Digital Design Principles from the UK Gov | Hacker News Reader

Digital Design Principles from the UK Gov

gov.uk

112 pointstilt34 comments

I'm really impressed with the gov.uk project and have been following it for quite a while now.

We've been taking their lessons and applying them to a small municipal site we're building -- topic pages like their VAT example, flat document structure, really robust search. At first we were unsure how many lessons from a national government would apply to a village of a few thousand but it's turning out really well so far. It's a liberating data model in that we spend less time worrying about hierarchies ("is this for businesses or residents?") and more time curating content based on what users will need (e.g. what pages should be drawn into the residents' topic page in the springtime before an election).

They've also got a bunch of their code on GitHub: https://github.com/alphagov

Great to hear our model's been helpful. Do let me know if/when there's anything to look at as I'd love to see how it's translated.

If someone asked, I would say this is what I've spent the last 15 years educating myself to learn.

It might all seem simple, but take none of this for granted. If your work adheres to the concepts they've laid out, you will begin to make the world a better place.

Bravo, gov.uk

I met one of the team on the train once (Jordan I think?) and he seemed like a passionate young guy. I hope the project is a huge success.

Interesting site. I wonder whether the GDS team have any thoughts on how to reconcile some of this advice, and indeed their own site, with the EU cookie rules?

It seems the GDS also has a document floating around[1] that talks about implementing the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations on public sector web sites. This in turn cites ICO guidance[2] that says the Information Commissioner is "unlikely to prioritise" regulatory action against sites for using first party analytical cookies.

On the other hand, there is nothing in the actual Regulations to exempt analytics as far as I can see, and that same ICO guidance quite clearly states that "A first party analytic cookie might not appear to be as intrusive as others that might track a user across multiple sites but you still need consent". Moreover, using a service like Google Analytics, which relies on third party cookies and tracks users across sites, seems to have been squarely in the crosshairs of the EU authorities when they wrote the Regulations.

I'll be the first to agree that the current rules are not the most helpful idea I've ever encountered, and I'm about as convinced by the mess at the top of the ICO's own web site as anyone else, apparently including the webmasters of just about every other UK government web site. Still, as long as the Regulations have the force of the law and as long as the moratorium on regulatory action is due to end soon, it seems odd that the GDS is advocating the use of tools like Google Analytics.

[1] http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-impl...

[2] http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/latest_news/2011/~/media/document...

I really like this project. One of the few things that the government seems to be getting right at the moment.

If you've not already seen them, the BBC's design guidelines are also very good (though obviously somewhat different in scope): http://www.bbc.co.uk/gel

The BBC approach has definitely influenced our work on these principles and there's a lot of great thinking captured in them.

Ben Terrett (GOV.UK/GDS Head of Design) talked about that a bit in one of the blog posts introducing our design principles: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/04/03/design-princi...

Huh. Apparently people are using "digital design" to mean graphic and webpage design. I've always associated the phrase with circuit design.

If you actually read the linked article you'll see it has almost nothing to do with graphic or web design, but rather digital design is used as a less highbrow synonym for "information architecture".

I did "actually" read the linked article. I also did a Google search for "digital design" to see how it's most commonly being used. I'm comfortable lumping everything I saw into "graphic and webpage design," with the assumed understanding that "webpages" are basically applications now.

When I accessed the site and saw the notice about using a carrot rather than stick approach I was turned off since I believed that stating that this was their approach just showed that this isn't the standard culture, however, that said, this is an excellent list of principles. I'm going to take notes. :)

Principle 0: use 72 points fonts.

It doesn't quite seem to match the Typography section.

Where it says "We’re using Georgia for body text." and that they're using em for sizing it appears to be styled as "Helmet,Freesans,sans-serif;" and using px+% (like YUI).

Also main.css has 7 declarations at the top of just the font-size for html object - which looks weird. Deleting all but the declaration "html {font-size: 62.5%;}" appears to right-size the fonts for the page.

I can't see where the web-font is supposed to be being downloaded either but I've only taken a quick glance.

Edit:

Looks like it's browser specific - this is FF11 on Linux. Somehow not applying the @media declarations correctly? Also looks like the little script isn't giving me the fastfonts css.

Thanks, I'm also F11 on Linux and wondered why no one else seemed to shudder at the huge text.

If you could email a screenshot and your browser details to govuk-feedback@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk someone will have a look at that. thanks!

