I'm consistently really impressed with the UK gov's websites. They're fast, usable and mostly quite intuitive, something that is helped by the fact that they all share a common theme. They support pretty much everything you'd want to do from an admin perspective.
This contrasts greatly with US and French government websites I've had the displeasure of using in the past.
While I agree, venture outside central government to local authority and you still get a shit show of bad websites and services.
The other day I paid out yearly fee for our garden waste bin collection. The page takes you to an completely un-styled credit card form with no branding and just the price, no details, then the “confirmation” screen is just white page with a single line “payment received”, nothing else not even a redirect. Oh and no confirmation email.
Our local planning site had a bug for six months where when you typed in the search box, focus was lost if you typed to slowly due to the results appearing automatically and steeling focus…
Having worked in building local government services there's loads of factors of why this hasn't worked (despite GDS trying desperately to make it so).
Most of it comes down to money - the vast majority of residents that use Council services are older and/or less likely to have access to a computer or smartphone and/or more likely to need support in accessing these services from someone else. We're pretty good at designing services for these people for the web but frankly, they aren't using them.
Some of it is because local government pays poverty wages. Much of the staff I worked with in our IT dept (in a pretty well complimented software development team, it must be said) had been working there 20 years or they are trainees on apprenticeships or fixed-term 1 year contracts. Because of that, there's huge difficulties in adopting agile as a working model, changing technology stacks to ones that the GDS and GOV.UK use is incredibly difficult and recruiting staff that can lead the way on this is an impossibility. Instead, we're relying on outsourcing this to companies like Capita who make some of the worst designed government services I've ever seen.
Finally, Councillor's (our budgetholders at the end of the day) just don't see the material benefit of good digital services for their residents. Faced with a year-on-year cut to the grants they get from central government and the poltiics of raising Council Tax, they see IT staff more as a cost centre than as an area for capital development.
It's expensive to hire even halfway competent developers. Local governments aren't big enough to even have good IT departments, nevermind actual software development.
I do wonder sometimes why stuff like Squarespace isn't used more often. It seems like at least the informational pages could look nice, even if the stuff that requires custom logic looks terrible.
I don't understand why every council should have their own developer. Seems like most municipalities need a standard set of services (the parent mentioned garbage bin collection, but others like council tax payment also come to mind) that can be built once by the UK government and then offered as an SaaS to every council, allowing them to gain economies of scale and freeing up their developers (if any) to work on custom stuff that's too specific to be shared across many municipalities.
GDS have arguably started to encroach on local government services with their voter registration service.
However don't underestimate the inclination of people to protect their silos. Even if offered a free service by central government, you'd almost certainly find a lot of local governments choosing to implement their own.
Councils and other local government organizations are expected to get fleeced by Capita and other "preferred" private outsourcing companies that don't care about anything other than collecting taxpayer money.
Of course it would make complete sense for the gov.uk team to expand and help local government organizations with their online presence. But that won't feather the nest of the right people.
The platform simply doesn't seem to be available for local authorities to use. So they have to cobble stuff together themselves with Wordpress, Drupal or whatever they have to hand.
Depends which bit you look at in my experience, some of the home office stuff (especially around visas and immigration) still manages to be obscure and is sometimes defective. Perhaps a sufficiently misanthropic department can always get its institutional culture to bleed through the standardised stylesheets.
I don't know about your specific example, but there's some stuff GDS hasn't touched (yet?) and it shows. The 'modern' stuff that has that consistent design across departments, awesome accessibility etc. is all great IME.
Devil's advocate though: I know someone who works in tax (for a private firm of accountants) and hates it. Too dumbed down, and the bar at which they need to reach out to HMRC for guidance or some other resource is just too low.
I find it often ends up linking through to actual legislature, so perhaps it's just something in the middle that's missing, the 'technical reference' level.
I don't work (and never have) in the public sector, but my understanding was that that's essentially true of any department; that GDS operated like a sort of slightly dictatorial contractor that also provides some common infrastructure and design system etc.?
Happy to be corrected, for the purpose of this thread though it was the design system I'm talking about anyway really though.
It seems that technology-wise, there is more proximity between GDS and the other departments, which is what I was alluding to. This is based on my observation of the various github repositories, with no insight into how the work is organized.
Yeah some stuff hasn't been migrated yet but it's pretty rare in my limited experience.
Regarding your devil's advocate example, it's obvious a power user (i.e. tax pro) will have different needs than a layman like me, and it's clear that the sites are built for the latter, which makes way more sense as that's like 99.999% of the users anyways. The power users are probably so rare that just forcing them to phone in makes sense.
It's nice to see pride in a civil service tech job. For the most part it's absolutely crazy how poor tech is handled in most governments, and nothing is done about it. Source: my sister waited 4 weeks for her civil service work laptop to be fixed. They have contract repair companies, but couldn't be bothered organising it. She ended up driving to the contractor herself after 4 weeks and waited for thr repair. Shocking.
usa.gov has gotten quite good thanks to work that USDS has done to standardize design language across the government (and help support agencies that want to adopt it), but getting other agencies to use it has been a slowwwwwwwwwwww process.
This contrasts greatly with US and French government websites I've had the displeasure of using in the past.