Why Gov.uk's Exit this Page component doesn't use the Escape key
beeps.website
beeps.website
Pressing shift three times is clever… but way too clever. Even if you stick a giant popup saying "hit shift three times to quickly exit" I'm not sure anyone in a panic will remember—loads of people don't even know which key is shift, especially when there's three buttons on a keyboard that look the same and only two are the same. I've come across people who always use shift-lock and did't realise you could use shift for anything. I'd be interested to know what UX tests they actually did, and who with.
If I was going down the press a key three times, I would have gone with pressing any key three times apart from the number keys (plus an info box when you enter the page—"hit any key 3 times to quickly exit to the weather"). Most people, I'm sure, would mash the spacebar in a panic but if they missed then it would still work.
What I would have preferred to test would be 'mashing'/chording — pressing more than one non-modifier key at the same time, so a user could just smash a load of keys at the same time in a panic.
Going to the Weather page is a great idea, though.
Maybe you could normalize it by listening for triple-shift presses on all pages on the site (not just sensitive ones) and calling that a baseline of accidental events.
But, how do we know that events in the baseline are truly accidental? What if users learned the behavior and tried using it on pages where it’s not implemented?
There’s just no good way to get analytics on this feature without interviewing users somehow.
First of all. Not using escape key to escape is the standard for almost all applications since the 90s. Do you use escape to close the browser? A tab? your email client? No. All software converged on the idea that a close button was not a good idea, we are left with the actual button as a vestige.
Second of all, this software is designed for people in high stress situations where one of their main goals is to avoid detection, they will not only memorize the escape sequence, but they will likely have their finger on the shift key at all times.
I think as devs we often think of our site or application as the center of the user's universe, but I don't think users memorize the minutia of our applications like we think / would hope.
Also, I actually worked with folks in abusive relationships at one time, their actions are not as predictable as you might hope.
I'm guessing gov.uk is hoping that this will become some kind of standard, at least for British resources.
Jakob's law is a thing but I actually think in the case of GDS they are in the fairly rare position of perhaps being able to justify the hubris you speak of slightly.
Not only are they directly or indirectly responsible for the UI of a frankly staggering number of online services, they are also one of the most influential bodies - perhaps in the world - when it comes to this sort of thing.
For the user I think that still means asking them to memorize something odd for a very limited use case that you won't think of visiting any other government site.
I thought this was a tool that users specifically install in order to browse any content.
But instead it seems this is simply a feature so that users that browse gov.uk websites specifically can exit.
Really? I always hit "escape" when I get a popover on a website, and it often works.
Many TUI interfaces use it for "go back" or "exit" e.g. BIOS settings.
FTFA: `It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.`
This is the craziest part of this entire article to me. The UK Government needed to invent a whole design system that included an "ejection seat" button in case you're caught looking at UK Government websites?
Or does this button exist because one website in particular needed this feature?
Over design much?
> When to use this component > > Use the component on pages with sensitive information that could: > - put someone at risk of abuse or retaliation > - reveal someone’s plans to avoid or escape from harm > > For example, when a potential victim is using a service to help them leave a domestic abuser.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
IMO this seems quite well designed.
Not to close a tab or entire application, no, but to unfocus a field, close a modal window or ad pop-up, back in something like a Typeform, etc.
All your other suggestions fail for this reason too - you need a high level of confidence the person really intended to escape. I for example would mash the space bar three times to scroll down.
It should be normalized as a percentage of page views at the very least.
They’re basically saying “hey we added a big red button and people press it sometimes”. The button could say “fire lasers at my cat” and some amount of people would press it (whether intentional or not).
But it is one of those features that I turn off the second it annoys me 1 too many times.
They keyboard shortcut is just gravy.
Many large sites (eg The Warehouse [2]) participate by putting an icon at the bottom of their website. When clicked, a modal pops up with domestic abuse resources.
There’s a prominent exit button that closes the modal faster than a page navigation or finding the close tab button. Closing the popup returns you to a major website rather than a new tab page. And most importantly, your history contains no evidence you viewed the information.
window.onload = function(){}
Otherwise, it's fine.
