9 ms·

Our plans to improve navigation on Gov.uk

110 points by open-source-ux 5y ago

hlandau 5y ago
This proposes to add expanding accordions to the navbar and to some pages. Will these work without JavaScript?
- thepangolino 5y ago
  Default behaviour should be that everything is expanded.
  - hadrien01 5y ago
    The way the BBC does it is putting a second menu in the footer, and linking to it for NoScript users.
- comex 5y ago
  Ideally they would use a styled <details> element, which provides exactly the desired behavior without needing JavaScript. Edit: At least, exactly the desired behavior for accordions within the page, where, once you expand a section, you expect it to close again only if you click the section header a second time. It would be less suited for a dropdown menu, which needs to be dismissed if the user clicks anywhere else on the page - though there might be some way to make it work.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  IIRC it's possible to make a menu like that nowadays without JS, just pure html + css.
- celticninja 5y ago
  GDS style/rules require an alternative where JavaScript is disabled, so I would expect this has been considered.
loufe 5y ago
Government website accessibility makes such a difference when in a rush and looking for clear, concise, and easy to follow instructions or forms. I was blown away by the quality of Ontario's websites, they are seriously top-notch, compared with those of Québec's. Québec is a mish-mash of styles and contradictive information and the only occasional use of English only serves to frustrate Anglophones who wouldn't be able to read more than a small part of a topic without passing through a translator. I wouldn't be surprised if Ontario's French support is on par with its English. As an aside, I am always saddened by how many jerks just let out all of their negativity into comments. I'm for free speech and don't object to its presence, just a little saddened.
Animats 5y ago
"This site uses cookies. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website. We use cookies to store information about how you use the GOV.UK blogs website, such as the pages you visit." They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.
- alias_neo 5y ago
  I read a Twitter thread a while back saying they use Google Analytics, but if you reject the cookie prompt it isn't loaded. They need some sort of analytics if they want to know how the site is used, but as a Brit who uses that site I'd really rather they didn't use GA, it's not appropriate, in my opinion for a government service.
  - the_other 5y ago
    It's never appropriate. It's a lynchpin of Google's surveillance network. The benefit they get from "giving away" the useful-but-awkward tools outweighs the benefit any GA users see from using GA. Google rigged the race before most people knew they were in it. We all should stop using it.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      I am a CTO making these decisions, right now. Can you point me toward a more moral path that won't make it painful for SEO contractors to work with our startup? If there's something better, or more informative than Google Analytics, I would obviously love to choose that!
      - stefanvdw1 5y ago
        I’ve heard good things about both plausible [0] and panelbear[1] as alternatives to Google Analytics. Can’t say I have tested them personally yet unfortunately. 0. https://plausible.io https://plausible.io 2. https://panelbear.com https://panelbear.com
lobsang 5y ago
GDS have done some excellent work in the past, especially around usability and design. Unfortunately since the various senior leaders have left and it's moved further into government/cabinet office they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves. It's interesting that one of the original principles behind gov.uk navigation was that it should be secondary to Google. The focus was on getting people to the right page from Google/Bing/DDG (where they start) without the need to navigate gov.uk itself. I also find it odd that the problem they identified from the Discovery was poor information architecture but their solution is to redesign the navigation menu. The use of the word 'topics' is also interesting. Again, GDS and gov.uks intent was to make it easier to access services, but the word service or a list of services isn't represented in either the current design or prototype.
- konamicode 5y ago
  Out of interest - who are the senior leaders you’re referring to?
  - lobsang 5y ago
    Sir Francis Maude and the team he had around him untill about 2016. I don't have the links to hand but there was some really great thinking going into what it meant to provide government services online at the time. Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost. There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017 Unfortunately GDS is now mostly toothless in all honesty
    - smackay 5y ago
      The GDS, even today, has an intrinsic beauty to it. It's really a marvel of engineering, though not the prettiest. A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines. Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds
ben_squire 5y ago
The best thing they could do is make it so you can login without having to google for "gov uk login".
- lobsang 5y ago
