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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

GDS have done a fantastic job of what you might call "government UX", by getting people with the right technical ethos in charge. HN would approve of their minimalist, functional, responsive approach.

Letting govt agencies who don't know what they're doing go out and tender for private sector building of internet services would be a disaster; they'd be oversold six ways from Sunday. Treble the cost to build the same thing three times for the three mobile platforms? Sure. Given that 99% of the stuff is simple secure form-filling, it doesn't need to be more than a web page.

I can file my taxes or renew my driving license online. The system works.

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> Letting govt agencies who don't know what they're doing go out and tender for private sector building of internet services would be a disaster; they'd be oversold six ways from Sunday.

You mean like this? $1.4 million for an app that chooses left or right.

http://www.geek.com/apps/tsa-paid-1-4-million-for-randomizer...

https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/tsa-randomizer-app-cost-336000...

Fun fact: The US Digital Service works closely with the GDS to bring over proven strategies to the US government.

Don't forget 18F (part of the new technology transformation service). 18f.gov

Can someone help me understand why "treble" means triple? I know it's technically correct, but why in the world would we use the word "treble" when triple is so much better? Even triple has the right prefix.

double -> treble? Only reasoning I can think of. Why do we use double? Who knows.

trouble was already taken

At a guess, it was probably "duo-ble" originally, but the pronunciation eroded from "due-wobble" to "dubbel" over time.

Treble comes from Old French, while triple comes from Latin. They mean exactly the same thing, and both words started as "triplus" in Latin. "Treble" is more commonly used in British English. In American English the word is used only in musical contexts.

And legal, but that's the common law coming through.

It's frequently used in law contexts as well in American English ("treble damages")

It may be more commonly used in British than in American, but even in British, i think it's less commonly used than 'triple'. For me, a native British speaker, the only things that are ever treble are twenties, whiskies, and clefs.

You must be upper-class. The only treble that working-class Brits know, is when you win the Premier League and two other cups in the same season.

"It may be more commonly used in British than in American"

What is this American you speak of? Perhaps it's the unique dialect of Spanish spoken in southern California? Or the Canadian French spoken in bits of northeastern North America? Or the dialect of English spoken in Belize?

And also fish hooks in American English (treble hooks). The demographics of people knowing the definition of treble would be an interesting slice!

By my mind, 'treble' is more associated with amount (3 x some value) while triple means three objects (3 of something). I don't know about dictionaries, but that's how I understand and use the words.

> Even triple has the right prefix.

Unlike, say, three?

It's basically the same word. Just spelling/pronouncation getting corrupted down the years as it went latin-french-english.

The top thread on HN is always a digression.

How could it not be? The site culture here encourages pedantry.

In my defense it was a comment on a comment, and I was genuinely curious.

Can you link to some favorite examples?

This is pretty representative: https://www.gov.uk/transformation/exemplars/apply-visa

Very clean uncluttered forms with clear direction.

I just sold a car and it took 120 seconds to do the government transfer. Kudos to that. https://www.gov.uk/sold-bought-vehicle

Overall, gov.uk is really well done; minimalistic but works.

Some things bug me though, as some services are only available during "open hours" (https://www.buysellvehicle.service.gov.uk/sell-private/vehic...): I didn't know that servers needed to sleep.

I recently came across a system in a bank that is available from 0800 to 1500 and 1530 to 1700. Apparently it not only needs to sleep, but it takes a tea break in the afternoon.

The person responsible for the system can hardly be held responsible when they're on a break, can they?

That'll be a web frontend to an old batch-processing system - the backend system will be configured to respond to interactive requests for information during the daytime, and perform some other process in batch mode after office hours have ended.

There's quite a few such systems still left in Government, finance, and certain very large companies. Even some "modern" systems - especially in e.g. stock management - will lock their database for hours at a time overnight. Part of the issue is that these systems implement a huge amount of informally defined business logic, making it very difficult to migrate off them.

Couldn't you run read only during those periods of batch processing with very little change.

Not if there's no transactions over the entire batch process - the system is very likely in an inconsistent state.

