not the cool modern one, several functions need you to call and queue for 1hr or send letters and hope. Having an accountant helps as they have access to a special version of HMRC they can use to do things mere mortals can't. Childcare services are embarrassing and require you to have a subaccount in your governments account. I've spent 3 months without access because they asked me security questions for the childcare service on HMRC; I provided HMRC security answers and got locked out; the procedure to restore the account involved verifying my identity by providing via email certified copy of various documents. They were extremely slow in replying (sometimes not replying at all), they never returned any copies or originals I sent and they were extremely picky about certifications so I ended up having to send 3-4 certified and original documents.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Most of the problems tend to occur when you are forced to interact with legacy versions of tools that were built prior to the buildout of the new gov.uk. The old sites are all over the place. I think part of the reason gov.uk has been a success is exactly that they were not forced to replace old systems wholesale, but were allowed to build out a platform and methodology that works well and replace public facing services bit by bit.
  - lucraft 6y ago
    I interviewed at a large UK gov Ministry for a technical architect role a couple of years ago and one of their interview questions was: "How would you architect new features on top of a legacy system implemented by an external agency that is hard to work with and has many bugs but we are unable to change in any way for contractual reasons?"
heavenlyblue 6y ago
UK only excels in static .gov.uk serving. They are great for informational purposes. The best one actually is the one serving Travel Guidance for any country in the world. They are light years behind countries that have fully-fledged dynamic services provided by the government accessible through the ID Cards, as it is in the Baltics for example.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  The lack of ID card based auth isn't really the fault of the team behind gov.uk, who provide the best service they can for government SSO in the form of Verify: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify/introducing-govuk-verify https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk... National ID cards are a particularly thorny issue politically, there's been a few attempts to introduce them, all of which have been noisily shut down in parliament because of privacy concerns. There isn't really any single database of people in the UK, with different ministries having their own databases. In principle this seems like a pretty good approach, even if it does mean that things like authentication with web services is a bit clunky.
  - marksomnian 6y ago
    GDS are clearly aware of this problem and are working on this as well, with "GOV.UK Accounts" [0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/22/introducing-gov-uk-accounts/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/22/introducing-gov-uk-accoun...
- fakedang 6y ago
  There's a nice episode of Yes, Minister showing why ID cards are a particularly thorny issue. One of the indicated reasons was how it's akin to Nazi armbands.
- gm3dmo 6y ago
  > UK only excels in static .gov.uk serving I'd put forward Gov.uk/pay and Gov.uk/notify as very successful transactional services that operate on a massive scale. They have been particularly good for local councils who just hook up to Notify and Pay. The parts where security is paramount are handled centrally. It stops councils having to "roll their own". Universal Credit is a transactional system handling billions in benefits. When the conservative government shut down the economy in March it seems to have coped pretty well: https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/12/14/dwps-agile-response-to-covid-19-scaling-universal-credit-to-meet-demand/ https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/12/14/dwps-agile-respons...
irjustin 6y ago
If you're looking for another example that does it well, I'm currently in Singapore. Their websites are fantastic. highly functional and relatively good looking [0]. They have SingPass[1] which is a centralized OAuth for government ID that lets me into things like taxes, identity, etc. There's a fair argument someplace for too much reach/tracking, but it works really smoothly. [0] https://www.gov.sg/ https://www.gov.sg/ https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0624-public-holidays-for-2021 https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0624-pub... [1] https://www.singpass.gov.sg https://www.singpass.gov.sg
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  This doesn't strike me as functional as gov.uk. It's more like your standard wordpress stories site (there is even a section labelled "stories"). edit: > The www.gov.sg Portal is the official online communication platform and repository of the Singapore Government, providing you with the latest policy announcements, information and news on Singapore. You can also translate Government terms using our translating tool, and search for contact information of public service agencies. > The Portal is managed by the Public Communications Division of the Ministry of Communications and Information. We welcome your suggestions for the Portal, to help us to serve you better. Indeed, it's more a branding website than an administrative tool.
rvz 6y ago
If there is one thing that the UK government gets praise for by the general public, it has to be gov.uk (secretly). Everything else, they're at the top of the Tower of Blame.
ksec 6y ago
>Their websites might not look the part, but they excel.... accessibility.... I remember they had a design document ( Something similar to [1] [2], but not the exact one I was looking for ) where they list accessibility as their number one priority and a very long list of accessibility requirement. Simply because Government Web Site needs to be accessible by everyone. That means there are certain fancy things and colour scheme they cant do. I wonder if the stack for Gov.UK are the same as their Petition Site [3] or was it based on something else? They have an Open Source Github account [4] for Government Digital Service which list everything they have open sourced. [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles [2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk https://design-system.service.gov.uk [3] https://petition.parliament.uk https://petition.parliament.uk [4] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov
- chaorace 6y ago
  If there was any remaining doubt about the UK Gov's design chops, check out their Github projects. Just to highlight one... they've published one of the most accessible and intuitive reverse-engineering tools I've ever used: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef
  - g_p 6y ago
    There's also huge amounts of UK Govt infrastructure code available online and open source. For all kinds of things, from all departments. You could pretty much spin up the code needed to run the boring bits of a country out of open-source code. How about the application for booking secure prisoner moves? [0] Or some nice open source security guidance? [1] And that's just one department, most others are similar! [0] https://github.com/ministryofjustice https://github.com/ministryofjustice [1] https://github.com/ministryofjustice/security-guidance https://github.com/ministryofjustice/security-guidance
    - fluential 6y ago
      Or run your own version of government tax system https://github.com/hmrc https://github.com/hmrc
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
captn3m0 6y ago
It all works with JS disabled. Their accessibility callouts are amazing, and they provide you callouts wherever accessibility-related concerns have not been closed (and a form to raise it as well).
cblconfederate 6y ago
i m glad the greek govt copied their design: https://www.gov.gr https://www.gov.gr
aledalgrande 6y ago
I know some of the people that worked on the gov.uk project. They are really good.

