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Comment by zurgax | Hacker News Reader

Depends which bit you look at in my experience, some of the home office stuff (especially around visas and immigration) still manages to be obscure and is sometimes defective. Perhaps a sufficiently misanthropic department can always get its institutional culture to bleed through the standardised stylesheets.

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I don't know about your specific example, but there's some stuff GDS hasn't touched (yet?) and it shows. The 'modern' stuff that has that consistent design across departments, awesome accessibility etc. is all great IME.

Devil's advocate though: I know someone who works in tax (for a private firm of accountants) and hates it. Too dumbed down, and the bar at which they need to reach out to HMRC for guidance or some other resource is just too low.

I find it often ends up linking through to actual legislature, so perhaps it's just something in the middle that's missing, the 'technical reference' level.

Yeah some stuff hasn't been migrated yet but it's pretty rare in my limited experience.

Regarding your devil's advocate example, it's obvious a power user (i.e. tax pro) will have different needs than a layman like me, and it's clear that the sites are built for the latter, which makes way more sense as that's like 99.999% of the users anyways. The power users are probably so rare that just forcing them to phone in makes sense.

GDS[1] and HMRC[2] don't have much in common besides the fact that HMRC uses GDS's design system.

[1]: https://github.com/alphagov [2]: https://github.com/hmrc

I don't work (and never have) in the public sector, but my understanding was that that's essentially true of any department; that GDS operated like a sort of slightly dictatorial contractor that also provides some common infrastructure and design system etc.?

Happy to be corrected, for the purpose of this thread though it was the design system I'm talking about anyway really though.

It seems that technology-wise, there is more proximity between GDS and the other departments, which is what I was alluding to. This is based on my observation of the various github repositories, with no insight into how the work is organized.

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