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I genuinely can't imagine this helping anyone. I am completely open to being wrong though.
I do think there is real value in being able to report domestic abuse without leaving an obvious paper trail. Call logs can be accessed by the account owner, I imagine a lot of people don’t know how to clear their history or aren’t confident enough they can do it correctly, etc.
It’s some small amount of peace of mind for victims who file reports, and with a cost of “adding a fake social link and a devs salary for a month” I’m pretty okay with it even if it literally only helps a single person. Bandwidth well spent.
I spent about 30 seconds figuring out how to close it. The icon in the top-right? No, that goes to the start page. Perhaps the icon in the top-left? No, that goes to the main menu. Clicking outside the modal, like most other websites? Nope, doesn't work.
Turns out the close button is the half-circle at the bottom of the modal, which is exactly the same color as the rest of the modal. It's pretty obvious once you see it, but it took me way too long to find. They should've either placed it in the top-right like literally every other close button ever, or made it bright red so it's impossible to miss.
However I am extremely disappointed to see that the questions section of that starts out gender neutral and then basically does the usual "if you're a woman being abused by a man..."
There is still no support for male victims of domestic violence, whether the abuser is male or female. :/ it's not hard to cater to all cases, no wonder men don't bother - particularly when it's reported that male victims who resort to calling the police are most often the one handcuffed/detained when they arrive.
In before someone comments something that we've all heard before - it's not a competition, both women & men can be helped by the same system, regardless of supposed statistical likeliness, etc.
He talks about how child support staff (like reception for example) are, are not favouring of him. They see DV in his profile and assume he's the perpetrator instantly. He had to explain himself constantly, no doubt reliving trauma when he does.
He has been struggling with the courts to gain sole custody of his child.
And to top it all off all the posters around these places are, like you say, about women reaching out against their abusive male partners. Which IS an issue and IS statistically more likely. But you make a very good point about these systems being able to help both.
Be careful about your phrasing there. I hope the implied subject on both sides of the "and" is different. Women being victims is an issue, and women reaching out is significantly more likely.
Women reaching out is (obviously) not an issue, but is statistically more likely. Alternately, women being victims is an issue, but the statistical likelihood of women being victims is unknown, and we have good reason to believe there is significant reporting bias.
> men can be helped by the same system
That is just a misinformation! Calling police if abuser is a female, and you are a male, is a VERY bad idea.
Without police you only get some bruises. With police you get escorted in handcuffs in front entire neighbourhood, get fired from job, pay very expensive lawyers, get criminal record and possible prison time!
There is no way to fix that, just leave and drop all contact!
There was a study in UK that if a man calls the police for domestic violence, there’s 56% chances the police only interviews the woman, and 23% chances he’s threatened of arrest (with, I think, 3% or 10% he’s actually led to the police station, I don’t remember the specifics, but still higher than not calling the police).
In France, a sad sentence of the government hotline “Female violence info” mentions that 10% calls are from men. For a hotline with “female” on it. The report continues that, since it’s only 10%, it’s still generally violence against women.
So yeah. Let’s be honest. Men better not end up in need of help.
There is also the matter of history; if I load the demo page, click that button, and press "back" then I'm on the demo page again.
And of course it'll be in the browser history.
I have to question how practically useful this is. Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off. Or open private window and close that, which is a smart thing to do anyway.
Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
Overall this seems like a IE5-era solution that's pretty outdated and useless today. Perhaps even worse than useless because the implementation is so-so and protection it offers low.
Overall, I'd say telling people to use private windows and teaching then Ctrl+W is probably better.
> Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place. In a normal situation, this is true, but this is UI design for people in extraordinary situations. Their abuser may have taken their cellphone or other devices and may not have a choice in what computer they use or when they have access to it.
Nothing about this prevents private windows or Ctrl+W (assuming they have another window open so it doesn't look suspicious that they're staring at a blank desktop), it just gives victims a quick action they can take to prevent immediate retaliation.