ignoranceprior 6y ago

In the US, 18F does a good job: https://18f.gsa.gov https://18f.gsa.gov

systemvoltage 6y ago
Agreed. I like the US design system more than anything else out there: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/ It’s incredibly well thought out and designed.

zucker42 6y ago

What's wrong with their aesthetics? I've always found their simple design to be quite nice.

skrebbel 6y ago
I think he means they don't look particularly "high tech" or something. Which I'd say is a feature.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  It's simple and clear. The aim is to convey information, not to be fancy and bloated, indeed.
  - blackhaz 6y ago
    And gov.uk's clear design looks better than most of the wild wild web out there, to be honest.
- tclancy 6y ago
  I believe it is: given the focus and care on accessibility for all users, there's a limit to how many whizbang widgets are ok to use.
- g_p 6y ago
  Gov.UK had a good article a while back (appeared on HN) where they pointed out the importance of designing for no JS. All official gov.uk sites that I'm aware of will work without JavaScript. They had an analysis showing how many % of their visits had broken JS support and therefore the need to build for the lowest common denominator.
  - gm3dmo 6y ago
    https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressive-enhancement https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... When a team builds a service using the service manual as a guide so many things become so much easier. Need to explain something to a non technical manager? The service manual has got you covered: > Progressive enhancement is a way of building websites and applications. It’s based on the idea that you should start by making your page work with just HTML, before adding anything else like Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript.
    - g_p 6y ago
      That's the one, progressive enhancement. A great principle, and nice to see they even think about Lynx accessing the sites [0] The post I was thinking about with the analysis of why JS/CSS shouldn't be assumed to work was [1]. [0] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progressive-enhancement-to-build-gov-uk/ https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/19/why-we-use-progres... [1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missing-out-on-javascript-enhancement/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...
npsomaratna 6y ago
I was about to ask this myself. I think their simple design is quite intentional—and it perfectly fits it's purpose. Addendum: plus being accessible (essential for any govt. service).

