
Digital Design Principles from the UK Gov - tilt
https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples?
======
thechangelog
I'm really impressed with the gov.uk project and have been following it for
quite a while now.

We've been taking their lessons and applying them to a small municipal site
we're building -- topic pages like their VAT example, flat document structure,
really robust search. At first we were unsure how many lessons from a national
government would apply to a village of a few thousand but it's turning out
really well so far. It's a liberating data model in that we spend less time
worrying about hierarchies ("is this for businesses or residents?") and more
time curating content based on what users will need (e.g. what pages should be
drawn into the residents' topic page in the springtime before an election).

They've also got a bunch of their code on GitHub:
<https://github.com/alphagov>

~~~
jystewart
Great to hear our model's been helpful. Do let me know if/when there's
anything to look at as I'd love to see how it's translated.

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walru
If someone asked, I would say this is what I've spent the last 15 years
educating myself to learn.

It might all seem simple, but take none of this for granted. If your work
adheres to the concepts they've laid out, you will begin to make the world a
better place.

Bravo, gov.uk

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tomwalker
I met one of the team on the train once (Jordan I think?) and he seemed like a
passionate young guy. I hope the project is a huge success.

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Chris_Newton
Interesting site. I wonder whether the GDS team have any thoughts on how to
reconcile some of this advice, and indeed their own site, with the EU cookie
rules?

It seems the GDS also has a document floating around[1] that talks about
implementing the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations on public
sector web sites. This in turn cites ICO guidance[2] that says the Information
Commissioner is "unlikely to prioritise" regulatory action against sites for
using first party analytical cookies.

On the other hand, there is nothing in the actual Regulations to exempt
analytics as far as I can see, and that same ICO guidance quite clearly states
that "A first party analytic cookie might not appear to be as intrusive as
others that might track a user across multiple sites but you still need
consent". Moreover, using a service like Google Analytics, which relies on
third party cookies and tracks users across sites, seems to have been squarely
in the crosshairs of the EU authorities when they wrote the Regulations.

I'll be the first to agree that the current rules are not the most helpful
idea I've ever encountered, and I'm about as convinced by the mess at the top
of the ICO's own web site as anyone else, apparently including the webmasters
of just about every other UK government web site. Still, as long as the
Regulations have the force of the law and as long as the moratorium on
regulatory action is due to end soon, it seems odd that the GDS is advocating
the use of tools like Google Analytics.

[1] [http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-
impl...](http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-implementer-
guide.pdf)

[2]
[http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/~/media/document...](http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/~/media/documents/library/Privacy_and_electronic/Practical_application/guidance_on_the_new_cookies_regulations.ashx)

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johneth
I really like this project. One of the few things that the government seems to
be getting right at the moment.

If you've not already seen them, the BBC's design guidelines are also very
good (though obviously somewhat different in scope):
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/gel>

~~~
jystewart
The BBC approach has definitely influenced our work on these principles and
there's a lot of great thinking captured in them.

Ben Terrett (GOV.UK/GDS Head of Design) talked about that a bit in one of the
blog posts introducing our design principles:
[http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/03/design-
princi...](http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/03/design-principles-
alpha/)

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scott_s
Huh. Apparently people are using "digital design" to mean graphic and webpage
design. I've always associated the phrase with circuit design.

~~~
sc00ter
If you actually read the linked article you'll see it has almost nothing to do
with graphic or web design, but rather digital design is used as a less
highbrow synonym for "information architecture".

~~~
scott_s
I did "actually" read the linked article. I also did a Google search for
"digital design" to see how it's most commonly being used. I'm comfortable
lumping everything I saw into "graphic and webpage design," with the assumed
understanding that "webpages" are basically applications now.

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lhnz
When I accessed the site and saw the notice about using a carrot rather than
stick approach I was turned off since I believed that stating that this was
their approach just showed that this isn't the standard culture, however, that
said, this is an excellent list of principles. I'm going to take notes. :)

------
nooop
Principle 0: use 72 points fonts.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It doesn't quite seem to match the Typography section.

Where it says "We’re using Georgia for body text." and that they're using em
for sizing it appears to be styled as "Helmet,Freesans,sans-serif;" and using
px+% (like YUI).

Also main.css has 7 declarations at the top of just the font-size for html
object - which looks weird. Deleting all but the declaration "html {font-size:
62.5%;}" appears to right-size the fonts for the page.

I can't see where the web-font is supposed to be being downloaded either but
I've only taken a quick glance.

Edit:

Looks like it's browser specific - this is FF11 on Linux. Somehow not applying
the @media declarations correctly? Also looks like the little script isn't
giving me the fastfonts css.

~~~
ralph
Thanks, I'm also F11 on Linux and wondered why no one else seemed to shudder
at the huge text.

~~~
jystewart
If you could email a screenshot and your browser details to govuk-
feedback@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk someone will have a look at that.
thanks!

~~~
ralph
Thanks, done.

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BjoernKW
I'm impressed by those design principles, even more so because they come from
a government agency.

Measured by these principles UK government IT is light years ahead of the crap
you've to cope with in Germany.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Er, I assure you it's not. This is a brand new site from a brand new team to
try and clear up the mess that is government websites. There's hundreds of
them just now.

~~~
BjoernKW
Sure, having such principles and applying them is something entirely different
but at least they've recognized that there's something wrong with their IT
projects, which already is a huge leap ahead.

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jheimark
this is well written and quite interesting... unfortunately the initial pink
dialog box distracted from the content.

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ktizo
Holy crap, much of this makes sense. Who are these people and what have they
done with the real government? I'm not falling for it. Must be a late april
fool.

~~~
ealexhudson
Unfortunately, the amount of difference this kind of thing will make is
minimal. For services supplied to Government, the decision making for anything
non-trivial is made at appointment after tender: and these principles aren't
embedded into procurement.

It also won't apply to the various Quangos, whose spending is publicly funded
but nowhere near as transparent as direct Government spending.

There have been a similar set of open source principles in Government for
something like six years now. They made practically no difference.

~~~
jystewart
There's definitely been a lot of good thinking and guidance around the
government for a long time.

The real difference here is that the Government Digital Service is empowered
to actually build some of this in-house and so the principles are emerging
from actual practice. We're also able to get involved in some procurement
processes very early on and work with the appointed suppliers. We're also
hoping that other people putting them into practice will come back with
feedback we can incorporate to make them better and illustrate them more
fully.

Getting these principles thoroughly embedded is going to be a long journey,
but they're a far cry from being just another good practice document that'll
be ignored.

~~~
ktizo
I agree that there has been loads of good thinking around the government, I
was just unaware that any of it had managed to filter inside.

While you are at it, can you try and get the whole government onto github so
we can fork it ;)

~~~
jystewart
Not sure about the whole government :)

But we're getting most of our code up there and beginning to convince others
that code funded by taxpayers should be released as openly as possible.

We've received some interesting pull requests along the way, eg.
<https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1>

~~~
ktizo
I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this.

Any chance on getting similar standards applied to the ordinance survey data?

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iRobot
Slightly off topic, but relevant in this discussion.

I worked in IT in local and central government in the UK, all departments of
which I was in would have completely ignored these guidelines for their own
petty reasons of security, people skills, costs(!), supplier lock-ins etc

Neither does this address bigger picture stuff such as supplier favouritism,
lack of single systems across multiple councils (eg council taxes) open
hostility to open source, total lack of fair tendering or the fact most IT
spending is authorised by people who's only qualification is they studied
history at the same college in Oxford as the CEO or go to the same golf club.

I could name several examples of the above from the security services but
would probably be immediately arrested because of that pile of steaming shit
called `the official secrets act'