Triple Shift that you can only on a single website is worse since you're even less likely to be able to use it in distress
Besides, as a site you can try to add typo-similar combinations for your "hide" action (like alt+w or win+w) instead of creating a totally different one
I'm just glad you're not in charge of this kind of services because although that might seem like an obvious thing to you, the reality is that the people needing that information the most are the ones who are the least likely to have easy access to a personal device with Internet access.
In particular, children and women in dysfunctional, abusive relationships are not very often provided with a smartphone and a data plan by their abusers.
I agree that the shift shortcut is unlikely to be of much use, but it's just one available method in addition to the rest.
This sounds like something which you have no evidence at all for claiming.
I'm not sure why you would be the quickly dismissive of something that would seem obvious to many.
Of course, the abuser was cheating the whole time.
So it does happen, contrary to what you claim.
My ex wife did not want me to get a smartphone and, in retrospect, it was because it let me keep in closer touch with family abroad (which is the main reason I have one at all). She also got very upset when I changed the password on my desktop some years previously.
I don't know how the relevant user is informed about the option/feature, but assuming they're aware it is a positive feature both in terms of thoughtfulness and execution.
Be interested to see the stats on how often it gets called
Why are you attacking the user instead of just focusing on the argument?
Sometimes I intend to do it, but it’s honestly usually just force of habit.
And "we need to do something for this" doesn't mean that this particular feature/button is a good idea.
Like I said, telling people to use private windows and teaching them Ctrl+W seems like a better solution to solve the same problem to me. You can have a widget with some basic tips, and you can even show the correct instructions based on the browser the person is using.
Then I saw your comment and realized I was entirely wrong about how I was thinking about this. I get it now.
Users probably don't want to attract attention by using a private window (which they may or may not think about using), and most browsers I've seen have a distinct appearance when in private mode.
Ctrl+W in normal mode has the issue of leaving a trail: Ctrl-Shift-T or similar will bring it back.
That also exists with this button: just press "back". Even easier.
This goes for everything. Place where you live. The food that is on offer. Work opportunities, and with that the ability to plan life. Even living large enough to have a private space, like offering your kids an undisturbed place to study or - like in the post - somewhere you can safely report abuse.
I have seen it more than once: if someone from a poor family grows up and does really well in school and in college and breaks with the life they had before that is usually not enough. Because when there is time to write a CV the kids from the middle class all had parents that made them do other things. Charity work. Play the trumpet with a youth orchestra that somehow got to play in Carnegie hall. Chemistry camp. Dancing with a youth ballet company at the met. The system is rigged from the start. True meritocracy was never a thing.
A feature like this takes a developer a short time to implement, and if it saves someones life or stops abuse it is worth it.
Merits are measurements, and society adapts to make those measurements a target.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
For the inequality of outcome to be fair and just, there has to be at least some kind equality of opportunity in a meritocratic society.
I've been using both for years, never had this issue ??
Yes, you should do that as well as understand that, for things like this, where you're providing information for vulnerable people across an entire population, your people are going to span a huge range of technical literacy and you will not be able to reach all of them in time. Give them the big red escape button with the special "dial 999" style memorable key combo as well as teach them everything else. But triage and do the "this solution works for the broadest number of people the quickest" thing first - the big red button.
I wouldn't be surprised if this will happen for anyone trying the triple-shift on a vanilla Windows install who doesn't actually use Sticky Keys, nor explicitly turn it off (ie a majority of visitors).
This risk is much worse than whatever layout differences and interactions with VoiceOver they observed for Control.
Edit - thanks to @jdietrich below there are some stats on this link, which shows a correlation between events you'd expect to increase the rush of domestic abuse, such as the Covid lockdowns: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/... I do wonder how they got those stats though.
Edit 2 - I'm so glad this got posted! I've been wondering about this for ages and it's really nice to get some evidence for its use. Reading through the comments has also solidified my thinking around "why don't people just close the browser window" - many people who use honour-based abuse services are very computer illiterate, don't have time to learn about incognito windows / (Ctrl | Command) + W, and can only snatch computer time here and there. Abusers can look back at the browser history, but if the choice is between being discovered on an honour-based abuse website or the chance that the abuser won't look at the history, the second is clearly superior.
