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Government Digital Service Design Principles

108 points by obilgic 13y ago

tehwalrus 13y ago
"while it’s right we should provide information about VAT it’s not necessary for us to provide information about keeping bees http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121015000000/www.direct.gov.uk/en/Environmentandgreenerliving/Smallholders/DG_179478 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121015000000/www... " LOL, I've heard some bad stuff about the OneGov team, but this is great.
estebank 13y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052
sevenproxies 13y ago
Related link about some of the technologies used on gov.uk. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/
widdershins 13y ago
Been exploring the gov.uk site, and I'm very very impressed. Unlike the Manchester.gov site[1], there's an excellent information density yet a very lightweight feel. Maybe it's my preference for text-based designs over icon-based ones, but I feel like I can find what I need incredibly quickly. [1] http://www.manchester.gov.uk http://www.manchester.gov.uk
- robotmay 13y ago
  The Manchester site's still pretty decent though. Unlike http://cardiff.gov.uk http://cardiff.gov.uk.
rmoriz 13y ago
Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad. The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something. They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform) So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.
- UK-AL 13y ago
  Java EE servers run some of biggest throughput web services in the world. But your saying its a bad choice?
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    J2EE ecosystem and the Open Source ecosystems have little overlap - if that is your first choice, it is likely your sympathies for all other decisions, technical, methodological and organisational, will not be in line with common practise in the OSS world. In other words, they hired the wrong guys. Liam Maxwell and folks at GDS are hitting all the right notes so far.
cheery 13y ago
What.. Are these government sites? Those do not look like such as they are too clean and positive. Are you sure they're just not a victim of very stylish hacker?
- jackfranklin 13y ago
  They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov.
  - jackfranklin 13y ago
    As another example, the app behind what powers the Design Principles, which is what this post links to, is here: https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles.
andyhmltn 13y ago
It's nice to see a government organisation actually taking design seriously for once. I imagine (having never worked in that kind of environment) that stuff like design committees and massive processes to get small tweaks through can't be that nice.
shaydoc 13y ago
This gov.uk work is good, real good. Consistent layout, and good search which is most important. Thoroughly good digital service, especially like the API for sharing content.
weego 13y ago
Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita run front-line strategy project that shut down not so many years ago the developers were allowed to quit as full time employees and instantly start back as contractors earning roughly three times as much). I wonder if it's a coincidence that this project appears to be blossoming while almost every large project I saw that was outsource either massively underachieved or was just buried after huge loses (schoolsweb for example).
- buro9 13y ago
  I've been part of a large consulting bid for work, and part of the team that executed it. It was horrible. We were bought in because we knew how to do something, but we won the bid because we simply could do it cheaper than anyone else. Where it went wrong though, was that even though we knew what to do, once engaged the client insisted on how it would be done and meddled with every part of it. And the next big failure was our part... our project management team let the client change the requirements frequently even though we told them in no uncertain terms that we were moving from the stated goal and that what was now being asked would not work. The project management team expanded to deal with the stream of change requests and meddling, and the devs got bogged down with change requests rather than actually driving the project to the project goals. Finally the project ran out of cash, and what was delivered fitted no-ones needs. It was horrible. I think the greatest thing that the gov.uk team have been able to achieve is finding the ability to say no when it needed to be said, and to dictate how it should be done right rather than permitting meddling. It's no surprise that #1 is "Start with needs", and it's less of a surprise that they've had to clarify this is the end user's needs and not the needs of anyone in government.
  - Periodic 13y ago
    It's agonizing to me that some of these government bids (my experience is in the US state of California) are required to take the lowest bid that meets the requirements unless they can clearly justify using a more expensive one. Of course, if they put out a general request they would end up with a terrible product, so they tailor their request to the company they want to hire. Even then, the companies aren't really rewarded for doing a good job. They're rewarded for doing a minimal job that barely meets the requirements and using as much money as they can.
edbloom 13y ago
I'm not connected with anyone who works on gov.uk but I've been a huge fan of what is going on over there for some time. In my view it is without a shadow of a doubt the best digital government team in the world. They've assembled a massively talented team who are knocking it out of the park week after week. It's rare to see this anywhere never mind a bloody government agency! well done folks - you're leading the world!
bapbap 13y ago
Can anyone with some knowledge of the GDS explain how they seem to be doing such a good job? It just seems impossible that someone somewhere in Government got something right for a change and brought this team in and let them get on with it. - I know Government projects get a lot of flak, rightly or wrongly but they always seemed to be awarded to companies like Capgemini who would spend £100's of millions achieving much less. I could be wrong.
- scraplab 13y ago
  This report started it all: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-proposed-for-government-services https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-propos...
- glomph 13y ago
  They have been allowed to just link to the old government websites for lots of things so they didn't have to create a feature complete drop in for the old site(s). I think this has made it much easier easy to make a nice looking site.
ngcazz 13y ago
Gov.uk is an excellent example to follow in e-government. Here in Portugal the last few years we've had great advances in it, but what we got is still laughably bad in comparison to this.
