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When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based w

When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.

manojlds 3y ago
My first disappoint in the UK was the DVLA where I was sent to the older form.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too. However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication, and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that scans my iris.... Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra tax to fund them.
- 46Bit 3y ago
  Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app. (I worked at GDS until two years ago.)
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Like he said: > a stronghold of common sense and decency I get that OP was going for something else but… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things when in the right hands.
  - dalbasal 3y ago
    IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Everyone uses Google Analytics. I don't find it particularly high up any list of real worries.
    - allan_s 3y ago
      French government websites use matomo if i m not mistaken
      - angra_mainyu 3y ago
        Makes sense, the French have a strong open source community and I believe the creator is French.
      - 6510 3y ago
        https://commission.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en https://commission.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en
    - Gud 3y ago
      I don’t. I despise Google and what they became and so should you. Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        For our podcast we specifically set up Plausible to exclude Google analytics. Rather little of value to be gained or lost either way, but it's a matter of conscience and politeness to our users. Sadly we had to put in links to other big-tech application platforms, but those are links to click out of choice if you're a user of those services.
        Gud 3y ago
        This is always the problem when interacting with the corporate internet. I have a Shopify store on my website where my readers can buy mugs and t-shirts to support me(not that anyone is lol). Lord knows what goes on in there. I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house. Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.
    - djhn 3y ago
      Sold parts of GCHQ? Could you elaborate? That sounds rather bad.
      - nonrandomstring 3y ago
        Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new "markets". https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90260 https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-british-spy-agencies-boost-use-ai-espionage-ft-2021-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-brit...
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    It's the HTML forms that are good and Angular, React and all that which are bad.
    - bzmrgonz 3y ago
      I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.
      - petepete 3y ago
        My form building library is used for all the form wrangling. https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/ https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/
  - arpinum 3y ago
    gov.uk is not a monolith, different departments can make different decisions. There is no mandate for AWS containers or Fastly CDN.
    - switch007 3y ago
      They have to provision from a market place of approve service though right?
    - sonthonax 3y ago
      They tend to use the tools provided by Government Digital Services.
      - Aerbil313 3y ago
        Yes, this is the point and the reason it's so good. Centralization and standardization. I'm so glad that my country (Turkey) has made big leaps in centralization of digital services in the recent years with E-Government platform. I even recently wrote the Presidency Public Communcations Center, suggesting every citizen should have a government-issued email address and that an email account must be a right. E-mail is a necessity at this point and it's unacceptable that anyone can lose access to their email account just because Google's ML models decided he's a bot. The government could easily verify every real citizen.
  - bitcharmer 3y ago
    Why does that matter?
  - tannhaeuser 3y ago
    GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it. But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.
  - ksec 3y ago
    >(I worked at GDS until two years ago.) If you could tell, why did you leave?
- mtillman 3y ago
  Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process and the results are cameras that don’t work to the point of the officials needing to manually adjust them, forms that don’t contain consistent data across pages, and my favorite “save a photo of the confirm just in case lah.” The old system just worked, the new system insists upon APPs.
  - delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
    > Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said. [1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-terminal-checkpoint-delays-ong-queue-slowness-clearance-delays-ica-3387526 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-ter... [2]: https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to-pqs-on-the-immigration-clearance-system-disruption-at-ica-checkpoints-on-31-march-2023/ https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to...
    - mtillman 3y ago
