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The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so use

The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application. And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be for it to work. The government does not need to do marketing and make you feel like they are trustworthy. If you want to interact with social security, you go to ssa.gov. If you want to interact with the IRS, you go to irs.gov. End of story. They don't need to act like commercial entities because they do not have to worry about market share. Their share is always 100%. They need to just make their stuff reliably work, easy to figure out, and should make it cheap and easy to build. Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes. If you view the computer as a tool instead of a toy, you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms. It doesn't need to look fancy. It needs some boxes to type information, it needs to always work, and ideally every form on every website would stick to the same 5 or so types of input (rendered consistently by your OS) with no surprises. Government sites should take the tool approach. Commercial sites can sell toys.

aembleton 3y ago
> It needs some boxes to type information Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of those where you start typing your address into a box and it fills in all of the address fields based on which address you select. If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested on?
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  We could simple put an input for each part of the address and let the user fill it out. Requires exactly zero lines of javascript, no third party api that may or may not work.
crazygringo 3y ago
> so users don't know what the buttons do. They do, though. People are able to figure out commercial websites orders of magnitude more easily than figuring out how to fill out their 1040. > They need to just make their stuff reliably work Which is what UX and design help with. > Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes. It doesn't. Layout and design are tools that help with clarify and ease-of-use. > you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Do you similarly think that your iPhone or desktop interface would be improved if the UX was "a more convenient version of paper forms"? Paper forms are an extremely limiting form of UX. Why would you ever want to throw out all of the progress we've made with usability?
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  Filling out your 1040 is "hard" because people don't understand what the words mean, there's a 100 page instruction manual that defines the terms, and it might require filling out other forms too (which you might just need to know somehow that you need to fill them out too). Other than that, the actual UI design is straightforward. You write/type numbers into numbered boxes, top to bottom, occasionally referring back to numbers you've already completed. You could progressively enhance with automatic calculations for relevant fields, but hand calculations work as a fallback. Reliability is unrelated from UI, except insofar as simple UIs are easy to build, and therefore less likely to break. A paper form 1040 is perfectly reliable; it's not going to burst into flames when you're filling it out. As I said above, I couldn't even fill out my payment form on a modern site. It did not work at all. The form did not appear. That is not reliable. It also makes no sense if you know the page is ultimately using HTML, and that HTML has forms built directly in, and they always work fine. And yeah, when I'm doing something like making a payment, setting up a transfer, doing my taxes, or even ordering a pizza, something like a slightly advanced paper form (e.g. with drop downs for options) would work great on my phone or desktop. Have a special request for your pizza that's not on the form? Put it in the free-form instructions box. The "progress" we've made in the last few years is that I can't do bank transfers without switching browsers, which requires selecting a "to" account from a drop-down, a "from" account from a drop-down, and typing an amount. I don't see how something so basic can be so hard to do correctly. There's literally no need for any javascript at all. I don't see the usability gain from whatever they're doing.

aembleton 3y ago

> It needs some boxes to type information Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of those where you start typing your address into a box and it fills in all of the address fields based on which address you select. If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested on?

vorticalbox 3y ago
We could simple put an input for each part of the address and let the user fill it out. Requires exactly zero lines of javascript, no third party api that may or may not work.

crazygringo 3y ago

> so users don't know what the buttons do. They do, though. People are able to figure out commercial websites orders of magnitude more easily than figuring out how to fill out their 1040. > They need to just make their stuff reliably work Which is what UX and design help with. > Basic HTML with minimal optional styles checks all of those boxes. It doesn't. Layout and design are tools that help with clarify and ease-of-use. > you see that you really just need most websites to be a more convenient version of paper forms. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Do you similarly think that your iPhone or desktop interface would be improved if the UX was "a more convenient version of paper forms"? Paper forms are an extremely limiting form of UX. Why would you ever want to throw out all of the progress we've made with usability?

ndriscoll 3y ago
Filling out your 1040 is "hard" because people don't understand what the words mean, there's a 100 page instruction manual that defines the terms, and it might require filling out other forms too (which you might just need to know somehow that you need to fill them out too). Other than that, the actual UI design is straightforward. You write/type numbers into numbered boxes, top to bottom, occasionally referring back to numbers you've already completed. You could progressively enhance with automatic calculations for relevant fields, but hand calculations work as a fallback. Reliability is unrelated from UI, except insofar as simple UIs are easy to build, and therefore less likely to break. A paper form 1040 is perfectly reliable; it's not going to burst into flames when you're filling it out. As I said above, I couldn't even fill out my payment form on a modern site. It did not work at all. The form did not appear. That is not reliable. It also makes no sense if you know the page is ultimately using HTML, and that HTML has forms built directly in, and they always work fine. And yeah, when I'm doing something like making a payment, setting up a transfer, doing my taxes, or even ordering a pizza, something like a slightly advanced paper form (e.g. with drop downs for options) would work great on my phone or desktop. Have a special request for your pizza that's not on the form? Put it in the free-form instructions box. The "progress" we've made in the last few years is that I can't do bank transfers without switching browsers, which requires selecting a "to" account from a drop-down, a "from" account from a drop-down, and typing an amount. I don't see how something so basic can be so hard to do correctly. There's literally no need for any javascript at all. I don't see the usability gain from whatever they're doing.