ed_blackburn 13y ago
Massive kudos to whoever it is in a position of authority, be a politician or a senior civil servant for allowing a modern dev team to grow and cultivate a culture that works. Too many people in authority are motivated by fear of failure, blame apportioning and self-interest meaning their aversion to risk is so high, nothing happens, so nothing goes wrong. I really hope that because this is associated with the cabinet office other teams elsewhere in govt. can draw encouragement from this team and use it as an example. Excellent to see the source open and hosted on github. Such code is rarely made publicly despite it not being confidential. Will the govt. sit up and notice that small focused team with a remit can deliver. Or will the next system change mean a complicated procurment process for a large consultancy who will hive the work off shore to the cheapest sub-contractor and deliver nothing but spend millions of tax payers pounds.
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  @liammax and @MTBracken (twitter) are "UK CTO" and director GDS, and currently the leading lights in this one. One thing to note is the Open Source software, in guidance handed to all government departments, should be preferred over proprietary software. (link in here somewhere http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism) In addition the "G-Cloud" - a online catalog of pre-vetted service providers, has 80% SMEs on it and a govt buyer can simply sign up online for a Saas service there and then with a govt credit card, legally I feel that Open Source in government will have serious network effects globally, so getting this right now for the UK could lead to a very long tail / virtuous circle for UK devs in the future.
neilkimmett 13y ago
Obligatory link to the moronic Daily Mail article about gov.uk: "And the award goes to boring.com! Government website beats off 100 others to be named world's best design" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310191/And-award-goes-boring-com-Government-website-beats-100-named-worlds-best-design.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310191/And-award-go...
piqufoh 13y ago
Great idea, lets hope it catches on. Unfortunately it seems like parts have been translated into 'trendy' - for example > Government should only do what only government can do. uh, what?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- anu_gupta 13y ago
  If you had continued to read the rest of that paragraph, you would have seen this: > If someone else is doing it — link to it. If we can provide resources (like APIs) that will help other people build things — do that. We should concentrate on the irreducible core.
  - piqufoh 13y ago
    I had continued reading it, and I maintain that single sentences must make (at least logical) sense by themselves. This is marketing jargon trash, and should not be encouraged in a web standards document!
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
- snowwrestler 13y ago
  What is "trendy" about that? I don't see a single buzzword and the meaning is very clear to me.
  - piqufoh 13y ago
    OK we disagree, but let's hope the English language survives (though it seems the UK gov. isn't going to champion it).
Nursie 13y ago
If anyone from gov.uk is reading this, do you fancy answering the question I posed when the site was launched but never received an adequate answer to? Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics? You are shipping all the data about all my interactions with my government off to a third party in another country. Another country that we know has not got the same legal data protection requirements, and one which has now been exposed as having massive internal spying problems. And no, telling me "google aren't allowed to use the data" and then opening an outsourced helpdesk ticket with another US based company does not cut it.
- jpswade 13y ago
  This extends well beyond boundaries and governments. Google Analytics has become an industry standard.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    Yes it has, and the sharing of site-visitor data with google on sites all over the web is something to be concerned about IMHO. However, again IMHO, tracking casual web use is a different class of data to my interactions with my government, and I very much resent those being sent to foreign companies and (by inference) foreign powers, however benign and friendly our relationship is.
    - jpswade 13y ago
      Let's not forget. Google is an international company, not "foreign". Google has servers and offices in the UK. If you read the first point, it says "Start with needs". They need to be relevant and appear in Google. Google Analytics is simply a tool that helps them do that.
      - Nursie 13y ago
        >> Let's not forget. Google is an international company, not "foreign". No, it's an American company, subject to the whims of the US government. >> Google has servers and offices in the UK. Sure does. I have no idea where they process the data though and I doubt the gov.uk folks have. If they did have a guarantee that the data wasn't ever going to leave the UK then maybe they could say so? >> If you read the first point, it says "Start with needs". They need to be relevant and appear in Google. Google Analytics is simply a tool that helps them do that. Err, no, google analytics records and transmits site interaction data.
itneverends 13y ago
This typifies the problem with the web. This website purports to be about data. But is it? Seems like lots of rambling about presentation of data. A true open data initiative would start by providing an ftp link. People can argue all day about how to present data. That's not about data. That's about something else. First, just give us the data. Raw. In an open format (e.g. plain text). From there it can be massaged into a gazillion possibilities. Many people have many different visions of those possibilities. Open data starts with providing the data. Not a lecture about "principles". First, give us the data. Raw. Open format.
- chestnut-tree 13y ago
  "First, give us the data" Here you go http://data.gov.uk/ http://data.gov.uk/
- johneth 13y ago
  Here's some raw data: http://www.data.gov.uk/ http://www.data.gov.uk/ They're working on releasing more, plus APIs, etc. It takes time.
nemesisj 13y ago
These guys are doing an incredible job. Liam Maxwell is smart and has a background in startups. I got the privilege of listening to him speak a couple months ago. Wrote up the experience here: http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/ http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/
mmed 13y ago
Hi just read the first comment as I got to dash off. I would say - ditch Google Anlaytics and use something open source like http://piwik.org http://piwik.org
jot 13y ago
More like these here: http://principles.adactio.com/ http://principles.adactio.com/