      “Recently” is admittedly subjective but I was just there (2 times in 3 weeks) and can confirm it’s a new system to 4 years ago when the foreign passes were all paper. I think it’s called Tacent. It was so bad a local woman couldn’t even get in and they had to have her wait in the foreign line. You can simply visit the existing immigration website, as it’s public, to view the inconsistent data-the same forms that are displayed on their iPads in the reception hall. This wasn’t an outage, just poor technology implementation.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Half of the technologies you named are actually useful and it wouldn’t shock me if gov.uk uses them
- gadders 3y ago
  >>simple authentication This is my only gripe. Every time I do self assessment or complete my tax returns as a contractor I had to find some arcane combination of government gateway ID, password, authentication app etc etc. It's so secure it stops you paying the government money.
- yonatan8070 3y ago
  Entirely off-topic, but why do some comments on HN have manual line breaks but most just soft-wrap? On my phone (Hacki app) each line is soft-wrapped, then hard-wrapped after 1 or 2 words, which looks quite off
xcdzvyn 3y ago
Australia's somewhat similar too. I wouldn't call our government services optimal nor "simple", but it's clear they're all operating on the same design principles. At the very least it inspires confidence that they're operating on roughly the same guidelines at federal and state levels.
myth2018 3y ago
> This is how internet services should look like. Yes, definitely. I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google? [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-year-2013 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...
- pjc50 3y ago
  The GOVUK deliberately bare branding serves a purpose similar to the old Tesco Value branding: to make it look austere. If it looked luxurious people would be more likely to complain about taxpayer's money being wasted.
  - superhuzza 3y ago
    Not really. They publish a lot of blogs explaining design decisions. It almost always comes down to making the services as accessible as possible. Part of that involves really simple layouts, very high contrast text, legible fonts, compatibility across many devices, simple language etc. It's certainly an added benefit that it gives an appearance of austerity, but that's more a byproduct of simplicity.
  - anonymous_sorry 3y ago
    Companies need branding because they're trying to stand out from the crowd. To be distinctive and memorable, so you think of them and trust them when making buying decisions. Governments generally don't have that requirement. So GDS doesn't need fancy branding and other concerns can take priority. It's remarkably refreshing. It would have been so easy to just cargo-cult whatever is fashionable in the private sector. It's kinda miraculous they didn't. A mark of thoughtful, self-confident professionals. Bravo!
  - tfgg 3y ago
    There was actually a lot of pushback against the austere aesthetic by government ministers - they wanted fancy looking photo banners and pretty things. This was pushed back on in the name of making something functional the prioritizes users.
LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.
- Chaosvex 3y ago
  This is definitely not true. Developers are better off in the private sector and I've never heard of any developer regard working for the government as coveted or prestigious.
  - qaisjp 3y ago
    When I retire I want to go work for the GDS
- kaashif 3y ago
  As someone from the UK, with friends who work as programmers in both the public and private sectors, I'm not sure what you're saying is true. It's definitely not highly paying to work for the government, although "relatively" may be doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
  - LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
    I'm going off what I was told when I expressed surprise that such a good engineer would go for government work. Looking online it looks like they pay about median for a software engineer in London. And yeah, relatively here is basically meaning I was surprised you didn't have to take a pay cut to work for the government.
- vidarh 3y ago
  > The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying It's middle of the tree at best. I'm sure you can find people for whom it's well paying, but the recruiters from UK gov departments that regularly contact me keep trying to sell me on the benefits of jobs where the upper salary band is less than half of what I earn.
mozey 3y ago
I applied for a UK visa from South-Africa about a year ago. To start my application I had to submit a form on this domain. The navigation to the form was obscured by a giant banner about the Ukraine invasion and a message about how service levels might be reduced due to refugees... no matter how I resized my browser window I couldn't get to the part of the page behind the banner. Eventually I opened up the Dev Tools and added some CSS to hide the banner. The link was revealed and I could continue with my application
- koo5_2 3y ago
  You passed the first test!
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  how else do you think they were planning on reducing service levels?
e2le 3y ago
>This is how internet services should look like. Thankfully I've noticed more sites copying gov.uk, very few but still positive.
doublesocket 3y ago
The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners. The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.
- dazc 3y ago
  I often wonder why so many Local Authorities and Gov Departments have to have their own unique web portals? There must be a massive cost-saving opportunity here.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Well, they probably want to be able to update them as things change without waiting so many weeks on a ticket to central IT. I can't imagine they're doing anything unique though, so the best of both worlds could be central IT providing tools and managed hosting.