Thanks, done.

The font size is responsive, try re-sizing the browser. The font scales.

I shouldn't have to re-size my window; I like my browser maximised.

I'm impressed by those design principles, even more so because they come from a government agency.

Measured by these principles UK government IT is light years ahead of the crap you've to cope with in Germany.

Er, I assure you it's not. This is a brand new site from a brand new team to try and clear up the mess that is government websites. There's hundreds of them just now.

Sure, having such principles and applying them is something entirely different but at least they've recognized that there's something wrong with their IT projects, which already is a huge leap ahead.

this is well written and quite interesting... unfortunately the initial pink dialog box distracted from the content.

Holy crap, much of this makes sense. Who are these people and what have they done with the real government? I'm not falling for it. Must be a late april fool.

Unfortunately, the amount of difference this kind of thing will make is minimal. For services supplied to Government, the decision making for anything non-trivial is made at appointment after tender: and these principles aren't embedded into procurement.

It also won't apply to the various Quangos, whose spending is publicly funded but nowhere near as transparent as direct Government spending.

There have been a similar set of open source principles in Government for something like six years now. They made practically no difference.

There's definitely been a lot of good thinking and guidance around the government for a long time.

The real difference here is that the Government Digital Service is empowered to actually build some of this in-house and so the principles are emerging from actual practice. We're also able to get involved in some procurement processes very early on and work with the appointed suppliers. We're also hoping that other people putting them into practice will come back with feedback we can incorporate to make them better and illustrate them more fully.

Getting these principles thoroughly embedded is going to be a long journey, but they're a far cry from being just another good practice document that'll be ignored.

I agree that there has been loads of good thinking around the government, I was just unaware that any of it had managed to filter inside.

While you are at it, can you try and get the whole government onto github so we can fork it ;)

Not sure about the whole government :)

But we're getting most of our code up there and beginning to convince others that code funded by taxpayers should be released as openly as possible.

We've received some interesting pull requests along the way, eg. https://github.com/alphagov/calendars/pull/1

I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this.

Any chance on getting similar standards applied to the ordinance survey data?

And you might add make sure any charging method is fit for purpose - I am trying to use Companies House data and they are insisting that we set up a direct debit.

HINT! FTSE 100 and FT Global 500 company's do not set up direct debits when they buy services it has to go though our accounts department in the normal way.

> Unfortunately, the amount of difference this kind of thing will make is minimal.

Not true at all.

gov.uk is up and live right now in beta, and I have already used it to look up things about my taxes, some legal stuff for a friend, and visa-related things for a foreign acquaintance. It took no time at all; I put in the general search term, and the top hit is a simple, beautfiul page containing exactly the information I'm looking for, with links to all the resources I might need. Gov.uk is amazingly good. I am a guy who enjoys finding fault, especially in technological matters, but I would not change a thing about the current gov.uk site (except get rid of the beta warning).

So no, these principles are not binding for anyone else, but they're already making a difference. I hope that when people see how good government sites can be, they'll start demanding improvement. Either that or gov.uk will eat everyone else's lunch because people prefer to use it.

I share your astonishment. The headline "...from the UK Gov" lead me to expect a comic disaster worthy of The Daily WTF, but this is really good stuff.

It's not exactly by the UK government. It's by the team of actually really smart people they hired to make a replacement for directGov.

It is full of excellent advice. But, you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Somewhere along the line my fear is that it'll get forgotten and bad practice will start slipping in. That not everyone will be singing from the same hymn sheet. That person A's interpretation of something is not going to be person B's. That involves training and vigilance. Adherence to one's own standards. Frankly, this isn't something I associate with Government IT projects.

It is really good stuff. But I'll reserve judgement on it till I see it translated into real-world results -- one way or another.

Slightly off topic, but relevant in this discussion.

I worked in IT in local and central government in the UK, all departments of which I was in would have completely ignored these guidelines for their own petty reasons of security, people skills, costs(!), supplier lock-ins etc

Neither does this address bigger picture stuff such as supplier favouritism, lack of single systems across multiple councils (eg council taxes) open hostility to open source, total lack of fair tendering or the fact most IT spending is authorised by people who's only qualification is they studied history at the same college in Oxford as the CEO or go to the same golf club.

I could name several examples of the above from the security services but would probably be immediately arrested because of that pile of steaming shit called `the official secrets act'

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