108 points by obilgic 13y ago

"while it’s right we should provide information about VAT it’s not necessary for us to provide information about keeping bees http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121015000000/www.direct.gov.uk/en/Environmentandgreenerliving/Smallholders/DG_179478 http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121015000000/www... " LOL, I've heard some bad stuff about the OneGov team, but this is great.

estebank 13y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3811052

sevenproxies 13y ago

Related link about some of the technologies used on gov.uk. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/govuk-launch-colophon/

widdershins 13y ago

Been exploring the gov.uk site, and I'm very very impressed. Unlike the Manchester.gov site[1], there's an excellent information density yet a very lightweight feel. Maybe it's my preference for text-based designs over icon-based ones, but I feel like I can find what I need incredibly quickly. [1] http://www.manchester.gov.uk http://www.manchester.gov.uk

robotmay 13y ago
The Manchester site's still pretty decent though. Unlike http://cardiff.gov.uk http://cardiff.gov.uk.

rmoriz 13y ago

Awesome stuff which makes me sad: Here in Germany OpenData and Open Government is really bad. The government started an initiative, later backed out in nearly every aspect of "openness" and hired some Fraunhofer FOKUS people (federal research institute) do code something. They used a huge JEE app-server as foundation for their work, have not a single test and neither a documentation. When they launched a couple of months ago, their production server went down for 2 days besides their research in "cloud computing" which does Fraunhofer as well. (=> https://govdata.de https://govdata.de sources at https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform https://github.com/fraunhoferfokus/opendata-platform) So, congrats to UK. You're doing it right. Please continue this work and put more stress on incompetent and lazy political actors and "research factories" in other countries, e.g. Germany.

UK-AL 13y ago
Java EE servers run some of biggest throughput web services in the world. But your saying its a bad choice?
- lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  J2EE ecosystem and the Open Source ecosystems have little overlap - if that is your first choice, it is likely your sympathies for all other decisions, technical, methodological and organisational, will not be in line with common practise in the OSS world. In other words, they hired the wrong guys. Liam Maxwell and folks at GDS are hitting all the right notes so far.

cheery 13y ago

What.. Are these government sites? Those do not look like such as they are too clean and positive. Are you sure they're just not a victim of very stylish hacker?

jackfranklin 13y ago
They are indeed Government sites! GOV.UK itself is looked after by the Government Digital Service (GDS). A brief history is available on the GDS blog: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/ http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/about/. It's also different in that it's coded in the open. Most of the code behind GOV.UK is on public Github repositories: https://github.com/alphagov https://github.com/alphagov.
- jackfranklin 13y ago
  As another example, the app behind what powers the Design Principles, which is what this post links to, is here: https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles https://github.com/alphagov/design-principles.

andyhmltn 13y ago

It's nice to see a government organisation actually taking design seriously for once. I imagine (having never worked in that kind of environment) that stuff like design committees and massive processes to get small tweaks through can't be that nice.