  - doublesocket 3y ago
    Absolutely, there's massive duplication of functionality. I think it's partly incompetence and partly a control thing.
    - chinabot 3y ago
      All a control thing, incompetence is just a side effect.
- gerdesj 3y ago
  Are you sure: "Welcome to tarantopermits.com" "This domain name is parked for FREE by fasthosts.co.uk"
  - doublesocket 3y ago
    Yes, they're so incompetent they haven't changed their parking page. See google search results: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantopermits.com https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantope... It's all on subdomains, e.g. https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com
dazc 3y ago
If you stay around long enough you'll accumulate a few different log-in id's and find yourself redirected to legacy pages with no way of finding your way back. The GOV.uk team loves moving things forward and leaving an awful lot of guff behind.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
  Well in my country they love changing URLs so there is no continuity at all. Any link from a year ago is 99% guaranteed to be 404.
jeff_vader 3y ago
The design, look and feel is great. Authenticating / proving your identity on the other hand is lacking: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-identity https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-... Meanwhile, at least in some EU countries, you can authenticate using your identity card and USB smartcard reader.
- kwhitefoot 3y ago
  It can be done without an ID card and card reader too. BankID is what we use in Norway.
  - bpye 3y ago
    I’m guessing that’s similar to what we have in Canada - which is essentially sign on through a banking provider? A couple provinces have their own sign on system with their services card now too - BC included.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  Proving your id: passport or ID card, 'new' driving license, domestic bill. There's a lot of ex-pats don't have the last two. Repeatedly being told to log in to the site is a pain if its impossible. Extremely well designed, though.
- marwis 3y ago
  Or identity card and your phone as an NFC reader
Roark66 3y ago
When I was living in the UK I thought so to, but when I moved to another country (Poland) I realised 3 huge shortcoming of the UK's online gov system (perhaps they fixed it by now, I moved 6 years ago). These were: a unified way to authenticate oneself to all gov services, a way to sign electronic forms/documents in a legally binding way without having to buy a personal certificate and a establishing a standard "document submission receipt" that proves what and when you submitted. I'll start why this really matters from the last item. Even after my move I kept my UK company for a while, I was making regular electronic VAT submissions until sometime in July 2021 I decided to deregister my company's VAT. I did that via HMRC's online form. In December I logged in to check to find out that any record of me doing that evaporated, and now I had an "estimated" VAT bill of around £5k. I submitted a zero return for the previous quarter I should've been deregister in and after I rang HMRC and 2 weeks later the balance "I owed" dropped to zero. I deregistered again and this time "it worked". However, I had no way whatsoever to prove I indeed deregistered before. The person I spoke to on the phone that day decided my story believable so I didn't get any fines. What if they had a worse day? Ability to reliably prove you submitted government documents when you say you did is extremely important. In the country I now live in(Poland) you get a cryptographically signed XML document you can use as proof. You get one from any level of government you submit stuff to online (taxes, local councils anything). There is an online service you can check the validity of such signature and the content is all readable with a text editor. Then a way to electronically sign documents that is equivalent to your in person signature legally without any special equipment or software for free. And a way to authenticate oneself to government services(including national healthcare) Here any citizen (or a foreigner that registers) can do so with one "thing". There are few ways to authenticate, an app, an online bank account (all banks in the country support it), a national id with a nfc chip and a pin, or you go to a local council in person and they create an account for you with a usename/password +2FA(sms,or auth app). You can sign any document using an online service, there is a history of stuff you signed you can check and you have a "mailbox" you can use to receive documents instead of the post. The system is mostly XML based and it uses ssl for signatures. I have no idea what they use in the backend (probably lots of java). One can also purchase certificates to use as a signature like in other EU countries. The government sites look reasonably modern with dynamic forms, but they deteriorate gracefully if all you want is to read them, but good luck getting forms to work without JS. Personally I think they did a pretty good job with this system.
joshxyz 3y ago
one of the many good measures of the company and country is their design system implementation. love u gov.uk.
manonthewall 3y ago
There is so much to be said for KISS, especially when you have to do an interface for "everyone" and not just a bunch of tech-savvy STEM people