Edit 3 - I really wonder about the three-press shift keyboard shortcut. Real lack of discoverability, and my worry would be that the lack of consistency across sites would lead to situations where people are on non-gov.uk websites and think that keyboard shortcut would work there too. Although I suppose the fact that the first shift press activates the button in some way does tie it to the presence of the button on screen.
Edit 4 - It doesn't seem to be in use on any relevant gov.uk pages. The pilot on the "check for legal aid" pages seems to have ended and it's not on the pages about domestic abuse.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
It does remind me of "boss keys" that old DOS games used to have.
> An honor killing (American English), honour killing (Commonwealth English), or shame killing is a traditional form of murder in which a person is killed by or at the behest of members of their family or their partner, due to culturally sanctioned beliefs that such homicides are necessary as retribution for the perceived dishonoring of the family by the victim.
> Methods of murdering include stoning, stabbing, beating, burning, beheading, hanging, throat slashing, lethal acid attacks, shooting, and strangulation. Sometimes, communities perform murders in public to warn others in the community of the possible consequences of engaging in what is seen as illicit behavior
> Often, minor girls and boys are selected by the family to act as the murderers, so that the murderer may benefit from the most favorable legal outcome. Boys and sometimes women in the family are often asked to closely control and monitor the behavior of their siblings or other members of the family, to ensure that they do not do anything to tarnish the 'honor' and 'reputation' of the family
> Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, says that honor killing is: "A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Islamic society. .. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. Honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility or reproductive power."
> Nighat Taufeeq of the women's resource center Shirkatgah in Lahore, Pakistan says: "It is an unholy alliance that works against women: the killers take pride in what they have done, the tribal leaders condone the act and protect the killers and the police connive the cover-up." The lawyer and human rights activist Hina Jilani says, "The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."
> Fareena Alam, editor of a Muslim magazine, writes that honor killings which arise in Western cultures such as Britain are a tactic for immigrant families to cope with the alienating consequences of urbanization. Alam argues that immigrants remain close to the home culture and their relatives because it provides a safety net. She writes that 'In villages "back home", a man's sphere of control was broader, with a large support system. In our cities full of strangers, there is virtually no control over who one's family members sit, talk or work with.'
Hopefully that expands on it. A rotten culture of "family values" that sees women as nothing more than baby factories and keeps them under control at all times, through intimidation, persecution, monitoring, and straight up state-sanctioned killing and blaming of the victim if they try to assert themselves.
What do they use frequently enough that they would learn about this exit functionality rather than just clicking a bookmark bar, closing the tab, or just switching the tab?
This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
+1. "Close tab" is more robust, well-supported and well-known.
It seems more likely a user will load an inoccuous page as a decoy, than learn triple-shift is a quick exit.
Still, interesting read, to hear the reasoning. Would like to see empirical evidence/user testing.
vs
<partner walks in> <nothing really special about a tab loading the weather> <you still live in fear but you're not getting physically abused>
My critiques were on the sad cases:
* Presses <Ctrl><Ctrl><Ctrl>. Wait why isnt this working? Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on another sensitive site that doesn't implement this. Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on a poorly supported browser, or after the functionality is removed, or after it conflicts with OS-level (it might not today, but who knows about future OS updates)
Either the abuser walked in while the person was still on the page with the big red button or not. It is not faster to press the big red button or shift 3 times than it is to close a tab.
Indeed.
Surely Ctrl+W (with a 2nd decoy tab already there and at BBC Weather) is 10x faster than finding and clicking a button on the page you're reading?
EDIT: another issue with the Exit This Page as implemented on eg https://www.camden.gov.uk/planning-to-leave-an-abuser - if you open it in a private browsing session, and click it, it sends you to Google, but of course there the first thing you get is the massive cookies pop-up. So wouldn't that be a bit of a red flag to whoever just walked in? :/
They see a page changing
Black eye
Their comment looks similar to any other comment on technical/UX matters, including yours and mine.
No, it’s telling people how they should behave, as you can see. It makes no attempt to step into the shoes of the user.
https://support.apple.com/guide/personal-safety/how-safety-c...