shaydoc 13y ago

This gov.uk work is good, real good. Consistent layout, and good search which is most important. Thoroughly good digital service, especially like the API for sharing content.

weego 13y ago

Having worked close to the department for education in the past it's refreshing to see a strategy that was implemented by employing smart people and giving them enough rope to actually do what was needed, rather than outsourcing to one of big suppliers (the DfE has been far too close to Capita over the last decade or so) and letting them bleed the pot dry with project management and consultancy fees (at one Capita run front-line strategy project that shut down not so many years ago the developers were allowed to quit as full time employees and instantly start back as contractors earning roughly three times as much). I wonder if it's a coincidence that this project appears to be blossoming while almost every large project I saw that was outsource either massively underachieved or was just buried after huge loses (schoolsweb for example).

buro9 13y ago
I've been part of a large consulting bid for work, and part of the team that executed it. It was horrible. We were bought in because we knew how to do something, but we won the bid because we simply could do it cheaper than anyone else. Where it went wrong though, was that even though we knew what to do, once engaged the client insisted on how it would be done and meddled with every part of it. And the next big failure was our part... our project management team let the client change the requirements frequently even though we told them in no uncertain terms that we were moving from the stated goal and that what was now being asked would not work. The project management team expanded to deal with the stream of change requests and meddling, and the devs got bogged down with change requests rather than actually driving the project to the project goals. Finally the project ran out of cash, and what was delivered fitted no-ones needs. It was horrible. I think the greatest thing that the gov.uk team have been able to achieve is finding the ability to say no when it needed to be said, and to dictate how it should be done right rather than permitting meddling. It's no surprise that #1 is "Start with needs", and it's less of a surprise that they've had to clarify this is the end user's needs and not the needs of anyone in government.
- Periodic 13y ago
  It's agonizing to me that some of these government bids (my experience is in the US state of California) are required to take the lowest bid that meets the requirements unless they can clearly justify using a more expensive one. Of course, if they put out a general request they would end up with a terrible product, so they tailor their request to the company they want to hire. Even then, the companies aren't really rewarded for doing a good job. They're rewarded for doing a minimal job that barely meets the requirements and using as much money as they can.

edbloom 13y ago

I'm not connected with anyone who works on gov.uk but I've been a huge fan of what is going on over there for some time. In my view it is without a shadow of a doubt the best digital government team in the world. They've assembled a massively talented team who are knocking it out of the park week after week. It's rare to see this anywhere never mind a bloody government agency! well done folks - you're leading the world!

bapbap 13y ago

Can anyone with some knowledge of the GDS explain how they seem to be doing such a good job? It just seems impossible that someone somewhere in Government got something right for a change and brought this team in and let them get on with it. - I know Government projects get a lot of flak, rightly or wrongly but they always seemed to be awarded to companies like Capgemini who would spend £100's of millions achieving much less. I could be wrong.

scraplab 13y ago
This report started it all: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-proposed-for-government-services https://www.gov.uk/government/news/digital-by-default-propos...
glomph 13y ago
They have been allowed to just link to the old government websites for lots of things so they didn't have to create a feature complete drop in for the old site(s). I think this has made it much easier easy to make a nice looking site.

ngcazz 13y ago

Gov.uk is an excellent example to follow in e-government. Here in Portugal the last few years we've had great advances in it, but what we got is still laughably bad in comparison to this.

ed_blackburn 13y ago

Massive kudos to whoever it is in a position of authority, be a politician or a senior civil servant for allowing a modern dev team to grow and cultivate a culture that works. Too many people in authority are motivated by fear of failure, blame apportioning and self-interest meaning their aversion to risk is so high, nothing happens, so nothing goes wrong. I really hope that because this is associated with the cabinet office other teams elsewhere in govt. can draw encouragement from this team and use it as an example. Excellent to see the source open and hosted on github. Such code is rarely made publicly despite it not being confidential. Will the govt. sit up and notice that small focused team with a remit can deliver. Or will the next system change mean a complicated procurment process for a large consultancy who will hive the work off shore to the cheapest sub-contractor and deliver nothing but spend millions of tax payers pounds.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago
@liammax and @MTBracken (twitter) are "UK CTO" and director GDS, and currently the leading lights in this one. One thing to note is the Open Source software, in guidance handed to all government departments, should be preferred over proprietary software. (link in here somewhere http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism http://www.oss4gov.org/policy_activism) In addition the "G-Cloud" - a online catalog of pre-vetted service providers, has 80% SMEs on it and a govt buyer can simply sign up online for a Saas service there and then with a govt credit card, legally I feel that Open Source in government will have serious network effects globally, so getting this right now for the UK could lead to a very long tail / virtuous circle for UK devs in the future.

