7 ms·

As always, I'm really impressed (and a little proud as a Brit) by the gov.uk team. I've had the misfortune of having to deal with the various levels of US feder

As always, I'm really impressed (and a little proud as a Brit) by the gov.uk team. I've had the misfortune of having to deal with the various levels of US federal, state, and local govt for basic administrative tasks, and every time I long for gov.uk. I love the look of the little or divider. Nice touch.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
I am also starting to like the french .gouv.fr sites. They are slowly becoming modern. It is just our love of PDF that is holding us back (really?, PDFs that are fillable on a computer but no web forms to avoid the save & send by email? (or print))
- mbesto 5y ago
  > They are slowly becoming modern. It doesn't even need to be modern. Just usable.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  PDFs are accessible: a person distrusting computer transmission or without a computer can print out the form and send it via postal service. Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    > PDFs are accessible: a person distrusting computer transmission or without a computer can print out the form and send it via postal service. Yes, this is very useful when you do not have or want to use a computer. But if you fill in a PDF form on a computer, better go for the web app whihc will be easier to read and has a higher chance to actually work (the govt PDF will always have that one weird field that cannot be filled). > Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions. It would be enough for the web form to send you a confirmation, making it also an acknowledgement of your request. We already have this for taxes for instance.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jakub_g 5y ago
    You could design HTML website in the same way, to be printable (although getting pixel perfect A4 format is tricky with HTML) Meanwhile, PDFs internally can be as accessible as JPEG in some cases; difficult for screen readers because it's optimized for screen display and printing. Sometimes PDF are not even searchable, you literally have vector glyphs and not "letters" inside. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/viewing-government-documents https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-fo... Although PDFs are of course nice if you want to download it and save somewhere as a user because it's guaranteed to work and 1 file has everything. Downloaded HTML might have all kind of weird issues if it was constructed with fancy "modern" techniques. Again, proper server-rendered plain HTML+CSS for the win, perhaps with everything inlined if form is expected to be saved on disk.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      > You could design HTML website in the same way, to be printable (although getting pixel perfect A4 format is tricky with HTML) But you can also get away with not doing it, so it will not be done.
    - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
      You would not need to have a true paper form. If anything really needs to be printed, it is a QR code with some basic information pointing to the online information on the gov site. This is how covid vaccine status is handled today and it works great.
- brnt 5y ago
  Although the French fondness for printable documents can be very annoying (it can be a lot of work, all that printing and scanning!), it is nice that it makes building your own archive simple. I now live in the NL, and while digitalisation here is advanced and generally not much work, I find it hard to document communication with the government (or business) consistently. Dutch folk are so weary of paperwork that asking for a copy for your own administration (and this has benefitted me countless times so I'm not quitting that habit) usually gets you surprised and/or annoyed frowns.
  - mytailorisrich 5y ago
    Really, it's the French administration's fondness for paperwork. During the Covid lockdowns people were allowed to go out for a number of specific reasons, like in most countries. Of course the French administration decided that this required people to fill a specific form to select the reason, to sign the form (along with name, date and place of birth, address, date of time person left home), and to carry it with them in case police stopped them... After some time they did deploy an electronic version (on smartphones, but that's still a form) but it's the very idea of doing something like that that is symptomatic of the mindset.
    - brnt 5y ago
      > Really, it's the French administration's fondness for paperwork. French business isn't any different in my experience.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Where does this regressive mindset come from do you think?
    - oever 5y ago
      So people carried as many filled in forms as there were reasons on the form?
      - donatzsky 5y ago
binbag 5y ago
I'm also really impressed with the gov.uk sites. So clean, simple, and usable.
technobabbler 5y ago
Meanwhile, we spent a gazillion dollars on a healthcare.gov website which couldn't even load for most users, much less give them checkboxes. I wouldn't trust our elected officials with any technology more complex than a tweet. Or even that... God forbid you have to renew your driver's license. Fill out an online form like any sane business? Nooooo. Print out some materials, photocopy it, fax it, mail it, and still wait two hours at the DMV. Peak Murica. Our shining beacon on the hill is rather turning into a big ol warning light. A government of the people, for the elite, by the lowest bidder. Can't you pretty please send some competent bureaucrats over the pond?
