A bold new look for the Gov.uk homepage | Hacker News Reader

A bold new look for the Gov.uk homepage

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

63 pointsjohneth71 comments

For some reason, the best government portal I've found so far is in Russia: https://www.gosuslugi.ru/ - you can even volunteer to serve in the army in just 3 clicks!

But apart from that it's awesome: services are well organized, there's an AI chat bot that can help you locate them, there are portals to the services provided by the local authorities, and the overall design is great.

Ukraine has an _application_ instead: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ua.gov.diia.ap... - it's great, but it's a freaking app.

It'd be interesting to compare government websites in multiple countries. I know that Estonia is also pretty good, but I've never used it.

why compare Russian and Ukrainian government portals? btw I can't read Russian or Ukrainian but found this https://diia.gov.ua/ i think it's just a web portal version of the Ukraine app you linked?

> why compare Russian and Ukrainian government portals?

Because I lived in both countries and I have the first-hand knowledge of both services?

> i think it's just a web portal version of the Ukraine app you linked?

Some services were accessible only through the app back when I was using it. It also provides some nifty features like taking photos for documents.

First impression: Well, they certainly don’t care about "prefers-reduced-motion" and everything moves, sometimes in reaction, sometimes by itself.

That's a really nice design. It makes it sort of obvious how austere and unambitious the supposedly awesome gov.uk design actually is.

The page doesn't load for me, I'm stuck at some captcha/anti-bot thing; I tried checking the console for any errors and found there's a debugger trap.

Really odd.

The UK government website team is great which makes it all the more painful that they are not making public service websites like NHS websites better. I recently moved and had to switch GPs: every GP website is different, every GP uses a different private company to deal with its online bookings. This should all be standardised and nice, why isn't it?

Because most GP surgeries are private companies.

Impossible! Only America could have such a thing!

It's the worst of both worlds, what people have described as a "playing at shops" market: the surgeries are private, so they're all little businesses with inefficiencies and poor IT, but they look and feel like a poverty-striken government service. Many have Squid Game appointment systems (rush the phone at 8am precisely and hope you get a slot). The user does not acually pay money at the point of service.

NHS dentistry is a lot more .. honest about "we don't have any NHS appointments, but you can have the same service from the same person at a higher price, in which case we do have an appointment".

I have known GPs to try that too, although it is much rarer and I do not know anyone (even in London) who has been completely unable to find a GP (one person did have to ask the NHS to find her one willing to take her though).

The worst of both worlds would be all of those problems + a bill that bankrupts you at the end. Which is, for what it's worth, what the US is like. The US medical system is also ludicrously oversubscribed and has insane wait times for lots and lots of routine health things.

> The US medical system is also ludicrously oversubscribed and has insane wait times for lots and lots of routine health things.

The number of doctors per capita in the US increased a lot for decades[0], but stalled over the past 10 years. I wonder if the blame lies at the AMA's feet.

For what it's worth, my personal experience with routine medical care hasn't been too bad in three (very different) states, though it's unclear to me what my expectations should be. It seems like the US is worse than average for primary care wait times and better than average for specialist wait times among developed countries[2].

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2020-2021/DocSt.pdf

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/186092/active-physicians...

[2]: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....

NHS.uk is brilliant, but yes, individual GPs (and I think the different NHS regional bodies, whatever they’re called), are a hodgepodge.

I think the plan is for each GP's prescribing system/appointment system to export enough data that you can just use the NHS app for your needs. i know I can book appointments through it. Obviously doesn't help when the GP is still sifting through paper records. But those are few and far between.

Hm, I'll check that out. If that is the plan then all GP websites should be required to advertise the NHS app instead of the hundreds different private booking companies.

NHS practices are private businesses, which are contracted to provide NHS services.

That's why there's the complex business of 'partners', which buy into the "business".

Ahh, so another thing that can be blamed on the privatisation of organisations that shouldn't be privatised.

I think GP practises were always privately owned?

Not privatised. GPs have always worked like this, since the foundation of the NHS. They were never nationalised in the first place.

IIRC GPs refused to be NHS employees, so the government compromised and agreed to pay existing private GPs to treat NHS patients.

The thing that's changed in recent years is who "owns" the practices. Traditionally they were owned by the senior GPs, they became partners (owners) in the practice they ran.

Now increasingly as older GPs who are partners in prentice's retire they sell their practice to privet equity backed groups. GPs don't want to buy into a practice anymore.

The result of this is significantly worse care and service as the PE backed groups try to extract profits from the system. It's an attractive deal for PE, guaranteed income based on patent list size, and an opportunity to cut costs to make a profit.

> GPs don't want to buy into a practice anymore.

Why is that?

Doctor's practices have always been private businesses. It was the NHS that pseudo-nationalized them by making the government the only paying customer (more or less). The doctors recognized the dangers and didn't want it, so Bevin famously had to "stuff their mouths with gold".

