
Building a better gov.uk, step by step - open-source-ux
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/10/17/building-a-better-gov-uk-step-by-step/
======
Someone1234
A lot of people skip reading gov.uk because "I'm not from the UK what do I
care?!" but I believe it is one of the best consumer web page development &
design document bundles around. Even if you're based out of the US or
elsewhere.

There's too many good pages to link but to get started:

[https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/start-pages/](https://design-
system.service.gov.uk/patterns/start-pages/)

[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-
principles](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles)

[https://design-system.service.gov.uk/](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/)

The US also has some good sites (Healthcare.gov's design pages[0], federal
government's digital team[1]) the main reason I like the gov.uk stuff a little
better is because it deals with more than simple design, it gets into
philosophy, deployment, and testing.

[0]
[https://styleguide.healthcare.gov/design/](https://styleguide.healthcare.gov/design/)

[1] [https://designsystem.digital.gov/](https://designsystem.digital.gov/)

~~~
rjtrickett
Agreed, GOV.UK is so underrated. Their service review teams (who give
approval) are relentless about user research, accessibility and ultimate
effectiveness of the service. They won't allow a service to pass an assessment
until it meets these on a very high standard, no matter how 'urgent' or
important the project is.

Their commitment to accessibility is also laudable, unlike other commercial
organisations who aren't incentivised to service that minority.

Many people complain that GOV.UK "looks boring" but it's brilliantly
effective.

~~~
IshKebab
Do people actually complain about that? I've never heard anyone in the real
world even mention gov.uk.

~~~
fredley
People probably don't mention it because it's so good it's invisible. In my
experiance people in the 'real world' only mention (read: bitch about)
services they struggle with.

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moreira
Living in the UK, I've come to believe that gov.uk is the model that all
governments should follow. No matter what I need to do, gov.uk has all the
information I could need, and tells me where to go and what to do.

Their greatest success isn't the website, although it is incredibly clean and
easy to use. Their greatest success is distilling bureaucracy down to easy-to-
follow instructions - as highlighted in this article. Their content is
impeccable. Lists, bullet points, jargon-free "here's what you need to do",
for any issue you might have in your life.

~~~
pertymcpert
Except when you need to log in. Email doesn't work, have to remember a
government gateway ID that everyone forgets because they use it once a year.

~~~
londons_explore
Now that all UK passport holders have NFC passports, they should just say
'touch your passport to the back of your phone to log in'.

The passports support challenge-response auth, allowing gov.uk to securely
identify the passport in a way a device cannot spoof, and the Web NFC API is
implemented quite widely now.

------
xuan
Disclaimer I used to work for the Ministry of Justice (UK) as a software
developer.

There are two aspects I feel worth mentioning:

1\. GOV.UK is not one single unit but rather quite distributed. these styles
and standards are created by a central organisation called Government Digital
Service, and all the the government departments follow and feedback. There is
a design community and one of the ways of collaboration is to use a Wiki
[https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/GOV.UK-Design-Patterns-Wiki-
hk...](https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/GOV.UK-Design-Patterns-Wiki-
hkou7bpzKya8Dadv24V1z)

2\. UK government is a big open source software contributor. Software projects
by default are open source on github. It felt really good getting paid for
writing open source code when I worked there :)
[https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-
source](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source)

~~~
m0nty
This is a complete 180 from about 18 years ago, when I contacted someone re.
the Jobcentre website requiring Internet Explorer:

"I only have a Linux system, how can I get access?"

"We only support Microsoft Explorer."

"So if I use Linux I can't find a job?"

"We only support Microsoft Explorer."

That kind of blinkered approach went on for far too long, so it's a real
pleasure to use the various websites on gov.uk at the moment. Even
traditionally unpleasant things like filing a VAT return are relatively low
friction, and taxing a car is absurdly easy.

Now, how can we get the same sort of thing to happen across Whitehall and
Westminster more generally? ;)

------
sbfriends
Australia tried to follow this with gov.au, and it was a bit of a debacle. It
ultimately didn't work because it the agency driving it lacked a stick and
couldn't coerce agencies to give up their branding/content. Agencies couldn't
see the financial incentive -- they'd have to give up their funding and
control, and that just wasn't appealing at all.

