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We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

gds.blog.gov.uk

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Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#61

Post by Aeolun »

sofixa wrote: post #39
ZeKK14 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France launched a similar program and publish everything they can on Github See https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/ and https://github.com/GouvernementFR/dsfr

I find it really funny that it's published on GitHub with the MIT license, but with a disclaimer it's illegal to use it outside of government websites. It's great that it's publicly available, like many other public stuff the French Government is doing like https://beta.gouv.fr/ or the tax calculators, but it's still funny.

That seems unenforcable under a MIT license? Especially outside of France.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#62

Post by nonrandomstring »

46Bit wrote: post #43
nonrandomstring wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too. However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common…

Umm, GOV.UK uses Google Analytics, Fastly CDN, AWS containers, and I believe is developing an app. (I worked at GDS until two years ago.)

Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and bring even more things properly back in-house.

Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#63

Post by pjc50 »

adamretter wrote: post #45

This looks great :-) However reading the How it works section, it states: "Each form needs an email address to be set for completed forms to be sent to when they’re submitted" So... erm is an email Inbox needed for integration? - how very 1990! In addition to email, for use by developers in other UK GOV departments - surely HTTP PUT of an XML or JSON document to a user nominated URL (with provided auth token) would h…

Old school HTML Forms don't require an active backend. They can be a purely static site.

> surely HTTP PUT of an XML or JSON document to a user nominated URL

This is the bit that's more tricky than a static site. And then you need to do something with the data.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#64

Post by LeonardoTolstoy »

meindnoch wrote: post #21

When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.

I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#65

Post by Aeolun »

greo wrote: post #24

Coming from Japan which is notorious for having the worst digital experience, the UK's gov.uk ecosystem is incredible

Japan is so terrible because every service does it’s own thing. The absolute best I’ve seen was the national census, which seems to actually have a website not designed before the year 2000.

But it’s still inconsistent with all other government services.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#66

Post by pjc50 »

Teandw wrote: post #31
azangru wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No frills or silly scroll jacking animations plus javascript hogging contraptions that we see in almost all websites these days. Still the cookie warnings though :-( I've just visited on my phone the forms page linked in the title, and the first thing that greeted me was a full-screen page-blocking dialog with some cookie nonsense. You can't interact with the contents of the page until you decide how you feel about…

Legal requirement in the UK. No way around it.

I would have hoped the government would be able to design a system that works only on "technical necessity" cookies and not anything more elaborate with regards to PII.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#67

Post by mozey »

meindnoch wrote: post #21

When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.

I applied for a UK visa from South-Africa about a year ago. To start my application I had to submit a form on this domain. The navigation to the form was obscured by a giant banner about the Ukraine invasion and a message about how service levels might be reduced due to refugees... no matter how I resized my browser window I couldn't get to the part of the page behind the banner. Eventually I opened up the Dev Tools and added some CSS to hide the banner. The link was revealed and I could continue with my application

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#68

Post by superhuzza »

pjc50 wrote: post #55
myth2018 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is how internet services should look like. Yes, definitely. I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google? [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...

The GOVUK deliberately bare branding serves a purpose similar to the old Tesco Value branding: to make it look austere. If it looked luxurious people would be more likely to complain about taxpayer's money being wasted.

Not really. They publish a lot of blogs explaining design decisions. It almost always comes down to making the services as accessible as possible.

Part of that involves really simple layouts, very high contrast text, legible fonts, compatibility across many devices, simple language etc.

It's certainly an added benefit that it gives an appearance of austerity, but that's more a byproduct of simplicity.

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#69

Post by kamel3d »

adamretter wrote: post #45

This looks great :-) However reading the How it works section, it states: "Each form needs an email address to be set for completed forms to be sent to when they’re submitted" So... erm is an email Inbox needed for integration? - how very 1990! In addition to email, for use by developers in other UK GOV departments - surely HTTP PUT of an XML or JSON document to a user nominated URL (with provided auth token) would h…

it is really cool but at the same time I can not stop smiling when the governement is telling you of about the best practices how to use web technologies, it is just funny

Re: We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms

#70

Post by kamel3d »

lambic wrote: post #51
sofixa wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they not track users? They need to know how many users there are accessing from abroad (considering this is the UK which has many legitimate "abroads" like crown dependencies outside of the classic British citizens living outside of Britain), using what browsers and OSes, display sizes to know what they need to support. It would also be useful to know how much time users spend on the various pages, to know…

Sure, but why use google analytics? There are better trackers for this kind of thing that don't need cookies and can be self-hosted.

Could you recommend some alternatives to Google Analytics? I am developing a plugin for Photoshop using UXP, and I have been unable to integrate it with GA.
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