I love the look of the little or divider. Nice touch.
One thing they've been doing lately is formalize many things into well-designed flows that divide the process of seeking or entering information into discrete numbered steps. It's implemented across several departments, so I guess they must have standardized on a common UX.
Previously, the digital portal required that you sign into the portal, click "New form", find the form (requiring a search among thousands of forms), open the form, fill out the fields and occasionally add sub-forms, and submit it. Very straightforward, sure, but these forms can be complicated stuff with lots of conditionals ("if you answered 'yes' in field 12.3.1, enter the total sum here, minus the subtotal in field 13.1.5"), and if you're not sure which form to use in the first place, there's no guidance at all.
In the new UX, you're guided through each step, which asks you a question, and the answers guide the next question. You always see all the steps, so you can go back and change it, and each section is nicely collapsed as you move forward down the list. Even just "contact us" is implemented this way, guiding you nicely to the right place if you're not sure where to go to, say, amend your tax return.
My wife recently applied for a permanent residency permit, and the process was just a single wizard like this. Occasionally a step would do more complex stuff like ask to upload documents, but the whole thing felt completely linear, and once you reached the end, that was the whole application. There were some further "real-world" steps like showing up for a personal interview, of course, but all the paperwork was done completely online.
They do excellent work. Which is not something I find myself saying very often about a government related organisation!
It’s actually quite remarkable how good some of the UI is on many of our government websites. A lot of thought clearly goes into this design system. And it’s applied relatively consistency across all sorts of online properties too.
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[Continue]They seemed open to more questions per page where needed but their single page per question standard makes sense when you understand the need to support the whole audience for a lot of their sites. Stats suggest over 16% of adults in the UK have very poor literacy so in the interests of accessibility I think the page per question is a reasonable pattern.
It is just our love of PDF that is holding us back (really?, PDFs that are fillable on a computer but no web forms to avoid the save & send by email? (or print))
Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions.
Yes, this is very useful when you do not have or want to use a computer. But if you fill in a PDF form on a computer, better go for the web app whihc will be easier to read and has a higher chance to actually work (the govt PDF will always have that one weird field that cannot be filled).
> Also, you can save a filled out PDF (or copy a paper) to have a copy of what you submitted in your records, something that is impossible to do with most webform solutions.
It would be enough for the web form to send you a confirmation, making it also an acknowledgement of your request. We already have this for taxes for instance.
Meanwhile, PDFs internally can be as accessible as JPEG in some cases; difficult for screen readers because it's optimized for screen display and printing. Sometimes PDF are not even searchable, you literally have vector glyphs and not "letters" inside.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-standards-fo...
Although PDFs are of course nice if you want to download it and save somewhere as a user because it's guaranteed to work and 1 file has everything. Downloaded HTML might have all kind of weird issues if it was constructed with fancy "modern" techniques. Again, proper server-rendered plain HTML+CSS for the win, perhaps with everything inlined if form is expected to be saved on disk.
But you can also get away with not doing it, so it will not be done.
This is how covid vaccine status is handled today and it works great.
During the Covid lockdowns people were allowed to go out for a number of specific reasons, like in most countries. Of course the French administration decided that this required people to fill a specific form to select the reason, to sign the form (along with name, date and place of birth, address, date of time person left home), and to carry it with them in case police stopped them... After some time they did deploy an electronic version (on smartphones, but that's still a form) but it's the very idea of doing something like that that is symptomatic of the mindset.
French business isn't any different in my experience.
Paper has advantages.
This was literally a piece of paper, but they managed to make it difficult to understand.
On the other hand, I must say that the police is human here as well and when you had almost the right papers and obviously were not trying to play the system they were very understanding (at least where I live)
France traditionally required a letter (un petit courrier), you got weeks later a paper response and so on. If you did not get a response, your letter may have been "lost" (where, it is a mystery).
At least now with the integrated messaging system on some govt platforms you have a trace.
What we are missing is integration. Each entity has their own system, with their own messages. We have a common login system at last (France Connect) but it is not a unified identity system (just a way to use one of the 5 or 6 "official" systems to connect to a new application).
Then you have the problem of answers: you send an email, and receive a letter. To which you cannot reply back.
When I look at countries such as Estonia or Poland, I envy their digital approach. Poland for instance has an app that will download all your key information: id card, driving license, the car papers, your visits to the doctor, the drugs prescriptions, the medical results - everything. Of course, if this is hacked it is a problem but I would like to have at t least the possibility. In France I have to have a huge pile of papers for everything.
It doesn't even need to be modern. Just usable.