  There isn't actually anything close to a standard user account for gov.uk Again one of the original goals was that services shouldn't require a persistent account. Unfortunately that makes sense in 80% of cases but misses some important ones (Universal Credit, Child tax benefit, Tax). For whatever reason the people looking at accounts also got fixated on identity (you are Sam Smith) rather than authentication (you have X credentials and have accessed the service before) combined with the UKs aversion to an identity system and central databases (we actually have several) it resulted in Gov.UK Verify, which, last I checked works about 30% of the time. Ultimately the big departments (HMRC) just built their own thing and created user portals which GDS didn't like... So everyone argued and no one fixed the actual problem.
gnrlst 5y ago
I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be. One thing that will always stick with me is one of the team leads telling me "we don't have customers, we have users" -- i.e. in the UK everyone has use Gov.uk for government-related digital information/tools/services. There's no competitor, therefore no customer choice. And they are well aware of this, hence their obsessions for the UX. I really wish other governmental digital agencies had this same mindset.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  >I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be. They gave a presentation at Webstock in Wellington (almost a decade ago IIRC). That was certainly my impression of them at the time. Great to see how little has changed.
  - lobsang 5y ago
    Unfortunately, lots has changed GDS itself is now 2 or 3 times the size and each department employs their own teams of DDAT experts. GDS is just another government bureaucracy at this point. Mores the shame.
- userbinator 5y ago
  It's odd to see "startup mentality" associated with a site that works well without JS and is otherwise very accessible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313)
NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago
I personally, and I hope many other users would benefit from having more data and less words. I would prefer to have my personal and company Tax page more as dashboard with alerts and notification for important approaching dates, than what exist now. I would like simple lists/tables with numbers own and amounts paid. Currently, you will see final numbers but finding out history will take you on journey of clicking on multiple links. There is too many links, and searching for simple transaction history sometimes was quite challenging. There is on other thing I find illogical on HMRC site, why do we need to register for each service online, waiting of some secret code? There is already username/password, and also SMS verification, also GOV knows what type of company/personal taxes we are registered for, why do we need to register separately for each service?
londons_explore 5y ago
These screenshots and mockups look like a step backwards from an 'ease of navigation' perspective, especially for someone who is only an occasional user. However, GDS has had good success in the past, so I hope they'll only push ahead with the rollout if the data shows that I'm an outlier.
codeulike 5y ago
I use gov.uk for all kinds of stuff but I've never needed to 'navigate' as such. You get a letter with a url on it, and you type in the url (e.g. vehicle tax). Or you google something, and you generally end up at the right page to do what you need or tell you what you need. Or maybe sometimes you're one click away but its pretty obvious. This was one of their goals back in 2016 and I think its worked. I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. I wonder if they are doing this because they're the only people with an overview of the whole site, and it seems like a big mess to them? It may well be a big mess, but to me (and I suspect a lot of people) it doesn't matter. Like, most people dont want to hang around at gov.uk, you go in and do whatever you need to do, and then you leave. You're not browsing. Generally I think the GDS era has been great, particulaly for covid they've had to throw a lot of things together very quickly (e.g. ordering tests by post) and its all just worked.
- dazc 5y ago
  I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. If you are self-employed or run a ltd company you do need to navigate and the phrase 'big mess' is an understatement. I agree with your main point though, for a lot of everyday, non-business transactions, the site works well enough.
snowwrestler 5y ago
I have employed tabs and accordions repeatedly during my career to try to simplify pages and have invariably found that they cause confusion among some users when we do real-world user testing. Some folks just don’t recognize them as affordances for uncovering hidden info. I’ve come to believe that, aside from top navigation, hiding any info on a page is a usability no-no. Users know how to scroll and it’s the easiest way to discover information. Just make the pages taller and use more white space.
denton-scratch 5y ago
"continues to meet user needs" You are talking about gov.uk, right? Well, you can't 'continue' until you've started. I'm surprised someone has turned up here, admitting to being responsible for these sites. But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website?
- dazc 5y ago
  But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website? But I like having to have 3 different accounts to manage my tax affairs. I especially like how I can navigate around and end up back on a ten-year old version of the site with no way back.
superkuh 5y ago
The Gov.uk site, so far, has been head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of providing a site that is both functional and usable for all users. Their proposed improvements seem to carry on this trend except for the mobile optimized pages (mobile-optimized usually meaning: hidden information, too much whitespace, mobile only buttons that don't work on real computers, etc).