manojlds 3y ago

My first disappoint in the UK was the DVLA where I was sent to the older form.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too. However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication, and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that scans my iris.... Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra tax to fund them.

46Bit 3y ago
Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app. (I worked at GDS until two years ago.)
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Like he said: > a stronghold of common sense and decency I get that OP was going for something else but… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things when in the right hands.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Everyone uses Google Analytics. I don't find it particularly high up any list of real worries.
  - allan_s 3y ago
    French government websites use matomo if i m not mistaken
    - angra_mainyu 3y ago
      Makes sense, the French have a strong open source community and I believe the creator is French.
    - 6510 3y ago
      https://commission.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en https://commission.europa.eu/europa-analytics_en
  - Gud 3y ago
    I don’t. I despise Google and what they became and so should you. Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      For our podcast we specifically set up Plausible to exclude Google analytics. Rather little of value to be gained or lost either way, but it's a matter of conscience and politeness to our users. Sadly we had to put in links to other big-tech application platforms, but those are links to click out of choice if you're a user of those services.
      - Gud 3y ago
        This is always the problem when interacting with the corporate internet. I have a Shopify store on my website where my readers can buy mugs and t-shirts to support me(not that anyone is lol). Lord knows what goes on in there. I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house. Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.
  - djhn 3y ago
    Sold parts of GCHQ? Could you elaborate? That sounds rather bad.
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new "markets". https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90260 https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90... https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-british-spy-agencies-boost-use-ai-espionage-ft-2021-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-brit...
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It's the HTML forms that are good and Angular, React and all that which are bad.
  - bzmrgonz 3y ago
    I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.
    - petepete 3y ago
      My form building library is used for all the form wrangling. https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/ https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/
- arpinum 3y ago
  gov.uk is not a monolith, different departments can make different decisions. There is no mandate for AWS containers or Fastly CDN.
  - switch007 3y ago
    They have to provision from a market place of approve service though right?
  - sonthonax 3y ago
    They tend to use the tools provided by Government Digital Services.
    - Aerbil313 3y ago
      Yes, this is the point and the reason it's so good. Centralization and standardization. I'm so glad that my country (Turkey) has made big leaps in centralization of digital services in the recent years with E-Government platform. I even recently wrote the Presidency Public Communcations Center, suggesting every citizen should have a government-issued email address and that an email account must be a right. E-mail is a necessity at this point and it's unacceptable that anyone can lose access to their email account just because Google's ML models decided he's a bot. The government could easily verify every real citizen.
- bitcharmer 3y ago
  Why does that matter?
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it. But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.
- ksec 3y ago
  >(I worked at GDS until two years ago.) If you could tell, why did you leave?
mtillman 3y ago
Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process and the results are cameras that don’t work to the point of the officials needing to manually adjust them, forms that don’t contain consistent data across pages, and my favorite “save a photo of the confirm just in case lah.” The old system just worked, the new system insists upon APPs.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  > Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said. [1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-terminal-checkpoint-delays-ong-queue-slowness-clearance-delays-ica-3387526 https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-ter... [2]: https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to-pqs-on-the-immigration-clearance-system-disruption-at-ica-checkpoints-on-31-march-2023/ https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to...
  - mtillman 3y ago
    “Recently” is admittedly subjective but I was just there (2 times in 3 weeks) and can confirm it’s a new system to 4 years ago when the foreign passes were all paper. I think it’s called Tacent. It was so bad a local woman couldn’t even get in and they had to have her wait in the foreign line. You can simply visit the existing immigration website, as it’s public, to view the inconsistent data-the same forms that are displayed on their iPads in the reception hall. This wasn’t an outage, just poor technology implementation.
whimsicalism 3y ago
Half of the technologies you named are actually useful and it wouldn’t shock me if gov.uk uses them
gadders 3y ago
>>simple authentication This is my only gripe. Every time I do self assessment or complete my tax returns as a contractor I had to find some arcane combination of government gateway ID, password, authentication app etc etc. It's so secure it stops you paying the government money.
yonatan8070 3y ago
Entirely off-topic, but why do some comments on HN have manual line breaks but most just soft-wrap? On my phone (Hacki app) each line is soft-wrapped, then hard-wrapped after 1 or 2 words, which looks quite off

xcdzvyn 3y ago

Australia's somewhat similar too. I wouldn't call our government services optimal nor "simple", but it's clear they're all operating on the same design principles. At the very least it inspires confidence that they're operating on roughly the same guidelines at federal and state levels.