Frustratingly the idea will be dead for a good time to come now. For an agency
to do this, they need a stick -- I believe the GDS had IT spending levers they
could pull to control how money was spent across the entire public sector.
This made them quite powerful and ultimately allowed them to say "if you want
to publish your agency's content, it has to be on our platform".

The end result is a far better UX.

~~~
asplake
Not so much “on our platform” (services are surprisingly free in terms of
technology and process) but “by our principles”. The GDS assessment process
did indeed have clout, in the sense that services could fail, and failure had
consequences for funding.

I did two 6-month stints as delivery manager on GDS “exemplar” projects. I
remain a fan.

~~~
sbfriends
Maybe not platform per se, but through your domain. There's a huge power in
that (as gatekeeper of content). It means department's have no choice but to
adhere to the standards and recommendations.

The exemplar projects in the Australian system were discontinued after the
second round, and were really just lip-service -- at the end of the day, even
the exemplar projects were at the mercy of internal Departmental IT operations
who ultimately decided what went on to their Departmental domains.

------
ttty
I didn't saw anybody mention the amount of money they save because they don't
need to support by phone and email that much.

I was thinking of other countries with really complicated gov pages must get
so much more questions by phone, face to face or email. Probably a magnitude
more.

Also these countries learned to answer emails with a template that comes from
the website, like copy paste. Therefore the customer need to wait for the
template, ask again and wait for the 2nd reply, which most of the time is as
bad as the first one. Then you call in. (By the way, looks like PayPal learned
this technique as well, send a template to any support ticket, wasting the
time)

I think this younger generation prefers to read online, so they did a very
good bet

------
osrec
Gov.uk is a great example for any web developer to follow. You can see the
thought they've put into ensuring clarity of information, casting aside
complicated, whizzy graphics. Also it's very accessible for those with
disabilities.

I can only assume that this was one project kept well away from the steer of
our politicians!

~~~
petepete
It's more the fact that it wasn't put out to tender and won by a big
outsourcing company like Capita. They would have tried to implement it all
using SharePoint, gone massively overbudget and bailed leaving a slow mess
that everyone avoids.

Instead, lots of small projects written by a young team using _sensible_
technologies and sticking to an excellent set of user interface guides.

------
topicseed
I am based in England and so is my company. GOV.CO.UK is an incredible portal:
finding info is easy, readig is easy, getting forms is magical, sending forms
is seamless. Some parts of the other related portals are older though but
being updated too, in order to have a consistent experience throughout.

LOVE IT.

------
motohagiography
Question about public service projects, may make it an Ask HN or a blog
question as well:

The Agile or iterative model, coupled with the sec/devops CI/CD model that
includes "own what you build," means that developers and highly skilled devops
teams are available to manage a CI/CD pipeline throughout the lifetime of the
product.

There is an underlying assumption that you are building to support the growth
and revenue model that SaaS companies require to survive and in turn pay for
continuous developers.

In public services, there is no such revenue growth. You have a budget for
developing it, then hand it over for production, and then you manage it over
the long term with more cost effective operators who are largely unionized
employees, engaging developers only if needed to reconcile the code with an
infrastructure change.

Keeping developers engaged and maintaining CI/CD on a product that does not
have revenue or growth means that the cost curve diminishes much more slowly
than in the waterfall engineering model. It means we have to ask whether the
additional cost yields commensurate benefits, and what budgeting for a service
supported by CI/CD truly costs without hockey stick revenue growth attached to
it.

I contract to an agency that would benefit from an 18F.gov or gov.uk like
digital service, but I have not seen this particular cost issue addressed. Has
anyone in gov.uk, 18F or another digital service run up against this, and
found solutions?

~~~
glenjamin
From what I have seen, this is one of the major problems that the GOV.UK / GDS
service model has thus far failed to address.

The advice is "keep the team around for each service indefinitely".
Unfortunately this doesn't mesh well with either government technology funding
models or the demand for increasing numbers of services.

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afarrell
As a US -> UK immigrant, I have been seriously impressed by the design of many
UK government pages.

~~~
umichguy
Same here. I am a US to UK person as well. Stuff is just so much easier to
find and fill out. It was a breath of fresh air, where previously I would
dread the thought of trying to use govt websites.

------
babahoyo
This reminds me of how incredibly good TurboTax is at UI, and if US and state
governments were to invest in UI we wouldn't have to pay $100 a year just to
do our taxes.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Don't get too excited. Filing your taxes online in the UK is also still
largely horrid, and often seems to require either starting afresh (the
equivalent of "turn it on and off again") because some unknown error is
reported on submission, or just phoning HMRC to talk to someone.

Whether this is because GDS haven't got their teeth into HMRC yet I don't
know, but not everything over here is as shiny as some would have you believe.

