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A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. The GDS (Government Digital Service [0]) and the GDS (Government Design System [1])

A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. The GDS (Government Digital Service [0]) and the GDS (Government Design System [1]) - who run the posted link too - are doing a great job. Want to renew my passport? Easy, same UI/UX for getting a drone license, taxing my car and filing for benefits. Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there! [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digital-service https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit... [1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ https://design-system.service.gov.uk/ Edit: Yes, I know the UK Gov's system for benefits isn't easy to understand. That's on the Gov, not GDS :)

mkdirp 5y ago
> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. In my experience gov.uk has been vastly superior compared to other websites for a long time. Gov.uk seems to be more consistent with everything than most company websites are.
- 0898 5y ago
  Agree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something the UK can be really proud of.
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    Agreed. I was delighted that my passport renewal process from first applying all the way to getting my new valid passport was about 12 days. The UK government's digital services is honestly a big factor in keeping me a UK resident
    - 35mm 5y ago
      As someone now experiencing Spanish gov systems after getting used to gov.uk - 100% yes. They’re actually really quite good.
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  Yeah the British government's IT projects have a bad reputation but credit where credit's due gov.uk is really good in my opinion. I remember reading (probably here) that it was designed with a philosophy of 'our users don't have a choice but to use our software, so we must make it as un-infuriating as possible'.
toyg 5y ago
Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.
- heurisko 5y ago
  The Cameron government learned the lessons of the massively wasteful failed IT projects from the Blair era (see Fujitsu NHS contract). The GDS started well, but I don't think the GDS can continue to cruise on its earlier reputation. It too has started to fall back into the bad old days of massively wasteful projects with unclear scope, such as the Verify system, that is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds for dubious benefit [1]. "Unfortunately, Verify is also an example of many of the failings in major programmes that we often see, including optimism bias and failure to set clear objectives." [2] I think the idea of GDS is a good one, but evidently it needs to continue to reevaluate itself to avoid regressing into what it was originally setup to avoid. [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with-government-identity https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with... [2] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister need to be spending his time listening to a report direct from a team implementing software services?
  - toyg 5y ago
    Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture). With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take it up with the PM then?" and that would be the end of it. It's effectively the nuclear option, in terms of civil-service management, but sometimes it's the only way to get stuff done.
nielsbot 5y ago
FWIW San Francisco is doing something similar. The have a digital services department and want to convert all city websites to the same design language: https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://medium.com/san-francisco-digital-services https://medium.com/san-francisco-digital-services
somnium_sn 5y ago
I've moved from Germany to the US and then to the UK. gov.uk is by far the most impressive government website i've encountered. Accessible, consistent and just works. Really a good show of what a government website can offer if done right.
- llampx 5y ago
  The German idea of an online platform is a website developed by Telekom (outsourced by them to the lowest bidder) which makes available the fax number of the Behörde, and the timings that the fax machine will receive incoming faxes.
  - hughrr 5y ago
    That's as German as you get. I'm sure there is a German idiom for "that's how it's always been done and the change is someone else's fault" because that's the attitude. Had that a couple of times in shops. Business is bad because we're closed at peak times and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because we don't accept cards and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because our customers don't have fax machines these days and that's the customer's problem. Recently I was with a German friend and she nearly fell on her ass when I showed her that you can actually pay at a car parking machine in the middle of nowhere with Apple Pay here in the UK.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      I still remember last time I visited. One Sunday morning, I went to the Bäckerei and tried to pay for my Brötchen and Stückchen with my card and they just looked at me in disbelief. I quickly realized my mistake but it was too late. I had no cash so I left without any baked goods.
      - jlelse 5y ago
        Thankfully that changed since 2020. Now many bakeries accept cards.
chippiewill 5y ago
gov.uk was great from the day it launched. It continues from strength to strength.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  not so much, some of the redesigns ripped out the usable data and replaced it with holding pages. Specifically to do with immigration, that hit us a couple of years ago. However its pleasing to see a site that works well on crappy computers.
KineticLensman 5y ago
> Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there Some important UK government services are still lagging behind. DVLA, since you mention it, has a mix of okay and truly appalling services. I'm in the position of trying to renew my driving licence after it was revoked for medical reasons. It's now six months since my cardiac arrest and I now meet the medically-fit-to-drive criteria. But, I face an 84 day delay in my application being processed, as detailed on the DVLA's 'how-slow-are-we-today' page [0], which is actually labelled as a COVID-19 update. Furthermore, I have to post a paper application form to them as they haven't yet digitized the medical review service [1]. This is life-wrecking stuff for anyone who needs a driving licence for their work or similar. I do like the gov.uk sites in general, but a lot of the back-office stuff is still disastrous. Some of this is due to strike action and COVID, but a big part of the problem is the continual failure of the various UK Govt departments to successfully manage large IT projects. [0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update [1] https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition
- hughrr 5y ago
  The (old) DVLA web site is merely a shallow front end for the 30 year old incompetent bureaucratic triangle of carnage that hides behind it. To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.
  - KineticLensman 5y ago
    > To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally. Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I supported the MOD's system development (simulators for training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to develop some interoperability middleware between disparate systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols / standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common requirements since may of them are doing very similar things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started working with the respective acquisition teams to get them to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place. This turned out to be because there were multiple customer project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each other at that level. I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his training schools (which had multiple different types of simulator, each with out own through-life support programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple of decades working in this space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
jayflux 5y ago
> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site Where've you been? Agree with your points but the things you mention have been around for almost 10 years now (driving license/passport renewal easy UX etc). I renewed my passport around 7 years ago and it was much easier to use then. It's true there's some services that tail off into the older systems (and you can tell), but the modern things gov.uk has owned have always been good since launch.
systemvoltage 5y ago
The UK Design System's page banner takes up 70% of the vertical space on my browser.
bertil 5y ago
Like a lot of users of the services of several government, gov.uk is consistently the best for many reason: simplicity, language clarity, accessibility, very lean design. There’s a certain… brand, i.e. the four aforementionned qualities taken as far as possible, that I really like -- but not everyone enjoys the assertive use of screen space. Just remember: visually impaired people pay taxes too. But for web developpers, that’s not all: it’s very deliberate, there’s detailed public guidelines, a scrutiny that developpers of the most popular open source project might recogonise. The overall result is that the people working there are very good. They are principled, and typically very complementary of the independent-minded polymath that many of us have worked with. They understand accessibility in detail and many dimensions (think: both rare handicaps and aging web-clients). I’ve worked with several and I would strongly recommend considering experience at the Government Digital service (GDS) as a very good signal on a CV, akin to senior role at a big tech, or early engineer at a successful start-up.
rmvt 5y ago
off-off-topic: i've recently discovered (through a job listing) that the moj has been doing some open-source work around all the software they use to manage prisons and prison-related stuff. surprisingly interesting - e.g. https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api
- jsmith99 5y ago
  That organisation has a repo called Welcome People into Prison?! It even has a nice ASCII banner https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-into-prison-api/blob/main/src/main/resources/banner.txt https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-in...
jpswade 5y ago
I wouldn’t say quickly exactly, this has been years in the making, it’s much better than it used to be.