- wongarsu 5y ago
  The .gov.uk vs healthcare.gov comparison sounds like a typical insourcing vs outsourcing story. The US government is of course big on outsourcing everything, but outsourcing is hard and many agencies don't have the talent and experience to do it well.
  - technobabbler 5y ago
    Yeah. Outsourced or not, I just can't remember our government having done anything well in my lifetime, except maybe winning traditional military battles against third world countries, which we also outsourced (then subsequently we lose the peace and create even more hostility, ripe for more outsourcing). The whole setup is just utterly incompetent, all the way up to the congress and president and supreme court... I don't know how it got this bad. Probably inevitable given the capture by for-profit entities and ideologues hell-bent on zero sum individualism. The system is so incompetent and corrupt it lacks even the rudimentary feedback loops that might've otherwise allowed it to break the cycle. Seems like the only way for it to get any better is to completely collapse under its own incompetence. Egads.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      I think NASA is a quite interesting microcosm of outsourcing in the US government. Just looking at the last couple of years you can see clear success stories (e.g. commercial resupply), but also cases where lobbyists and lawyers are heavily involved and try to influence the decision towards the worse and out-of-budget choice (e.g. lunar lander), and projects that are too big to fail and are continued mostly due to political reasons and lobbying (e.g. SLS). With NASA all of this is fairly obvious because there's a big hobbyist community that's invested in the outcome, I have little doubt it's worse in other agencies where people pay less attention.
tailspin2019 5y ago
A fellow Brit here, and I share your pride. They do excellent work. Which is not something I find myself saying very often about a government related organisation! It’s actually quite remarkable how good some of the UI is on many of our government websites. A lot of thought clearly goes into this design system. And it’s applied relatively consistency across all sorts of online properties too.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  There's a pattern in UK govt. websites that pisses me off: multi-page forms with one page per field. What is your biological sex? Male [] Female [] Other [] [Continue]
  - UglyToad 5y ago
    This is a deliberate choice by the designers and we had some to and fro with them about it for the application we were building (a complex 40+ question process for exports). They seemed open to more questions per page where needed but their single page per question standard makes sense when you understand the need to support the whole audience for a lot of their sites. Stats suggest over 16% of adults in the UK have very poor literacy so in the interests of accessibility I think the page per question is a reasonable pattern.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    As long as they do the keyboard support right (and they do) this is the same number of keypresses. A lot of people get distracted or confused by giant forms. This is even an accessibility issue.
atombender 5y ago
I've been similarly impressed with a lot of the Norwegian government's web sites. One thing they've been doing lately is formalize many things into well-designed flows that divide the process of seeking or entering information into discrete numbered steps. It's implemented across several departments, so I guess they must have standardized on a common UX. Previously, the digital portal required that you sign into the portal, click "New form", find the form (requiring a search among thousands of forms), open the form, fill out the fields and occasionally add sub-forms, and submit it. Very straightforward, sure, but these forms can be complicated stuff with lots of conditionals ("if you answered 'yes' in field 12.3.1, enter the total sum here, minus the subtotal in field 13.1.5"), and if you're not sure which form to use in the first place, there's no guidance at all. In the new UX, you're guided through each step, which asks you a question, and the answers guide the next question. You always see all the steps, so you can go back and change it, and each section is nicely collapsed as you move forward down the list. Even just "contact us" is implemented this way, guiding you nicely to the right place if you're not sure where to go to, say, amend your tax return. My wife recently applied for a permanent residency permit, and the process was just a single wizard like this. Occasionally a step would do more complex stuff like ask to upload documents, but the whole thing felt completely linear, and once you reached the end, that was the whole application. There were some further "real-world" steps like showing up for a personal interview, of course, but all the paperwork was done completely online.
pjc50 5y ago
That is the Government Digital Service https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ , and it's something of a miracle that it's allowed to exist. Competent and committed public servants providing a core structure for other departments to deploy successful software projects, the very antithesis of the "we don't have to manage anything if we contract it out" Serco approach.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