~~~
dbbk
Actually 'Making Tax Digital' means eventually the manual tax submission will
go away. They're pushing all tax returns to be completed via API from
accounting software.

------
Liquidor
We've had something similar in Denmark for a couple of years:
[https://www.borger.dk/](https://www.borger.dk/) (translation: citizen)

English version (smaller but directed at non-citizens):
[https://lifeindenmark.borger.dk/](https://lifeindenmark.borger.dk/)

It's crazy how much you can do on your own and it leads you to wherever you
need to go.

The website also changes the available subjects based on the municipal you
live in (as an option to avoid confusion).

Almost every page has been written and updated by one of the departments in
the government as noted at the bottom of every page.

Sample pages to look at:

[https://www.borger.dk/bolig-og-
flytning/flytning_oversigt](https://www.borger.dk/bolig-og-
flytning/flytning_oversigt) (landing page with popular shortcuts/subjects)

[https://www.borger.dk/bolig-og-
flytning/flytning_oversigt/fl...](https://www.borger.dk/bolig-og-
flytning/flytning_oversigt/flytning-i-danmark) (subjects and Start buttons for
forms and guides either on borger.dk or one of the other gov websites such as
[https://virk.dk](https://virk.dk) (company/business registration/management)
and [https://sundhed.dk](https://sundhed.dk) (health database with knowledge
and journals)

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pcr0
It resembles MDN a lot. I like the contrast on the page, it's really nice
after all the faded blacks that you see around the web.

------
aogl
For years I've often had endless fears when dealing with government
departments and websites that are not clear, even more convoluted or not kept
up to date. But I have actually found gov.uk to be really straight to the
point and concise this past year or so. It's a fantastic change and one that
other governments should look at emulating!

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flr03
gov.uk is state of art can't praise it enough, especially after so many
embarrassing experiences with the french equivalent(s)

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chrxr
Other areas of IT around the UK gov are learning from the success of gov.uk.
DHSC just set out its vision for digital future of healthcare for the NHS, and
it looks very promising:

[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-
hea...](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-healthcare-
our-vision-for-digital-data-and-technology-in-health-and-care/the-future-of-
healthcare-our-vision-for-digital-data-and-technology-in-health-and-care)

------
MordodeMaru
We had Kuba Bartwicki yesterday in Product Hunt Madrid and it was simply
amazing. In this thread you can get a gist of what he shared with us about the
goals and tools GDS is using to cause _digital entropy_.

[https://twitter.com/MadProductHunt/status/105298906548054016...](https://twitter.com/MadProductHunt/status/1052989065480540166)

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EngineerBetter
I know GDS uses Cloud Foundry a lot (as do the US and Korean governments). How
much of gov.uk is deployed on CF?

~~~
javindo
GDS hosts a CF instance called PaaS (Platform as a Service) which hosts web
applications on *.cloudapps.digital but the majority of the actual GOV.UK
estate is hosted in AWS, as is GOV.UK Verify. I believe GOV.UK Pay might be on
PaaS and a lot of internal tooling is.

(Source: have worked at GDS for the past couple of years.)

~~~
wooVe5ee
GOV.UK Pay use Amazon ECS, not CF. They do this because it is PCI compliant.

GOV.UK aren't quite yet entirely on AWS but are working toward that end. With
GOV.UK, all the code is in the open where possible
([https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-aws](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-
aws) and [https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-
puppet](https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-puppet) respectively for the
infrastructure).

Source: I used to work at GDS.

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test6554
So now that they know these processes are sequential, and commonly used, does
each government department still require you to fill out a paper form with
your name and all the other same information on it? Or is there a way to
streamline someones journey through the bureaucracy digitally?

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Separo
Absolutely one of the best websites in the world in terms of user interface
and usability. I'm always surprised that using this site actually feels
rewarding even though I'm doing administrative tasks with my government.

------
adav
There are a lot of HMRC pages/flows that desperately need the GDS treatment!

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
As someone who's just gone through the process of becoming a visa sponsor, I'd
add Visas & Immigration too!