For companies house, say, my naive view is I'd duplicate the companies record at 6pm. There are about 4 million companies. That at least would allow access to basic company information. I can't imagine 4 million tuples of basic text, with indexes and such, would ever be more than 1G in size? Work on the duplicate and then replace the static version at 6am - I'm sure I've overlooked something, interested to know what.

Sure, you could duplicate the records and work on them - but these are likely to be old COBOL systems working on fixed-width records where the location of everything is hardcoded and the application is covered in global variables. If you're going to refactor one of these applications, you might as well spend the money migrating away from it (into a language the agency can actually hire for).

A possibly more doable approach would be to provide a read-only dump into an external SQL database at the end of every batch job for external systems which desire such a thing, but I'm not convinced there's a whole lot of benefit compared to the cost of doing so. There's no part of the agency which needs the information out of office hours, and it's honestly quite reasonable to say "come back tomorrow" in the few cases where the public might want the information out of office hours - note that the web interface is replacing having to call up the DVLA or visit one of their offices, which would have the same restriction.

It'd be much more reasonable to spend money and the time of the people who have experience with the system attempting to migrate off it. Hopefully they're trying.

Appreciate your analysis thanks.

Many sections of HMRC's website are now integrated into gov.uk. For example the PAYE (Paye-As-You-Earn) for employees/employers/agents. Have a look at the screenshots [1], the UX is superb. In a single page, you clearly see your gross income, your estimated income tax, and the history of pension contributions.

I see there are guidelines about coding in-the-open in Scala [2].

Or, have a look at the todo-list of the DWP [3].

[1] http://hmrc.github.io/hmrc-screens/

[2] http://hmrc.github.io/

[3] http://dwp-digital-services.herokuapp.com/

>In a single page, you clearly see your gross income, your estimated income tax, and the history of pension contributions.

And now so can Google thanks to gov.uk forcing use of Google Analytics on all government departments just because "it's private industry best practice".

Injecting untrusted third party javascript controlled by a foreign corporation into the tax forms of all citizens seems absolutely insane to me.

Wow, I haven't noticed Google Analytics is also injected in the "logged in" sections. That's insane!

My Mother is British and my Father is American. I grew up in the states but retain British citizenship. I started looking into getting my first British Passport just before their transition to the new digital services setup.

Before hand there was a mess of documents, pages etc to hunt through, applications to fill out, things to do, documents to include. After the transition there was a small little questionnaire that got me to a beautiful well designed page. That page then had links to all the various things I needed for my application.

There was even a web application that filled out 90% of the application for me and then provided me with a super nice PDF with instructions to submit it, and a check list of all the documents that I needed to provide with my application. It was excellent far better than the preexisting setup.

For what it's worth, think of a couple of things you might need to interact with the government on. Go to http://gov.uk/ and see if you can find the right website, and see how many clicks it takes to get there.

A couple of maybe odd examples to try:

* You're a Brit abroad, had a kid, want to register them as a British citizen (children of British citizens are eligible for it provided they're under 18)

* Renew a passport

* Renew your driving license.

One of the design rules mentioned in the article is that they don't rely on the home page. Instead they assume you get there from Google.

I just tried "renew uk driving license" in Google and got the right page as the first result. Same when I wanted to renew a passport recently, and for the birth example you mentioned.

There used to be one downside to this: scammers would sometimes get search results above the gov.uk one with sites that were not-quite-claiming-to-be the official site, and charge you extra for the "service" of applying on your behalf. However that seems to have been stopped now. Maybe HMG have had a word with Google about it.

I just had to renew my passport in Germany, which in involves making new (biometric) photos, having them print out at the shop, going to the proper authorities, who will then scan those photos and fill in a form with basic questions for you. I expected to be able to do all of this online by now, but it is definitely not possible in Germany yet.

So this seemed like a good test run for the UK gov site and the experience (as far as I took it) has been nothing but pleasant. That's how it should be done.

good. anything from the govment should not even be allowed to use colors or css. to prevent current party image association and such.

The dept logo on the header and that's it. leave the rest to the user's browser default.

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