I am also starting to like the french .gouv.fr sites. They are slowly becoming modern. It is just our love of PDF that is holding us back (really?, PDFs that are fillable on a computer but no web forms to avoid the save & send by email? (or print))

mbesto 5y ago
> They are slowly becoming modern. It doesn't even need to be modern. Just usable.
mschuster91 5y ago
PDFs are accessible: a person distrusting computer transmission or without a computer can print out the form and send it via postal service. Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  > PDFs are accessible: a person distrusting computer transmission or without a computer can print out the form and send it via postal service. Yes, this is very useful when you do not have or want to use a computer. But if you fill in a PDF form on a computer, better go for the web app whihc will be easier to read and has a higher chance to actually work (the govt PDF will always have that one weird field that cannot be filled). > Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions. It would be enough for the web form to send you a confirmation, making it also an acknowledgement of your request. We already have this for taxes for instance.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jakub_g 5y ago
  You could design HTML website in the same way, to be printable (although getting pixel perfect A4 format is tricky with HTML) Meanwhile, PDFs internally can be as accessible as JPEG in some cases; difficult for screen readers because it's optimized for screen display and printing. Sometimes PDF are not even searchable, you literally have vector glyphs and not "letters" inside. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-for-government/viewing-government-documents https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-fo... Although PDFs are of course nice if you want to download it and save somewhere as a user because it's guaranteed to work and 1 file has everything. Downloaded HTML might have all kind of weird issues if it was constructed with fancy "modern" techniques. Again, proper server-rendered plain HTML+CSS for the win, perhaps with everything inlined if form is expected to be saved on disk.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > You could design HTML website in the same way, to be printable (although getting pixel perfect A4 format is tricky with HTML) But you can also get away with not doing it, so it will not be done.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    You would not need to have a true paper form. If anything really needs to be printed, it is a QR code with some basic information pointing to the online information on the gov site. This is how covid vaccine status is handled today and it works great.
brnt 5y ago
Although the French fondness for printable documents can be very annoying (it can be a lot of work, all that printing and scanning!), it is nice that it makes building your own archive simple. I now live in the NL, and while digitalisation here is advanced and generally not much work, I find it hard to document communication with the government (or business) consistently. Dutch folk are so weary of paperwork that asking for a copy for your own administration (and this has benefitted me countless times so I'm not quitting that habit) usually gets you surprised and/or annoyed frowns.
- mytailorisrich 5y ago
  Really, it's the French administration's fondness for paperwork. During the Covid lockdowns people were allowed to go out for a number of specific reasons, like in most countries. Of course the French administration decided that this required people to fill a specific form to select the reason, to sign the form (along with name, date and place of birth, address, date of time person left home), and to carry it with them in case police stopped them... After some time they did deploy an electronic version (on smartphones, but that's still a form) but it's the very idea of doing something like that that is symptomatic of the mindset.
  - brnt 5y ago
    > Really, it's the French administration's fondness for paperwork. French business isn't any different in my experience.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Where does this regressive mindset come from do you think?
  - oever 5y ago
    So people carried as many filled in forms as there were reasons on the form?
    - donatzsky 5y ago

binbag 5y ago

I'm also really impressed with the gov.uk sites. So clean, simple, and usable.

technobabbler 5y ago

Meanwhile, we spent a gazillion dollars on a healthcare.gov website which couldn't even load for most users, much less give them checkboxes. I wouldn't trust our elected officials with any technology more complex than a tweet. Or even that... God forbid you have to renew your driver's license. Fill out an online form like any sane business? Nooooo. Print out some materials, photocopy it, fax it, mail it, and still wait two hours at the DMV. Peak Murica. Our shining beacon on the hill is rather turning into a big ol warning light. A government of the people, for the elite, by the lowest bidder. Can't you pretty please send some competent bureaucrats over the pond?