myth2018 3y ago

> This is how internet services should look like. Yes, definitely. I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google? [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-year-2013 https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...

pjc50 3y ago
The GOVUK deliberately bare branding serves a purpose similar to the old Tesco Value branding: to make it look austere. If it looked luxurious people would be more likely to complain about taxpayer's money being wasted.
- superhuzza 3y ago
  Not really. They publish a lot of blogs explaining design decisions. It almost always comes down to making the services as accessible as possible. Part of that involves really simple layouts, very high contrast text, legible fonts, compatibility across many devices, simple language etc. It's certainly an added benefit that it gives an appearance of austerity, but that's more a byproduct of simplicity.
- anonymous_sorry 3y ago
  Companies need branding because they're trying to stand out from the crowd. To be distinctive and memorable, so you think of them and trust them when making buying decisions. Governments generally don't have that requirement. So GDS doesn't need fancy branding and other concerns can take priority. It's remarkably refreshing. It would have been so easy to just cargo-cult whatever is fashionable in the private sector. It's kinda miraculous they didn't. A mark of thoughtful, self-confident professionals. Bravo!
- tfgg 3y ago
  There was actually a lot of pushback against the austere aesthetic by government ministers - they wanted fancy looking photo banners and pretty things. This was pushed back on in the name of making something functional the prioritizes users.

LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago

I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.

Chaosvex 3y ago
This is definitely not true. Developers are better off in the private sector and I've never heard of any developer regard working for the government as coveted or prestigious.
- qaisjp 3y ago
  When I retire I want to go work for the GDS
kaashif 3y ago
As someone from the UK, with friends who work as programmers in both the public and private sectors, I'm not sure what you're saying is true. It's definitely not highly paying to work for the government, although "relatively" may be doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
- LeonardoTolstoy 3y ago
  I'm going off what I was told when I expressed surprise that such a good engineer would go for government work. Looking online it looks like they pay about median for a software engineer in London. And yeah, relatively here is basically meaning I was surprised you didn't have to take a pay cut to work for the government.
vidarh 3y ago
> The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying It's middle of the tree at best. I'm sure you can find people for whom it's well paying, but the recruiters from UK gov departments that regularly contact me keep trying to sell me on the benefits of jobs where the upper salary band is less than half of what I earn.

mozey 3y ago

I applied for a UK visa from South-Africa about a year ago. To start my application I had to submit a form on this domain. The navigation to the form was obscured by a giant banner about the Ukraine invasion and a message about how service levels might be reduced due to refugees... no matter how I resized my browser window I couldn't get to the part of the page behind the banner. Eventually I opened up the Dev Tools and added some CSS to hide the banner. The link was revealed and I could continue with my application

koo5_2 3y ago
You passed the first test!
whimsicalism 3y ago
how else do you think they were planning on reducing service levels?

e2le 3y ago

>This is how internet services should look like. Thankfully I've noticed more sites copying gov.uk, very few but still positive.

doublesocket 3y ago

The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners. The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.