bartread 6y ago

> I have lived in five countries now, but not one (local or state) government had an online presence that was nearly as good as the gov.uk infrastructure. It is a neverending source of wonder to me that, whilst our government may be a shambles[0], our government services are so fantastic. They really are very impressive and, for the most part, very easy to use. Clearly a group of people have invested a lot of time and effort into this, and to me they demonstrate very clearly the value of investing heavily in user experience. Also, the site is almost never down, which is good for somebody like me who tends to remember that they need to do thing X at random-o-clock at night. [0] Not intended as an especially partisan statement as I have been known to vote Conservative (and over the last few years have criticised both Labour and Conservatives pretty equally), but I think it's tricky to argue that, as an example, sending 3 million kids back to school for 1 day before changing your mind demonstrates competent leadership.

acta_non_verba 6y ago
This is the main advantage of western democracies, right? Institutions and the day to day running of the country are separate to the executive.
- iso1210 6y ago
  I believe they're known as "Unelected bureaucrats"
thu2111 6y ago
I think you're seeing differences between job cultures more than politicians vs civil service. Politicians are doing crazy stuff and reversing direction 24 hours later all over the world because that's what public health "experts" are doing. The WHO is notorious for it, they have routinely made contradictory announcements within days or weeks of each other in 2020 and this will probably continue in 2021. Public health is just making it up as they go along and this is reflected through politicians, who basically just do whatever they're told by their "expert" committees even if it makes them look foolish. gov.uk is run by software engineers, presumably pretty good ones. They make decisions based on data and know how to interpret it. One thing that has become super clear to me in 2020 is the huge quality gap between CS culture and public health culture, at least in research. Public health research papers and especially epidemiology papers contain not just severe errors all the time but are flat out deceptive in ways I just never see in the output of CS research or the software industry. For example I never encounter bogus citations in CS papers but that happens all the time in epidemiology papers. Public health research superficially looks and feels like science but when you scratch the surface the scientific method has gone AWOL, good data practices have gone AWOL, basic logic and integrity has gone AWOL. It's just a disaster zone.

helij 6y ago

I on the other hand find the design of gov.uk websites one of the best out there.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

I agree UK services are ahead of other countries I've experienced but they are still terrible in my experience. That said I know very well some contractors that worked on gov.uk and they're top notch. That's probably were the technical excellence come from. The bureaucracy and process are the problems. They're much worse than any UK private company or UK bank I had to work with. HMRC is terrible, there are tons of error on the payslips, they mess up tax codes all the times, part of the website uses a previous UI and not the cool modern one, several functions need you to call and queue for 1hr or send letters and hope. Having an accountant helps as they have access to a special version of HMRC they can use to do things mere mortals can't. Childcare services are embarrassing and require you to have a subaccount in your governments account. I've spent 3 months without access because they asked me security questions for the childcare service on HMRC; I provided HMRC security answers and got locked out; the procedure to restore the account involved verifying my identity by providing via email certified copy of various documents. They were extremely slow in replying (sometimes not replying at all), they never returned any copies or originals I sent and they were extremely picky about certifications so I ended up having to send 3-4 certified and original documents.

vidarh 6y ago
Most of the problems tend to occur when you are forced to interact with legacy versions of tools that were built prior to the buildout of the new gov.uk. The old sites are all over the place. I think part of the reason gov.uk has been a success is exactly that they were not forced to replace old systems wholesale, but were allowed to build out a platform and methodology that works well and replace public facing services bit by bit.
- lucraft 6y ago
  I interviewed at a large UK gov Ministry for a technical architect role a couple of years ago and one of their interview questions was: "How would you architect new features on top of a legacy system implemented by an external agency that is hard to work with and has many bugs but we are unable to change in any way for contractual reasons?"

heavenlyblue 6y ago

UK only excels in static .gov.uk serving. They are great for informational purposes. The best one actually is the one serving Travel Guidance for any country in the world. They are light years behind countries that have fully-fledged dynamic services provided by the government accessible through the ID Cards, as it is in the Baltics for example.