>This should all be standardised and nice, why isn't it?

The prevailing opinion in government is that services are better when they are organised locally.

This is obviously wasteful and results in duplication and hundreds of organisations (e.g. councils) all doing the same thing in a different way.

It's absolutely wasteful.

The disadvantage of the opposite is that if everything is nationalised into one giant org, it could become too big and become an unmanageable and slow monolith (which is why it was decentralised back in the 90s).

So... the first thing that jumps to me is that the site's title now takes half of your screenspace?

I don't like that trend, but at least it's only the homepage.

But have you seen the font sizes many (most?) folks 60+ use on their mobile devices? This is an accessibility choice, and it makes sense.

Do these folks now see single characters or will this adapt?

This uses `rem`s for font sizes, so it will increase if you increase your system font. This is what it looks like if you set 32px as default instead of 16px: https://i.imgur.com/amr8t8Q.png

great point - i spent seven years in customer facing banking which included helping people with the mobile app. nearly everyone over 50 had large font sizes.

Perhaps, on mobile. But why should it take so much space on a huge monitor?

How important is gov.uk's tagline? It seems like making the content larger and on screen is more important than having a HUUUGE tagline.

The three-line “The best place to find government services and information” doesn’t make sense when screen space is scarce due to large fonts.

In addition, old folks tend to have difficulty finding information when they have to scroll down, especially when there’s no indication that there’s more below the fold (e.g. formerly scroll bars).

There is no fold.

https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1946

I hate this trend, it's a waste of space and doesn't help those with mobility issues that have to keep scrolling down all the time to find what they need.

There are good reasons to do this on mobile:

1. Phones these days are tall. It can be difficult to reach the top of the screen. The height of the screen is great for reading content, but it makes sense to load the initial navigation pieces mid-screen.

2. The barrier introduced by scrolling is much reduced my mobile. It's trivial to flick your thumb up to raise the main content to takeover the full screen.

The key is to ensure adequate information density after the initial scroll.

How about just the blue horizontal bars with white text trend?

https://peazip.github.io/

https://www.izarc.org/

What prompted this standardization of look? Im seeing it all over now. The fact that I could find two archive utility websites, as example should speak to its ubiquity.

GDS gets lots of love here but if you actually try and use the pages for things like HMRC and Companies House you quickly find it's lipstick on a pig and some horrible mess of legacy systems underneath with lots of bugs.

For example, if I want to update company information, the wizard type thing for it rejects my auth. If I use it's password reset function, it successfully changes my password but then rejects my new auth. Instead I have to find a log-in page for an entirely unrelated action and then navigate from there to the page that will let me edit what I need.

I reported it and they just gave some flannel that it was a temporary fault but it still behaves like this years later. The system is crap and their response to bug reports is crap too.

Good description. Some year ago I may have worked on part of an auth solution for HMRC and the main problem for auth is summed up perfectly with https://xkcd.com/927/

There is basically many legacy and partial rewritten auth services and abstraction layers across gov.uk. Some parts are actually good but it is confusing which funnel will trigger which auth flow. Not helped with several huge maintenance contracts to large consultancies that have no interest letting go of their legacy service.

I agree. The interface is mostly nice but the functionality is not there.

Tax free childcare is the worst because you have to constantly interact with it. Go through the whole security dance including 2fa and 3 "security" questions every single month.

It asks you when you want to pay. Today! you say, tediously typing in today's date, instead of clicking a "now" button. Submit. "Nope! You can't do that." You try tomorrow. "Nope!" Ugh I guess it's a weekend.

Next you see how much you can pay in... "you have £0 left for this entitlement period". An entitlement period is 3 months. When does it end? God knows.

The most annoying thing is that they have a big banner asking for feedback, but clearly have nobody at all working on this.

This website is more complicated and unnecessary than the previous one where everything fit into one page.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/05/17/our-plans-to-improve-navi...

Nothing is important above the fold that doesn't help me as I have to scroll down all the time which wastes my time.

And everything is not categorised in boxes when scrolling down and it looks all over the place.

Did Gov.uk not think about accessibility and those with mobility issues having to keep scrolling to find what they need?

And lastly they need to remove Google Analytics, I don't understand why a government website needs shove Google data and violate our privacy.

They want you to search for everything I believe. E.g. letters from the government give instructions such as "go to gov.uk and search for <x>"

I don't feel they want you navigating things like directories or typing in URLs

I think it's a worse experience. The search isn't exactly perfect...

I have a lot of respect for GDS, but taking up more than 50% of the screen with a header (of quite little text, no less) is absolutely not 'easier to read'.

(For some perhaps - but then if your sight is that bad the rest is too small anyway.)

