[HN Gopher] Replacing the scroll tracker on GOV.UK
___________________________________________________________________
Replacing the scroll tracker on GOV.UK
Author : open-source-ux
Score : 21 points
Date : 2022-03-28 17:52 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk)
| mxz3000 wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| 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...
| diordiderot wrote:
| It really confuses me. All of "Her Majesty's government's"
| designs and software are exceptionally well made and freely
| available.
|
| Why can't counties, boroughs, and councils just copy it and
| add a dash of styling
| Veen wrote:
| Lack of incentives and resources (i.e. they don't give a
| shit, and if they did they have something else to spend the
| money on).
| phatfish wrote:
| 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 to help local government organizations with their
| online presence. But that won't feather the nest of the
| right people.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 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.
| zurgax wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| silasdavis wrote:
| Interacting with gob.es has given my a vast amount of respect
| for gov.uk.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > That would mean adding almost 2,260 URLs to the JavaScript.
| This might sound reasonable
|
| This is one of the many things in today's web I have a problem
| with.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-03-28 23:01 UTC)