mkdirp 5y ago

> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. In my experience gov.uk has been vastly superior compared to other websites for a long time. Gov.uk seems to be more consistent with everything than most company websites are.

0898 5y ago
Agree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something the UK can be really proud of.
- 12ian34 5y ago
  Agreed. I was delighted that my passport renewal process from first applying all the way to getting my new valid passport was about 12 days. The UK government's digital services is honestly a big factor in keeping me a UK resident
  - 35mm 5y ago
    As someone now experiencing Spanish gov systems after getting used to gov.uk - 100% yes. They’re actually really quite good.
BoxOfRain 5y ago
Yeah the British government's IT projects have a bad reputation but credit where credit's due gov.uk is really good in my opinion. I remember reading (probably here) that it was designed with a philosophy of 'our users don't have a choice but to use our software, so we must make it as un-infuriating as possible'.

toyg 5y ago

Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.

heurisko 5y ago
The Cameron government learned the lessons of the massively wasteful failed IT projects from the Blair era (see Fujitsu NHS contract). The GDS started well, but I don't think the GDS can continue to cruise on its earlier reputation. It too has started to fall back into the bad old days of massively wasteful projects with unclear scope, such as the Verify system, that is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds for dubious benefit [1]. "Unfortunately, Verify is also an example of many of the failings in major programmes that we often see, including optimism bias and failure to set clear objectives." [2] I think the idea of GDS is a good one, but evidently it needs to continue to reevaluate itself to avoid regressing into what it was originally setup to avoid. [1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with-government-identity https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with... [2] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/ https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/
chrisseaton 5y ago
> setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister need to be spending his time listening to a report direct from a team implementing software services?
- toyg 5y ago
  Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture). With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take it up with the PM then?" and that would be the end of it. It's effectively the nuclear option, in terms of civil-service management, but sometimes it's the only way to get stuff done.

nielsbot 5y ago

FWIW San Francisco is doing something similar. The have a digital services department and want to convert all city websites to the same design language: https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://medium.com/san-francisco-digital-services https://medium.com/san-francisco-digital-services

somnium_sn 5y ago

I've moved from Germany to the US and then to the UK. gov.uk is by far the most impressive government website i've encountered. Accessible, consistent and just works. Really a good show of what a government website can offer if done right.

