Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to make a great government website

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: How to make a great government website

#61

Post by fleischhauf »

jpmoral wrote: post #34
sgu999 wrote: post #24

How to not make great government websites: use random domain names instead of a single dedicated tld, different contractors and design for each, make sure there's enough overlap in functionality in-between each of them, and then regularly remind everyone that it's very easy to scam you with fishing attacks. Here are just some of the official French websites: service-public.fr impots.gouv.fr gouvernement.fr ameli.fr v…

How about the totally not-dodgy-sounding ustraveldocs dot com?

it also looks dodgy to be honest. Also if you click too much while logged in they detect "suspicious behaviour" and block you from logging in again for a couple of days without warning, saying don't call customer service, they won't help you (very frustrating if you are short on time). They also have the option of maestro for payment (was decommissioned years ago in Europe) and don't accept real credit cards, only debit apparently.

Re: How to make a great government website

#62

Post by AlienRobot »

sgu999 wrote: post #24

How to not make great government websites: use random domain names instead of a single dedicated tld, different contractors and design for each, make sure there's enough overlap in functionality in-between each of them, and then regularly remind everyone that it's very easy to scam you with fishing attacks. Here are just some of the official French websites: service-public.fr impots.gouv.fr gouvernement.fr ameli.fr v…

When making a blog for your small town, don't forget to use Wordpress so it gets full of malware!

Re: How to make a great government website

#63

Post by IshKebab »

petepete wrote: post #23
IshKebab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gov.uk is pretty good, and their forms are quite good. But there are definitely still places where this design is worse than one using JavaScript. For example when paying for tax free childcare you have to enter a date for when you want the payment to go out. Not only is the date picker just three edit boxes (no "tomorrow" button for example), but it isn't validated at all so if you put in today's date (quite reasona…

> It would be much better if a tiny bit of JavaScript told you as soon as you put the date in, and if it had a "tomorrow" button, which would also require some JavaScript. There's so much research that shows the opposite. You might prefer that but government websites need to work for everyone, and showing validation messages automatically confuses less technically able people, and it's really hard to make it fully ac…

> At which point do you announce the mistake to a screen reader?

There is a standard for this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

But I would suggest just having the validation in addition to the current behaviour.

> Where do you shift focus?

You don't?

> There's so much research that shows the opposite.

There's research that shows that a "tomorrow" button is bad??

Re: How to make a great government website

#64

Post by ndriscoll »

8organicbits wrote: post #37
danpalmer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Most content on government sites is static content, you could fairly easily deliver much of that to a large population with relatively little hardware, assuming the software is developed such that static delivery is possible. There are "processes" that people need to complete, but these are typically life-changing processes, things you do once in your life, or maybe once a year at most. Even if those are…

> things you do once in your life, or maybe once a year at most I don't think that's the case. Analytics [1] for the top web pages in the US Federal government are: * GSA advantage - a search tool * Visa instructions - static? * USPS tracking - a search tool * ESTA application - a form * NWS Radar - weather radar * Sex offender registry - search tool Checking the weather or shipping a package are much more common tha…

USPS tracking should be using an indexed id (you don't want to allow partial matches/searches here), so I'd expect even very modest hardware to handle 10s of thousands of requests per second. Likewise with things like CRUD forms.

Right now your link shows only ~5700 requests in the last 30 minutes for GSA advantage, or ~3/s. Sex offender registry has ~3500/30m or 2/s. Even USPS tracking is only at ~12k/30m or ~7/s. It's still only 9am on the west coast so maybe they need to handle 100000x traffic for peaks, but I doubt it.

Re: How to make a great government website

#65

Post by ndriscoll »

bruce511 wrote: post #15
davisr wrote: post #3

Ctr+F "javascript" -- no results. Hmm, if a government website necessitates the use of JavaScript, I'd consider that a hallmark of being awful.

I would somewhat strongly disagree . Using JavaScript allows for a more interactive interface, where cause and effect are more clearly visible, and where the relationship between answers and further questions is more obvious. For example, it's common for govt forms to have sections like "fill this part in if you're a resident" and "fill this part in if you're a visitor". Elsewhere in this thread, auto-saving is menti…

It allows for more interactive forms, but also frequently makes cause/effect confusing. e.g. things like autofill or tabbing or sometimes just typing quickly can cause forms to break because they think you have not filled out a field, and it's doing something stupid to make it so you can't fill out the next field, so you end up having to delete and retype text to get it to pick it up.

Re: How to make a great government website

#66

Post by daguar »

0xWTF wrote: post #2

Dave Guarino needs to read Seeing Like a State, Seeing Like a Bank, and Seeing Like a Data Structure. And then write his own Seeing Like a Government Website. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-... https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/seeing-data-structu...

Hi! This is Dave. I am in fact perhaps a top 10 fan of James C. Scott. For some evidence of this, please see: https://x.com/search?q=allafarce%20%22seeing%20like%20a%22&s...

This is a really cool idea, and I'll consider it.

(Aside: I own seeinglikeastate.com)

Re: How to make a great government website

#68

Post by daguar »

lobsang wrote: post #42
alexcason wrote: post #35

Mandatory link to the one thing in the UK that actually works well: https://www.gov.uk Further details: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...

I'm genuinely curious if people still think gov.uk is a good example - or I guess, as good as it was. I'm slightly biased from past experience but my feeling is a lot of the critical thinking that went into gov.uk has been lost. I just can't see the original form of GDS having an cookie banner on gov.uk for example. These were the guys that rightly pointed out that there is no actual need for people to have user acco…

I broadly think this is correct, and that GDS has drifted significantly.

Re: How to make a great government website

#69

Post by hnlmorg »

david_allison wrote: post #50
ssl232 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why Good Friday doesn't get bunting.

Likely the Good Friday Agreement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement

The Good Friday agreement was named after the day it was signed on, not the other way around.

Good Friday is the Friday before Easter Monday. In Christianity, in symbolises the day Christ died and Monday was the day he rose.

Re: How to make a great government website

#70

Post by beryilma »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #44
jpmoral wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the totally not-dodgy-sounding ustraveldocs dot com?

Let's not forget payusatax dot com and all the other IRS "partners" that you somehow need to go through.

Also freetaxusa.com; a legit and almost free tax filing service, which is much less evil than TurboTax and Intuit.
Post reply on HN