Our plans to improve navigation on Gov.uk
gds.blog.gov.uk
gds.blog.gov.uk
They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.
They need some sort of analytics if they want to know how the site is used, but as a Brit who uses that site I'd really rather they didn't use GA, it's not appropriate, in my opinion for a government service.
Can you point me toward a more moral path that won't make it painful for SEO contractors to work with our startup?
If there's something better, or more informative than Google Analytics, I would obviously love to choose that!
There are several alternatives, you'll tend to find a lot of them advertised in the comments section here for any anti-Google Analytics post.
Umami is a great self-hosted alternative, which you can load under a subdomain to avoid it being blocked by adblockers. Most of the SaaS products end up on uBlock or other adblocker lists, even when they respect privacy, so this has been my go to option.
UserTrack is another great option we use and it continues to add great features. It's more than worth the commercial license fee. I had a conversation with Cristian by email this weekend, for example, about adding a feature. By this morning he had put together an example in their docs on how to add the feature to your site.
If you have google.com blocked, instead of asking you to unblock it you just get told "we can't confirm the details you entered are genuine".
Page in question: https://test-for-coronavirus.service.gov.uk/register-home-te...
Even the feedback form linked from there is "Protected by reCAPTCHA". Ridiculous.
(But they could self host)
GA is already approved and installable via a meta tag, so besides the warm feeling of fighting the giant, there is not too much upside and lots of questions to answer.
Upper stakeholders should connect the ideas : "Google data monopoly" and "other option for analytics should be available".
/rant's-off
But as others have said, you don't need a cookie notice of all you're using is necessary cookies.
Plus in the UK the ICO is underfunded, has a low enforcement record and is now sending menacing, misleading, letters demanding £40 from every UK business even though 90% of them don't actually need to pay the fee.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-fee/
I agree it’s a complete joke, they demand you pay, then you pay £40 annually to basically click yes on 3 questions saying you are holding consumers personal information correctly with zero verification.
"It should take about 15 minutes to complete this form."
Really? 15m to make a 40-quid payment? Please fix that (or better, don't charge a fee unless you're providing a service).
I just hope that at some point someone will calculate amount of time lost by clicking on these banners.
edit: Don't get me wrong idea behind is important, but practical implementation is just terrible. Either enforce it, exercise it or upgrade law to forbid any hint of user tracking, in the way it is implemented right now is just wasting people time and nerves.
This is illegal. Unfortunately, enforcement of the GDPR is laughable and everyone knows it, so the practice continues.
An exception: Disqus got in legal trouble in Norway for this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27060609
In my mind, thats more important than the potential data leak of someone knowing that someone running Chrome 95 for Windows took 8.6 seconds to click from "Tax info" to "Self Employed Tax Info".
Most analytics serve no other purpose than fill colorful dashboards for various middle managers needing to prove "impact".
And even not for that, analytics is a useful tool to figure out how people use the website.
In the UK, cookies used for only that purpose don't require consent. In their cookie policy, you can see they don't ask for permission to set such cookies - they rely on a different legal basis: https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/
It's interesting that one of the original principles behind gov.uk navigation was that it should be secondary to Google. The focus was on getting people to the right page from Google/Bing/DDG (where they start) without the need to navigate gov.uk itself.
I also find it odd that the problem they identified from the Discovery was poor information architecture but their solution is to redesign the navigation menu. The use of the word 'topics' is also interesting. Again, GDS and gov.uks intent was to make it easier to access services, but the word service or a list of services isn't represented in either the current design or prototype.
I don't have the links to hand but there was some really great thinking going into what it meant to provide government services online at the time.
Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost.
There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017
Unfortunately GDS is now mostly toothless in all honesty
A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines.
Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds
If this is true, then it proves everything that comes around, goes around. My first ever professional web development job was rebuilding the England and Wales Housing website[1], which was around the time that gov.uk was beginning its work to bring all central government online activity into the one site. The resistance from Government Departments - who all greatly value their semi-independence from the clutches of the Cabinet Office (and HM Treasury) - was immense!
I'm glad gov.uk won that fight: allowing each Government Department to have its own online presence, and their individual policies and procedures surrounding that presence, can never lead to a good outcome for people who have to access and use government services online.
[1] - Thank you, National Archives! https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20011030184204/ht...
it's @govdigerati
I think a huge contribution to that were IR35 changes in public sector that created a brain drain. Talent was replaced by poor quality service from big consultancies.
One thing that will always stick with me is one of the team leads telling me "we don't have customers, we have users" -- i.e. in the UK everyone has use Gov.uk for government-related digital information/tools/services. There's no competitor, therefore no customer choice. And they are well aware of this, hence their obsessions for the UX.
I really wish other governmental digital agencies had this same mindset.
They gave a presentation at Webstock in Wellington (almost a decade ago IIRC). That was certainly my impression of them at the time. Great to see how little has changed.
GDS is just another government bureaucracy at this point. Mores the shame.
As an aside, I am always saddened by how many jerks just let out all of their negativity into comments. I'm for free speech and don't object to its presence, just a little saddened.
Again one of the original goals was that services shouldn't require a persistent account. Unfortunately that makes sense in 80% of cases but misses some important ones (Universal Credit, Child tax benefit, Tax).
For whatever reason the people looking at accounts also got fixated on identity (you are Sam Smith) rather than authentication (you have X credentials and have accessed the service before) combined with the UKs aversion to an identity system and central databases (we actually have several) it resulted in Gov.UK Verify, which, last I checked works about 30% of the time.
Ultimately the big departments (HMRC) just built their own thing and created user portals which GDS didn't like... So everyone argued and no one fixed the actual problem.
I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. I wonder if they are doing this because they're the only people with an overview of the whole site, and it seems like a big mess to them? It may well be a big mess, but to me (and I suspect a lot of people) it doesn't matter. Like, most people dont want to hang around at gov.uk, you go in and do whatever you need to do, and then you leave. You're not browsing.
Generally I think the GDS era has been great, particulaly for covid they've had to throw a lot of things together very quickly (e.g. ordering tests by post) and its all just worked.
If you are self-employed or run a ltd company you do need to navigate and the phrase 'big mess' is an understatement.
I agree with your main point though, for a lot of everyday, non-business transactions, the site works well enough.
There is on other thing I find illogical on HMRC site, why do we need to register for each service online, waiting of some secret code? There is already username/password, and also SMS verification, also GOV knows what type of company/personal taxes we are registered for, why do we need to register separately for each service?
However, GDS has had good success in the past, so I hope they'll only push ahead with the rollout if the data shows that I'm an outlier.
I’ve come to believe that, aside from top navigation, hiding any info on a page is a usability no-no. Users know how to scroll and it’s the easiest way to discover information. Just make the pages taller and use more white space.
Edit: At least, exactly the desired behavior for accordions within the page, where, once you expand a section, you expect it to close again only if you click the section header a second time. It would be less suited for a dropdown menu, which needs to be dismissed if the user clicks anywhere else on the page - though there might be some way to make it work.
You are talking about gov.uk, right? Well, you can't 'continue' until you've started. I'm surprised someone has turned up here, admitting to being responsible for these sites.
But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website?
But I like having to have 3 different accounts to manage my tax affairs. I especially like how I can navigate around and end up back on a ten-year old version of the site with no way back.