llampx 5y ago
The German idea of an online platform is a website developed by Telekom (outsourced by them to the lowest bidder) which makes available the fax number of the Behörde, and the timings that the fax machine will receive incoming faxes.
- hughrr 5y ago
  That's as German as you get. I'm sure there is a German idiom for "that's how it's always been done and the change is someone else's fault" because that's the attitude. Had that a couple of times in shops. Business is bad because we're closed at peak times and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because we don't accept cards and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because our customers don't have fax machines these days and that's the customer's problem. Recently I was with a German friend and she nearly fell on her ass when I showed her that you can actually pay at a car parking machine in the middle of nowhere with Apple Pay here in the UK.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    I still remember last time I visited. One Sunday morning, I went to the Bäckerei and tried to pay for my Brötchen and Stückchen with my card and they just looked at me in disbelief. I quickly realized my mistake but it was too late. I had no cash so I left without any baked goods.
    - jlelse 5y ago
      Thankfully that changed since 2020. Now many bakeries accept cards.

chippiewill 5y ago

gov.uk was great from the day it launched. It continues from strength to strength.

KaiserPro 5y ago
not so much, some of the redesigns ripped out the usable data and replaced it with holding pages. Specifically to do with immigration, that hit us a couple of years ago. However its pleasing to see a site that works well on crappy computers.

KineticLensman 5y ago

> Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there Some important UK government services are still lagging behind. DVLA, since you mention it, has a mix of okay and truly appalling services. I'm in the position of trying to renew my driving licence after it was revoked for medical reasons. It's now six months since my cardiac arrest and I now meet the medically-fit-to-drive criteria. But, I face an 84 day delay in my application being processed, as detailed on the DVLA's 'how-slow-are-we-today' page [0], which is actually labelled as a COVID-19 update. Furthermore, I have to post a paper application form to them as they haven't yet digitized the medical review service [1]. This is life-wrecking stuff for anyone who needs a driving licence for their work or similar. I do like the gov.uk sites in general, but a lot of the back-office stuff is still disastrous. Some of this is due to strike action and COVID, but a big part of the problem is the continual failure of the various UK Govt departments to successfully manage large IT projects. [0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update [1] https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition

hughrr 5y ago
The (old) DVLA web site is merely a shallow front end for the 30 year old incompetent bureaucratic triangle of carnage that hides behind it. To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.
- KineticLensman 5y ago
  > To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally. Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I supported the MOD's system development (simulators for training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to develop some interoperability middleware between disparate systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols / standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common requirements since may of them are doing very similar things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started working with the respective acquisition teams to get them to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place. This turned out to be because there were multiple customer project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each other at that level. I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his training schools (which had multiple different types of simulator, each with out own through-life support programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple of decades working in this space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

jayflux 5y ago

> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site Where've you been? Agree with your points but the things you mention have been around for almost 10 years now (driving license/passport renewal easy UX etc). I renewed my passport around 7 years ago and it was much easier to use then. It's true there's some services that tail off into the older systems (and you can tell), but the modern things gov.uk has owned have always been good since launch.

systemvoltage 5y ago

The UK Design System's page banner takes up 70% of the vertical space on my browser.

bertil 5y ago

Like a lot of users of the services of several government, gov.uk is consistently the best for many reason: simplicity, language clarity, accessibility, very lean design. There’s a certain… brand, i.e. the four aforementionned qualities taken as far as possible, that I really like -- but not everyone enjoys the assertive use of screen space. Just remember: visually impaired people pay taxes too. But for web developpers, that’s not all: it’s very deliberate, there’s detailed public guidelines, a scrutiny that developpers of the most popular open source project might recogonise. The overall result is that the people working there are very good. They are principled, and typically very complementary of the independent-minded polymath that many of us have worked with. They understand accessibility in detail and many dimensions (think: both rare handicaps and aging web-clients). I’ve worked with several and I would strongly recommend considering experience at the Government Digital service (GDS) as a very good signal on a CV, akin to senior role at a big tech, or early engineer at a successful start-up.

rmvt 5y ago

off-off-topic: i've recently discovered (through a job listing) that the moj has been doing some open-source work around all the software they use to manage prisons and prison-related stuff. surprisingly interesting - e.g. https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api

jsmith99 5y ago
That organisation has a repo called Welcome People into Prison?! It even has a nice ASCII banner https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-into-prison-api/blob/main/src/main/resources/banner.txt https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-in...

jpswade 5y ago

I wouldn’t say quickly exactly, this has been years in the making, it’s much better than it used to be.