I assume there's a .gov.uk page somewhere that lists resources for people who are in abusive relationships. I imagine if an abusive partner walked in to find you reading that, that might set them off.
An accidental ctrl-Q is much worse, because closed incognito windows can't be recovered.
Firefox gave me plenty of scars over the years. CTRL-Q and CTRL-W are just two; another's the fear of the browser randomly going "updates have been installed, you're not allowed to do anything until you restart; shame about that unsaved work you had on the page we just blanked" shit that used to fly on Ubuntu.
(Maybe still does? I browse from Windows nowadays.)
How likely are you to know keyboard shortcuts?
As a UX designer, would you not want to make a big safe UX button that you need no prior training or experience of, that you can trust to help you get out of a difficult situation.
Footsteps. Oh shit. They’re coming back. Is it Ctrl-W? Or Ctrl-V? Oh fuck, he’s nearly in the room. Quick, where’s the tiny little cross to close the window… oh, wait, click that exit page button, or just quickly hit shift a bunch of times. “Oh yes, I was just looking at the weather for tomorrow. I was thinking about whether to put some washing out on the line…”
> just quickly hit shift a bunch of times
How would you even know about this shortcut you never use anywhere, let alone remember it in a time of stress?
This is a much more realistic user story than 99% you will ever read.
In principle, information about this could be propagated, if it's reliably available on UK govt sites at this point (I'm not sure if it is).
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/...
This is particularly the case for an honour-based abuse service (forced marriage, honour killings etc) that we work with for example.
The police, the divorce services, health services pages about contraception, abortion, sexual assault, LGBT youth services, etc etc etc. Think people who are already being abused, mostly.
Agreed. I suspect the number of people assisted by this button is vanishingly small, and outweighed by the number of people who don't get the information they're looking for because they accidentally click the button and can't find their way back.
Or the number of people harmed because the "exit this page" UI is on some pages only (for example, it isn't here on HN), and that is even more confusing for users who aren't tech savvy enough to realise its part of the site not the browser and who could come to rely on it.
Overall, I think this button is poor UX and shouldn't be used, even on pages with sensitive content that it is intended for.
Having said that, regardless of the key the guidelines on using this pattern say that you should explicitly inform the user of the feature before they first encounter it.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
2. It seems a bit weird to be concerned about UI patterns if you earnestly want this component to do its job.
3. If it's that important, the Escape key event can be added after DOMContentLoaded. Warn content authors to not overuse the component, and it would be fine. You can still have the triple-Shift key event for those cases that they specifically call out.
- they don’t have a smartphone, or it’s been taken off them
- they’re forced to use a desktop because their abuser doesn’t want them to do things in private easily
- plausibly mobile has something different entirely, given that this appears to be desktop focused.
- They mention escape is intercepted by most browsers to stop loading, if someone is interrupted midway and panics and starts hitting escape, they could plausibly end up _stuck_ on the page they were trying to hide from their abuser.
2. I don't understand this comment. Surely this is a perfect example of when you want a component to work as well as possible, including UI research?
3. The mAjor point here is that the functionality of the escape key is ambiguous. It can do various things in various contexts, so you can't rely on people to use it for that, and visitors can't rely on it because it might just e.g. minimise a maximised window on MacOS, leaving the website on-screen.
But for the most part I agree that this is silly and unnecessary. Ctrl-W is a better solution and this would really only make sense if it also scrubbed the site from the browser's history at the same time. In fact this solution is worse because the abuser can just hit the "back" button when they see BBC Weather loaded.
Most of that rich content is obstructed by them bloody cookie warnings, on first visit. That’s not a very convincing simulation of “I’ve been looking at this page for the last 5 mins!”
I don't think gov.uk would admit that they want to exclude those users.
Everyone on the nearby continent has some accented characters and possibly both English and their national keyboard installed.
Incidentally, this is a major complaint with smartphone OS designers that only speak English and don't realize there are places where people mix languages daily. That predictive spell checker should be configurable to accept more than one language at a time...
"As a result of advertising people being bastards, more and more of what the web platform can do is ..."