neilkimmett 13y ago

Obligatory link to the moronic Daily Mail article about gov.uk: "And the award goes to boring.com! Government website beats off 100 others to be named world's best design" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310191/And-award-goes-boring-com-Government-website-beats-100-named-worlds-best-design.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310191/And-award-go...

piqufoh 13y ago

Great idea, lets hope it catches on. Unfortunately it seems like parts have been translated into 'trendy' - for example > Government should only do what only government can do. uh, what?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
anu_gupta 13y ago
If you had continued to read the rest of that paragraph, you would have seen this: > If someone else is doing it — link to it. If we can provide resources (like APIs) that will help other people build things — do that. We should concentrate on the irreducible core.
- piqufoh 13y ago
  I had continued reading it, and I maintain that single sentences must make (at least logical) sense by themselves. This is marketing jargon trash, and should not be encouraged in a web standards document!
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
snowwrestler 13y ago
What is "trendy" about that? I don't see a single buzzword and the meaning is very clear to me.
- piqufoh 13y ago
  OK we disagree, but let's hope the English language survives (though it seems the UK gov. isn't going to champion it).

Nursie 13y ago

If anyone from gov.uk is reading this, do you fancy answering the question I posed when the site was launched but never received an adequate answer to? Why does gov.uk, a site all about allowing the British public to interact with the British government, use google analytics? You are shipping all the data about all my interactions with my government off to a third party in another country. Another country that we know has not got the same legal data protection requirements, and one which has now been exposed as having massive internal spying problems. And no, telling me "google aren't allowed to use the data" and then opening an outsourced helpdesk ticket with another US based company does not cut it.

jpswade 13y ago
This extends well beyond boundaries and governments. Google Analytics has become an industry standard.
- Nursie 13y ago
  Yes it has, and the sharing of site-visitor data with google on sites all over the web is something to be concerned about IMHO. However, again IMHO, tracking casual web use is a different class of data to my interactions with my government, and I very much resent those being sent to foreign companies and (by inference) foreign powers, however benign and friendly our relationship is.
  - jpswade 13y ago
    Let's not forget. Google is an international company, not "foreign". Google has servers and offices in the UK. If you read the first point, it says "Start with needs". They need to be relevant and appear in Google. Google Analytics is simply a tool that helps them do that.
    - Nursie 13y ago
      >> Let's not forget. Google is an international company, not "foreign". No, it's an American company, subject to the whims of the US government. >> Google has servers and offices in the UK. Sure does. I have no idea where they process the data though and I doubt the gov.uk folks have. If they did have a guarantee that the data wasn't ever going to leave the UK then maybe they could say so? >> If you read the first point, it says "Start with needs". They need to be relevant and appear in Google. Google Analytics is simply a tool that helps them do that. Err, no, google analytics records and transmits site interaction data.

itneverends 13y ago

This typifies the problem with the web. This website purports to be about data. But is it? Seems like lots of rambling about presentation of data. A true open data initiative would start by providing an ftp link. People can argue all day about how to present data. That's not about data. That's about something else. First, just give us the data. Raw. In an open format (e.g. plain text). From there it can be massaged into a gazillion possibilities. Many people have many different visions of those possibilities. Open data starts with providing the data. Not a lecture about "principles". First, give us the data. Raw. Open format.

chestnut-tree 13y ago
"First, give us the data" Here you go http://data.gov.uk/ http://data.gov.uk/
johneth 13y ago
Here's some raw data: http://www.data.gov.uk/ http://www.data.gov.uk/ They're working on releasing more, plus APIs, etc. It takes time.

nemesisj 13y ago

These guys are doing an incredible job. Liam Maxwell is smart and has a background in startups. I got the privilege of listening to him speak a couple months ago. Wrote up the experience here: http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/ http://peebs.org/2013/03/29/evening-united-kingdom-cto/

mmed 13y ago

Hi just read the first comment as I got to dash off. I would say - ditch Google Anlaytics and use something open source like http://piwik.org http://piwik.org

jot 13y ago

More like these here: http://principles.adactio.com/ http://principles.adactio.com/