I will be zooming this way out, personally. Not sure if that's a collectable metric (i.e. if there's a JS API for 'what is the browser zoom set to') even if they wanted to?

Weeps in websites made by Gov of India and its National Informatics Centre. https://www.nic.in/

Oh my, is that real?!

It literally has Comic Sans on the page...

I mean, I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, they chose comic sans for its benefits for individuals with dyslexia?

I love that the Indian Governments idea of security for their Aadhaar portal is to block IPs outside of India.

One VPN later…

After having travelled in India and experienced Indian bureaucracy I have to say I was expecting a lot worse! I did a cheeky right click inspect and they're quite the fans of commenting out large swathes of html

Impressive. Between the cookie banner and the huge header, half the search box is pushed off the page for me. Even after dismissing the cookie banner, fully 40% of the page is wasted by the header.

A bold new thing would have been to make the system behind these homepages work. The nhs, hmrc, and wide range of other government agencies are in total chaos. Slapping a new look on top wont fix the underlying issues.

They're doing both.

They have a lot more control over gov.uk than all the other departments and systems. They take a _long_ time to improve

A long time and a lot of money. I am surprised this ui overhaul hasnt been sent to the pm family’s infosys.

Well, as far as government pages go, I have seen worse. Only tested it on Desktop.

The information density on desktop could be ALOT better, and that giant Title-Banner is just unnecessary. Page looks the same regardless of browser-preferred color scheme. That's about it with my criticism though.

With Brave-Browser Shields disabled, total page load for the landing page is 1.2MB, with shields active that goes to to just shy of 700kB. Still alot for a mostly-text landing page, but absolutely acceptable.

Search seems to be fast and works reasonably well. I tried "register a company", and the top results were very reasonably what I would expect a good search to return.

Subpages show a navigation bar on top. There is another toplevel nav-index at the bottom of the page, and in a top-right menu (which is actually labeled "Menu", a nice touch in a world of these awful hamburger-menu-buttons).

Page seems to also work fine with scripts blocked. This also brings the landing page load down to 412kB.

Content licence is clearly linked at the bottom of the page, with link to a detailed explanation.

-----

All in all, not bad. Not bad at all.

I'd like a bit more information density on desktop, and https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

What was the point of leaving EU if the cookie nonsense still takes half your screen?

On mobile it takes up the entire screen

Because the UK has the choice to keep good EU laws and dump the ones they don't want.

GDPR and cookies are good for the user. they give the user the choice to tell google etc to go away

For decades the UK was run by the sort of people who were totally A-OK with lots of stuff being ruled from Brussels, and who even wanted to accelerate that trend. Brexit took away the rule from Brussels and the constitutional crisis that saw 50+ MPs get kicked out of Parliament got rid of the most extreme elements of the Tory party at least, but neither suddenly replaced all the politicians and civil servants who never really wanted Brexit to happen and have no actual ideas for what to do with the new powers.

Getting rid of the stupid cookie banners may seem obvious, but there's a lot of obvious improvements that can be made like that. Sunak would rather host AI summits than actually make them, however.

On my screen the content takes only about 40% of the screen's width. HN on the other hand uses about 90% of the width, just as I would expect.

HN's 90% width is difficult to read for long-form content; anything more than a few sentences and your eyes are doing far too much work.

While HN uses 90% of the screen width each individual comment is capped to a fairly reasonable width. So the only long text is the title but in that case it is probably also fine because reading one long line is fine and titles very rarely wrap. So I think HN actually does a good job here. It just allows more space for comment nesting.

The HN width for a top-level (or fairly close) comment is far, far too wide for good readability. (The font is also way too small; I have to read at 133% or higher.)

Folks on HN know how to deal with this; Gov.uk users largely don't.

If you have ublock origin, you can use its "my filters" screen to reduce the width of comments:

https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/c39c83f2f97c3c6b1c307c...

I do not think that I need a a nanny to decide which content width is good for me. I can reduce the window size any time if I decide the content is too wide.

That's great and all, but sites get to pick a default. Picking readable ones is hardly down a trip to totalitarianism, and the UK government likely has additional legal requirements to serve folks a little less technical than us.

Looks great. When measuring impact ideally you would try these changes out individually instead of all at once, as that's really what will give you learnable lessons. But running such experiments is very time consuming, so I'm still happy with just this.

I know it's always said, but I really like the design of the site and wish more people would try to emulate it.

To be actually honest, I am always jealous of you brits for having nice guys who try to improve public funded websites and utilities. many, if not wast majority, other govt. bodies related to this field should learn a thing or two from you.

anyway, good luck with your current project.

Minimalist bliss. This design and IA always give me a big smile

They could be even more bold and drop the cookies which "require" them to have a consent banner which takes up half the screen

Notably absent from their screenshots too

Good job guys.

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