wongarsu 5y ago
The .gov.uk vs healthcare.gov comparison sounds like a typical insourcing vs outsourcing story. The US government is of course big on outsourcing everything, but outsourcing is hard and many agencies don't have the talent and experience to do it well.
- technobabbler 5y ago
  Yeah. Outsourced or not, I just can't remember our government having done anything well in my lifetime, except maybe winning traditional military battles against third world countries, which we also outsourced (then subsequently we lose the peace and create even more hostility, ripe for more outsourcing). The whole setup is just utterly incompetent, all the way up to the congress and president and supreme court... I don't know how it got this bad. Probably inevitable given the capture by for-profit entities and ideologues hell-bent on zero sum individualism. The system is so incompetent and corrupt it lacks even the rudimentary feedback loops that might've otherwise allowed it to break the cycle. Seems like the only way for it to get any better is to completely collapse under its own incompetence. Egads.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    I think NASA is a quite interesting microcosm of outsourcing in the US government. Just looking at the last couple of years you can see clear success stories (e.g. commercial resupply), but also cases where lobbyists and lawyers are heavily involved and try to influence the decision towards the worse and out-of-budget choice (e.g. lunar lander), and projects that are too big to fail and are continued mostly due to political reasons and lobbying (e.g. SLS). With NASA all of this is fairly obvious because there's a big hobbyist community that's invested in the outcome, I have little doubt it's worse in other agencies where people pay less attention.

tailspin2019 5y ago

A fellow Brit here, and I share your pride. They do excellent work. Which is not something I find myself saying very often about a government related organisation! It’s actually quite remarkable how good some of the UI is on many of our government websites. A lot of thought clearly goes into this design system. And it’s applied relatively consistency across all sorts of online properties too.

denton-scratch 5y ago
There's a pattern in UK govt. websites that pisses me off: multi-page forms with one page per field. What is your biological sex? Male [] Female [] Other [] [Continue]
- UglyToad 5y ago
  This is a deliberate choice by the designers and we had some to and fro with them about it for the application we were building (a complex 40+ question process for exports). They seemed open to more questions per page where needed but their single page per question standard makes sense when you understand the need to support the whole audience for a lot of their sites. Stats suggest over 16% of adults in the UK have very poor literacy so in the interests of accessibility I think the page per question is a reasonable pattern.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  As long as they do the keyboard support right (and they do) this is the same number of keypresses. A lot of people get distracted or confused by giant forms. This is even an accessibility issue.

atombender 5y ago

I've been similarly impressed with a lot of the Norwegian government's web sites. One thing they've been doing lately is formalize many things into well-designed flows that divide the process of seeking or entering information into discrete numbered steps. It's implemented across several departments, so I guess they must have standardized on a common UX. Previously, the digital portal required that you sign into the portal, click "New form", find the form (requiring a search among thousands of forms), open the form, fill out the fields and occasionally add sub-forms, and submit it. Very straightforward, sure, but these forms can be complicated stuff with lots of conditionals ("if you answered 'yes' in field 12.3.1, enter the total sum here, minus the subtotal in field 13.1.5"), and if you're not sure which form to use in the first place, there's no guidance at all. In the new UX, you're guided through each step, which asks you a question, and the answers guide the next question. You always see all the steps, so you can go back and change it, and each section is nicely collapsed as you move forward down the list. Even just "contact us" is implemented this way, guiding you nicely to the right place if you're not sure where to go to, say, amend your tax return. My wife recently applied for a permanent residency permit, and the process was just a single wizard like this. Occasionally a step would do more complex stuff like ask to upload documents, but the whole thing felt completely linear, and once you reached the end, that was the whole application. There were some further "real-world" steps like showing up for a personal interview, of course, but all the paperwork was done completely online.

pjc50 5y ago

That is the Government Digital Service https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ , and it's something of a miracle that it's allowed to exist. Competent and committed public servants providing a core structure for other departments to deploy successful software projects, the very antithesis of the "we don't have to manage anything if we contract it out" Serco approach.