dazc 3y ago
I often wonder why so many Local Authorities and Gov Departments have to have their own unique web portals? There must be a massive cost-saving opportunity here.
- hooverd 3y ago
  Well, they probably want to be able to update them as things change without waiting so many weeks on a ticket to central IT. I can't imagine they're doing anything unique though, so the best of both worlds could be central IT providing tools and managed hosting.
- doublesocket 3y ago
  Absolutely, there's massive duplication of functionality. I think it's partly incompetence and partly a control thing.
  - chinabot 3y ago
    All a control thing, incompetence is just a side effect.
gerdesj 3y ago
Are you sure: "Welcome to tarantopermits.com" "This domain name is parked for FREE by fasthosts.co.uk"
- doublesocket 3y ago
  Yes, they're so incompetent they haven't changed their parking page. See google search results: https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantopermits.com https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantope... It's all on subdomains, e.g. https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com

dazc 3y ago

If you stay around long enough you'll accumulate a few different log-in id's and find yourself redirected to legacy pages with no way of finding your way back. The GOV.uk team loves moving things forward and leaving an awful lot of guff behind.

ricardobayes 3y ago
Well in my country they love changing URLs so there is no continuity at all. Any link from a year ago is 99% guaranteed to be 404.

jeff_vader 3y ago

The design, look and feel is great. Authenticating / proving your identity on the other hand is lacking: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-identity https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-... Meanwhile, at least in some EU countries, you can authenticate using your identity card and USB smartcard reader.

kwhitefoot 3y ago
It can be done without an ID card and card reader too. BankID is what we use in Norway.
- bpye 3y ago
  I’m guessing that’s similar to what we have in Canada - which is essentially sign on through a banking provider? A couple provinces have their own sign on system with their services card now too - BC included.
Ylpertnodi 3y ago
Proving your id: passport or ID card, 'new' driving license, domestic bill. There's a lot of ex-pats don't have the last two. Repeatedly being told to log in to the site is a pain if its impossible. Extremely well designed, though.
marwis 3y ago
Or identity card and your phone as an NFC reader

Roark66 3y ago

When I was living in the UK I thought so to, but when I moved to another country (Poland) I realised 3 huge shortcoming of the UK's online gov system (perhaps they fixed it by now, I moved 6 years ago). These were: a unified way to authenticate oneself to all gov services, a way to sign electronic forms/documents in a legally binding way without having to buy a personal certificate and a establishing a standard "document submission receipt" that proves what and when you submitted. I'll start why this really matters from the last item. Even after my move I kept my UK company for a while, I was making regular electronic VAT submissions until sometime in July 2021 I decided to deregister my company's VAT. I did that via HMRC's online form. In December I logged in to check to find out that any record of me doing that evaporated, and now I had an "estimated" VAT bill of around £5k. I submitted a zero return for the previous quarter I should've been deregister in and after I rang HMRC and 2 weeks later the balance "I owed" dropped to zero. I deregistered again and this time "it worked". However, I had no way whatsoever to prove I indeed deregistered before. The person I spoke to on the phone that day decided my story believable so I didn't get any fines. What if they had a worse day? Ability to reliably prove you submitted government documents when you say you did is extremely important. In the country I now live in(Poland) you get a cryptographically signed XML document you can use as proof. You get one from any level of government you submit stuff to online (taxes, local councils anything). There is an online service you can check the validity of such signature and the content is all readable with a text editor. Then a way to electronically sign documents that is equivalent to your in person signature legally without any special equipment or software for free. And a way to authenticate oneself to government services(including national healthcare) Here any citizen (or a foreigner that registers) can do so with one "thing". There are few ways to authenticate, an app, an online bank account (all banks in the country support it), a national id with a nfc chip and a pin, or you go to a local council in person and they create an account for you with a usename/password +2FA(sms,or auth app). You can sign any document using an online service, there is a history of stuff you signed you can check and you have a "mailbox" you can use to receive documents instead of the post. The system is mostly XML based and it uses ssl for signatures. I have no idea what they use in the backend (probably lots of java). One can also purchase certificates to use as a signature like in other EU countries. The government sites look reasonably modern with dynamic forms, but they deteriorate gracefully if all you want is to read them, but good luck getting forms to work without JS. Personally I think they did a pretty good job with this system.

joshxyz 3y ago

one of the many good measures of the company and country is their design system implementation. love u gov.uk.

manonthewall 3y ago

There is so much to be said for KISS, especially when you have to do an interface for "everyone" and not just a bunch of tech-savvy STEM people