This proposes to add expanding accordions to the navbar and to some pages. Will these work without JavaScript?

thepangolino 5y ago
Default behaviour should be that everything is expanded.
- hadrien01 5y ago
  The way the BBC does it is putting a second menu in the footer, and linking to it for NoScript users.
comex 5y ago
Ideally they would use a styled <details> element, which provides exactly the desired behavior without needing JavaScript. Edit: At least, exactly the desired behavior for accordions within the page, where, once you expand a section, you expect it to close again only if you click the section header a second time. It would be less suited for a dropdown menu, which needs to be dismissed if the user clicks anywhere else on the page - though there might be some way to make it work.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
IIRC it's possible to make a menu like that nowadays without JS, just pure html + css.
celticninja 5y ago
GDS style/rules require an alternative where JavaScript is disabled, so I would expect this has been considered.

Government website accessibility makes such a difference when in a rush and looking for clear, concise, and easy to follow instructions or forms. I was blown away by the quality of Ontario's websites, they are seriously top-notch, compared with those of Québec's. Québec is a mish-mash of styles and contradictive information and the only occasional use of English only serves to frustrate Anglophones who wouldn't be able to read more than a small part of a topic without passing through a translator. I wouldn't be surprised if Ontario's French support is on par with its English. As an aside, I am always saddened by how many jerks just let out all of their negativity into comments. I'm for free speech and don't object to its presence, just a little saddened.

Animats 5y ago

"This site uses cookies. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website. We use cookies to store information about how you use the GOV.UK blogs website, such as the pages you visit." They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.

alias_neo 5y ago
I read a Twitter thread a while back saying they use Google Analytics, but if you reject the cookie prompt it isn't loaded. They need some sort of analytics if they want to know how the site is used, but as a Brit who uses that site I'd really rather they didn't use GA, it's not appropriate, in my opinion for a government service.
- the_other 5y ago
  It's never appropriate. It's a lynchpin of Google's surveillance network. The benefit they get from "giving away" the useful-but-awkward tools outweighs the benefit any GA users see from using GA. Google rigged the race before most people knew they were in it. We all should stop using it.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    I am a CTO making these decisions, right now. Can you point me toward a more moral path that won't make it painful for SEO contractors to work with our startup? If there's something better, or more informative than Google Analytics, I would obviously love to choose that!
    - stefanvdw1 5y ago
      I’ve heard good things about both plausible [0] and panelbear[1] as alternatives to Google Analytics. Can’t say I have tested them personally yet unfortunately. 0. https://plausible.io https://plausible.io 2. https://panelbear.com https://panelbear.com

lobsang 5y ago

GDS have done some excellent work in the past, especially around usability and design. Unfortunately since the various senior leaders have left and it's moved further into government/cabinet office they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves. It's interesting that one of the original principles behind gov.uk navigation was that it should be secondary to Google. The focus was on getting people to the right page from Google/Bing/DDG (where they start) without the need to navigate gov.uk itself. I also find it odd that the problem they identified from the Discovery was poor information architecture but their solution is to redesign the navigation menu. The use of the word 'topics' is also interesting. Again, GDS and gov.uks intent was to make it easier to access services, but the word service or a list of services isn't represented in either the current design or prototype.

konamicode 5y ago
Out of interest - who are the senior leaders you’re referring to?
- lobsang 5y ago
  Sir Francis Maude and the team he had around him untill about 2016. I don't have the links to hand but there was some really great thinking going into what it meant to provide government services online at the time. Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost. There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017 Unfortunately GDS is now mostly toothless in all honesty
  - smackay 5y ago
    The GDS, even today, has an intrinsic beauty to it. It's really a marvel of engineering, though not the prettiest. A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines. Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds

ben_squire 5y ago

The best thing they could do is make it so you can login without having to google for "gov uk login".

