31–40 of 41 posts
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I'm proposing that we don't pretend that this is an old, unused site that someone has stumbled across because goverment IT is doing such a good job not breaking old hyperlinks. It's still in active use and it's still terrible. Those are simple facts that doing the relatively easy job of moving a bunch of PDFs and static web content to a new site are not going to change. Government IT (in the UK and elsewhere) has bee…
Nobody is pretending anything. It's the old DWP website. The DWP has a new home on gov.uk, which is much better, and is transitioning — actually rather quickly, given all the red tape that must be involved — to this new site as we speak. The old website only persists because a few remaining functions have not been transitioned yet. It's rubbish, but it's actively being replaced. Criticising it is pointless. It's inte…
All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not likely to win many design awards either.
It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the simple task of putting information online, but anything past the 20th century web still seems beyond them. Hopefully it's the next step, I don't really envy the people that need to make that cultural change happen. I do however feel it's more likely to happen sooner if we don't pretend that it'll just happen magically by itself.
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Nobody is pretending anything. It's the old DWP website. The DWP has a new home on gov.uk, which is much better, and is transitioning — actually rather quickly, given all the red tape that must be involved — to this new site as we speak. The old website only persists because a few remaining functions have not been transitioned yet. It's rubbish, but it's actively being replaced. Criticising it is pointless. It's inte…
Have you got any evidence that it's actively being replaced? All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not likely to win many design awards either. It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the simple task of…
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Nice throwaway comment written without actually having much of a clue about what the UK Government is doing with its web presence.
My comment could also be paraphrased as "Why was this link submitted to HN?"
Or set aside your bias and take a look at what the GDS team is doing.
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Have you got any evidence that it's actively being replaced? All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not likely to win many design awards either. It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the simple task of…
Well, the GDS team are pretty open and transparent. Why not go take a look a their blog where they go into quite a lot of detail about their plans?
I did spot a mock-up of a form for reporting lost Passports, which when I googled for it was a nice 3 question form which after processing your answers used that information to give you a link to the correct PDF form to fill in and post (ok, to be fair it gave some helpful extra contextual info like the relevant countries embassy info, but to be unfair if you ask it about an Adult passport, then want to know about a child passport--because I'd imagine losing your whole families passports at once is relatively common--it forces you to answer the remaining 3/4 questions again).
So, some little steps in the right direction as far as web apps for interacting with government are concerned.
At the other end of the spectrum, the Manchester city council site: http://www.manchester.gov.uk/ Definitely not what you might expect!
Manchester are on it. Free wi-fi in a number of places and MadLab. As a resident I'm not that surprised :)
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I can't speak for their digital strategy but their universal jobmatch site is abysmal. A truly awful piece of work. https://www.gov.uk/jobsearch
That's just redirecting to the old Directgov/Jobcenter site, which I've always felt was quite good at what it did. It might not be the prettiest, but it's not awful.
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I can't speak for their digital strategy but their universal jobmatch site is abysmal. A truly awful piece of work. https://www.gov.uk/jobsearch
I think you're seriously over-stating how bad it is. I mean it was designed to be used on a touch-screen interface by people of all ages, they're going to have to lose some functionality for that alone.