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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

UK government online services are, in general, excellent. Easy to follow, clear, reliable. Accessible from almost any hardware, wouldn’t surprise me if my calculator could render it. They put to shame most (all?) commercial sites I can think of.

I never felt in need of an FAQ on their websites.

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Agreed. The others here saying FAQs are useful should try gov.uk and understood why they shouldn't be needed. Using gov.uk you really get an idea a lot of research and testing has gone into the text phrasing and structure and the overall look and feel of the site. It's really excellent. I've since seen other countries' government websites copy many of its design aspects - the highest form of flattery. It's all organised by Government Digital Service, who produce "government as a platform" tools [1]. Once you realise that this group have managed to get various IT departments spread across the whole UK government to stick to a common set of tools and design rules, it's clearly an even greater achievement (see their "design system" [2]). All the more so given how large government IT projects normally turn out.

One more for good measure: the "design principles" page: [3].

[1] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/category/government-as-a-platform/

[2] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

[3] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

I think the backstory here is that at some point the government hired the team from theyworkforyou.com (and various other citizen/politics websites), who were clearly very smart and motivated. Wonder if anyone knows more details.

Interesting - it's clear that some talented people on a mission were put in the right place at the right time. I too would be interested to hear from anyone that knows more!

Fortunately there's an FAQ^h^h^h Story about that: "A GDS Story"

Introduction

The most common questions we’re asked by visitors to GDS are things like:

    “How did it all start in the first place?”
    “How did you get where you are now?”
    “How can I get my government/team/organisation to do similar things?”

This is an attempt to answer those.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/

Government IT projects just work better in the hands of internal teams than external consultancies. It's quite well-known that there's a whole industry of consultancies who make money taking on government contracts with low bids and intentionally expanding the budget by dragging their heels so they can extract the maximum amount of taxpayer money possible. Then the project usually fails and the process repeats.

I think there's also a dynamic related to pay that's not often discussed.

My observation is that in the UK, developer pay in the public vs private sector is not so wildly different than it is in the US.

The public sector can reliably get quite good staff.

that's also true, in a former life I was a contractor and while I didn't work in the public sector at any point by pure circumstance, a few friends did and they pulled a similar rate to when they were in the private sector.

I don't know any developers in the public sector, but friends in various civil service roles love the other perks. Decent pension. Loads of flexidays. One friend could almost work a 4 day week all year.

They all seem quite fulfilled, too.

Really disagree IME — there are great people at GDS, but they're doing it as a vocational thing and could make much more money in private sector.

Generally in the UK you have to go freelancing to earn the top of the market, but even permanent roles in private sector have much better pay for less responsibility. E.g. I saw some GDS "Head of" roles advertised with a salary band ~£60-80k.

AFAIK, they've also dialled back on public sector & they now offer defined contributions nearer to general private sector.

Yep, the divide is still there, I meant it's not quite so extreme. There are good people everywhere, but not having so much FAANG 4x comp vs .gov, maybe the alternative is contracting for 2x perm rate - it does make a difference.

Even if an external contractor is honest, bidding in the first place requires navigating such a complex process that essentially you're choosing from a set of companies who have designed themselves around being able to handle the bidding process.

This does not have as much overlap with designing a company around being to handle delivery as one might like.

For people who aren't British or UK-resident, a reasonable example would be working out how to move to the UK for a job — what visa to apply for.

Start at https://www.gov.uk/

I tried to do this and found it very easy. I suppose it would be a more stringent test for someone who is ESL and not very tech competent.

I am impressed with the careful and clear use of language to explain everything. It is just so easy to understand what is going on, where I am on the site, and what I need to know.

1 in 6 adults in the UK have poor literacy skills [0] so it's important for the Gov website to clearly give information to people who maybe don't have the best comprehension even in their native language, especially when it comes to government/legal matters.

[0] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...

A friend, tried to apply for a heavy goods vehicles driver visa; but he couldn't find a simple how-to, unfortunately.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58670792

Yes its good once your on the site but not having structured data FAQ's means your not targeting search.

Also looking at FAQ and PAA data does give insight into searches that your not providing information to your users - which you can quickly solve by adding FAQ's

Just blindly assuming that users will automatically know to go direct to the relevant .gov site is typical Civil Service Arrogance.

Don’t know about you, but use this thing called Google, does a really good job of landing me on the correct .gov.uk page almost every time, because the content of those pages is clear and simple enough that you can easily Google what you need.

No duplication, no stupid FAQs that link to thing i actually want. Just one page with the right content at the top of the Google search results.

The fact that people may not know which is the relevant site is why https://gov.uk/ exists.

Agreed. I had to negotiate HM Customs & Excise and pensions pages as a non resident. I tookaway three things

1) they are implementing material design rigidly but sensibly. Consistent style is used to denote active and passive elements.

2) if you comment in feedback to the design they respond. They will even try to respond about non web aspects of negotiating government: it may very coincidental but a year after I fed back we need better international banking paths to pay things british resident people can pay online but expatriates must do as paper cheques (no staples, plain pins may be used to attach cheque to covering letter) they implemented international funds transfer with IBAN.

3) it's plain English. They remorselessly police jargon out.

I was of this opinion until I caught COVID and tried to understand the rules for self isolation. I am quite an edge case in this regard. I found multiple pages saying the same thing with a different ambiguous wording. Some pages even explicitly contradicting each others. It's added a lot of stress to the whole self isolation + sickness situation.

To be fair to the GDS team, I think it’s the policy itself rather than the presentation of it that’s confusing and self-contradictory in this case.

Yeah, the first months were a mess. Contradictory instructions abound, even if you read all of the ordinances, you are still left unsure if you're on the right side of the law (or worse, simultaneously on the correct and wrong side of the law!)

I know you are replying about "gov.uk" being clear or not, but I would just like to add that a FAQ would probably not cover an edge case.

I put that more down to inept guidance given by the government rather than the excellent work of the folks maintaining government websites.

When the government doesn't even follow it's own recommendations and different MPs offer different opinions (and even the PM giving advice that contradicts his own earlier advice!!) it doesn't exactly make the job easy for anyone who needs to document the rules.

Says more about U.K. covid guidelines than GDS. I’m pretty certain our government has created deliberately ambiguous guidance so they can’t get called out for accidentally punishing people if fall into an extreme edge case.

In general, I agree. However, as someone with an individual tax account, 2 business tax accounts and one general purpose account, far from perfect.

I find the individual tax return very simple. Compare it to the misery they have in the US.

So is solving formats last theorem

The individual tax return in the US is very simple for 90% of people

I'm not sure about that 90% figure, seems a little high.

25 million people receive the earned income tax credit (i.e. they are poor), and are at high risk of audit https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-now-audits-poor-ameri...

9 million are expats, for whom US tax filing is a special type of hell

15 million are self-employed, which means lots of extra filing https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/self-employment-in-the-un...

putting us at circa 50M out of circa 167M returns filed https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-we...

means US tax returns are rather complicated for 30% of people before we start to consider high-income earners.

I just went to look up how many people file the 1040EZ, and realized that it doesn't even exist anymore. Today I learned.

Only something like 15-20% of Brits actually have to do a tax return in the first place. I did mine for the first time this year, and it was surprisingly easy.

So it is but I would strongly recommend you speak with an accountant before doing your own tax returns.

Indeed they are. It's a pity that more governments haven't followed their example or that having clear, easy to use government websites is somehow still a too high bar to clear for so many countries.

I'm not sure the average Brit appreciates how good these online services are, on account of never having to use the "average" government website.

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