lobsang 5y ago
There isn't actually anything close to a standard user account for gov.uk Again one of the original goals was that services shouldn't require a persistent account. Unfortunately that makes sense in 80% of cases but misses some important ones (Universal Credit, Child tax benefit, Tax). For whatever reason the people looking at accounts also got fixated on identity (you are Sam Smith) rather than authentication (you have X credentials and have accessed the service before) combined with the UKs aversion to an identity system and central databases (we actually have several) it resulted in Gov.UK Verify, which, last I checked works about 30% of the time. Ultimately the big departments (HMRC) just built their own thing and created user portals which GDS didn't like... So everyone argued and no one fixed the actual problem.

gnrlst 5y ago

I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be. One thing that will always stick with me is one of the team leads telling me "we don't have customers, we have users" -- i.e. in the UK everyone has use Gov.uk for government-related digital information/tools/services. There's no competitor, therefore no customer choice. And they are well aware of this, hence their obsessions for the UX. I really wish other governmental digital agencies had this same mindset.

tjpnz 5y ago
>I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be. They gave a presentation at Webstock in Wellington (almost a decade ago IIRC). That was certainly my impression of them at the time. Great to see how little has changed.
- lobsang 5y ago
  Unfortunately, lots has changed GDS itself is now 2 or 3 times the size and each department employs their own teams of DDAT experts. GDS is just another government bureaucracy at this point. Mores the shame.
userbinator 5y ago
It's odd to see "startup mentality" associated with a site that works well without JS and is otherwise very accessible (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313)

NiceWayToDoIT 5y ago

I personally, and I hope many other users would benefit from having more data and less words. I would prefer to have my personal and company Tax page more as dashboard with alerts and notification for important approaching dates, than what exist now. I would like simple lists/tables with numbers own and amounts paid. Currently, you will see final numbers but finding out history will take you on journey of clicking on multiple links. There is too many links, and searching for simple transaction history sometimes was quite challenging. There is on other thing I find illogical on HMRC site, why do we need to register for each service online, waiting of some secret code? There is already username/password, and also SMS verification, also GOV knows what type of company/personal taxes we are registered for, why do we need to register separately for each service?

londons_explore 5y ago

These screenshots and mockups look like a step backwards from an 'ease of navigation' perspective, especially for someone who is only an occasional user. However, GDS has had good success in the past, so I hope they'll only push ahead with the rollout if the data shows that I'm an outlier.

codeulike 5y ago

I use gov.uk for all kinds of stuff but I've never needed to 'navigate' as such. You get a letter with a url on it, and you type in the url (e.g. vehicle tax). Or you google something, and you generally end up at the right page to do what you need or tell you what you need. Or maybe sometimes you're one click away but its pretty obvious. This was one of their goals back in 2016 and I think its worked. I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. I wonder if they are doing this because they're the only people with an overview of the whole site, and it seems like a big mess to them? It may well be a big mess, but to me (and I suspect a lot of people) it doesn't matter. Like, most people dont want to hang around at gov.uk, you go in and do whatever you need to do, and then you leave. You're not browsing. Generally I think the GDS era has been great, particulaly for covid they've had to throw a lot of things together very quickly (e.g. ordering tests by post) and its all just worked.

dazc 5y ago
I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. If you are self-employed or run a ltd company you do need to navigate and the phrase 'big mess' is an understatement. I agree with your main point though, for a lot of everyday, non-business transactions, the site works well enough.

snowwrestler 5y ago

I have employed tabs and accordions repeatedly during my career to try to simplify pages and have invariably found that they cause confusion among some users when we do real-world user testing. Some folks just don’t recognize them as affordances for uncovering hidden info. I’ve come to believe that, aside from top navigation, hiding any info on a page is a usability no-no. Users know how to scroll and it’s the easiest way to discover information. Just make the pages taller and use more white space.

denton-scratch 5y ago

"continues to meet user needs" You are talking about gov.uk, right? Well, you can't 'continue' until you've started. I'm surprised someone has turned up here, admitting to being responsible for these sites. But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website?

dazc 5y ago
But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website? But I like having to have 3 different accounts to manage my tax affairs. I especially like how I can navigate around and end up back on a ten-year old version of the site with no way back.

superkuh 5y ago

The Gov.uk site, so far, has been head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of providing a site that is both functional and usable for all users. Their proposed improvements seem to carry on this trend except for the mobile optimized pages (mobile-optimized usually meaning: hidden information, too much whitespace, mobile only buttons that don't work on real computers, etc).