jon-wood 6y ago
The lack of ID card based auth isn't really the fault of the team behind gov.uk, who provide the best service they can for government SSO in the form of Verify: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk-verify/introducing-govuk-verify https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/introducing-govuk... National ID cards are a particularly thorny issue politically, there's been a few attempts to introduce them, all of which have been noisily shut down in parliament because of privacy concerns. There isn't really any single database of people in the UK, with different ministries having their own databases. In principle this seems like a pretty good approach, even if it does mean that things like authentication with web services is a bit clunky.
- marksomnian 6y ago
  GDS are clearly aware of this problem and are working on this as well, with "GOV.UK Accounts" [0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/22/introducing-gov-uk-accounts/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2020/09/22/introducing-gov-uk-accoun...
fakedang 6y ago
There's a nice episode of Yes, Minister showing why ID cards are a particularly thorny issue. One of the indicated reasons was how it's akin to Nazi armbands.
gm3dmo 6y ago
> UK only excels in static .gov.uk serving I'd put forward Gov.uk/pay and Gov.uk/notify as very successful transactional services that operate on a massive scale. They have been particularly good for local councils who just hook up to Notify and Pay. The parts where security is paramount are handled centrally. It stops councils having to "roll their own". Universal Credit is a transactional system handling billions in benefits. When the conservative government shut down the economy in March it seems to have coped pretty well: https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/12/14/dwps-agile-response-to-covid-19-scaling-universal-credit-to-meet-demand/ https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2020/12/14/dwps-agile-respons...

irjustin 6y ago

If you're looking for another example that does it well, I'm currently in Singapore. Their websites are fantastic. highly functional and relatively good looking [0]. They have SingPass[1] which is a centralized OAuth for government ID that lets me into things like taxes, identity, etc. There's a fair argument someplace for too much reach/tracking, but it works really smoothly. [0] https://www.gov.sg/ https://www.gov.sg/ https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0624-public-holidays-for-2021 https://www.mom.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/2020/0624-pub... [1] https://www.singpass.gov.sg https://www.singpass.gov.sg

johnchristopher 6y ago
This doesn't strike me as functional as gov.uk. It's more like your standard wordpress stories site (there is even a section labelled "stories"). edit: > The www.gov.sg Portal is the official online communication platform and repository of the Singapore Government, providing you with the latest policy announcements, information and news on Singapore. You can also translate Government terms using our translating tool, and search for contact information of public service agencies. > The Portal is managed by the Public Communications Division of the Ministry of Communications and Information. We welcome your suggestions for the Portal, to help us to serve you better. Indeed, it's more a branding website than an administrative tool.

rvz 6y ago

If there is one thing that the UK government gets praise for by the general public, it has to be gov.uk (secretly). Everything else, they're at the top of the Tower of Blame.

ksec 6y ago

>Their websites might not look the part, but they excel.... accessibility.... I remember they had a design document ( Something similar to [1] [2], but not the exact one I was looking for ) where they list accessibility as their number one priority and a very long list of accessibility requirement. Simply because Government Web Site needs to be accessible by everyone. That means there are certain fancy things and colour scheme they cant do. I wonder if the stack for Gov.UK are the same as their Petition Site [3] or was it based on something else? They have an Open Source Github account [4] for Government Digital Service which list everything they have open sourced. [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles [2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk https://design-system.service.gov.uk [3] https://petition.parliament.uk https://petition.parliament.uk [4] https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov

chaorace 6y ago
If there was any remaining doubt about the UK Gov's design chops, check out their Github projects. Just to highlight one... they've published one of the most accessible and intuitive reverse-engineering tools I've ever used: https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef
- g_p 6y ago
  There's also huge amounts of UK Govt infrastructure code available online and open source. For all kinds of things, from all departments. You could pretty much spin up the code needed to run the boring bits of a country out of open-source code. How about the application for booking secure prisoner moves? [0] Or some nice open source security guidance? [1] And that's just one department, most others are similar! [0] https://github.com/ministryofjustice https://github.com/ministryofjustice [1] https://github.com/ministryofjustice/security-guidance https://github.com/ministryofjustice/security-guidance
  - fluential 6y ago
    Or run your own version of government tax system https://github.com/hmrc https://github.com/hmrc

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

captn3m0 6y ago

It all works with JS disabled. Their accessibility callouts are amazing, and they provide you callouts wherever accessibility-related concerns have not been closed (and a form to raise it as well).

cblconfederate 6y ago

i m glad the greek govt copied their design: https://www.gov.gr https://www.gov.gr

aledalgrande 6y ago

I know some of the people that worked on the gov.uk project. They are really good.