Not sure if you know this, but it might be of interest: in the UK speech, within the House of Commons (maybe the Lords too? I'm unsure) is specifically protected from defamation actions. An MP could stand up and say "Mr Smith murders kittens in his spare time" and Mr Smith would have no ability to sue. However, this does not apply to MPs outside of parliament.
We preloaded Kohl’s (a department store sort of retailer in America) and fiddled with the safety exit button to make sure Kohl’s came up really quickly. If we would have worked on the site longer, I would have a done a rotation of a couple of different stereotypical shopping websites. (Kohl’s was picked by the organisations’s executive director who, unfortunately, had plenty of first hand experience with domestic violence.)
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
One cool thing is when you first hit the shift key once, the "Exit this page" button expands vertically, and shows three small circles, one now filled in. So it makes it obvious that hitting the shift key did something related to that button. So if you hit the shift key for any other reason, you'll see something happen.
But still, I agree it seems a little hard to discover.
If the cursor is in the textarea, tapping Shift without any other keys will add 1 circle, but if that wasn't the 3rd one, any additional Shift will remove all the circles and they don't come back. You have to click outside the textarea and hit Shift 4 times to trigger it (the first one doesn't register any circles).
It seems like they tried to prevent accidental triggers (if you have 1 or 2 circles and hit anything except Shift they all disappear, and if you hold Shift while hitting another key you don't get any in the first place), but got something slightly wrong.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
But I agree the end result feels like an over thought process that comes up with something completely counter intuitive that someone would seem to need to trigger at a moments notice.
To some extent this seems to be one of those "well they did something" solutions that for a lot of work, provides near zero value.
But also a better way would be to ask the user to open a second tab (or another app) so that it's not the only tab/app.
Still beats remembering a unique shortcut.
If you are with someone who cannot know what you are doing, who has appeared suddenly, you are quickly closing what you're doing and, yes, you will be looking at a blank page without some sort of escape mechanism like this. And if it's sudden and unexpected, you might not have been anticipating needing to pop open some decoys.
This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
> If you have enough time to just go and open Solitaire, you have no need for an escape button.
You don't have enough time to complete that, you do that not to appear just staring at a blank screen. Activity of opening Solitaire is enough in itself.
> who cannot know what you are doing,
which is easier achieved when the browser is closed vs. when a browser is opened, since in the latter case it's easier to think about checking "previous" browser history
> This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
Indeed, so much so that this overengineered-but-underthought solution has none of the supposed benefits under the conditions people come up with to defend it
In almost all cases, it's not just so obvious that the experts in a field are so misguided. It's that there is complexity and depth that is not perceivable at a glance.
This is actually not true. Having a browser opened leads to the thought of "let's check the previous page/browser history" easier (since the browser is right there to remind you) than a situation of "oh, I've just logged in" or the activity of doing anything else leads to the thought of having to check a browser
In virtually all browsers, pressing Escape while a webpage is loading stops the loading process.
It’s pretty weird that pressing the Shift key is considered more of a user interaction than pressing Escape.
Everything is so bad and requires so much though to even get to "decent"! Our current standards are so low, because we can not afford higher standards — but when paying attention to the world, anywhere, it does not even take effort to find an instance of a (systemic) design problem that could be fixed.
Granted, reconfiguring our system to pay for that is an outstanding issue, but I don't think that's because it requires much fantasy to find things that could be done and that would be appreciated by us and the people around us.
> You can quickly leave this website by clicking the “X” in the top right or by pressing the Escape key twice.
And it does have some kind of Escape key functionality.
The gov.uk page has some listed hotlines by nation (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help#g...), but none of them are actually using that exact red button:
- https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/ uses green bookmark in bottom right and redirects to google.co.uk
- https://dsahelpline.org/ has a green area at the bottom right
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
Instead of introducing a new (hidden) shortcut, I would rely on clear visual cues and intuitive (meaning, already common) interactions. E.g. opening the form in a modal; clicking anywhere outside of this modal closes the modal and loads the weather page. The clickable background should be clearly identified as a special feature, e.g. tiled text "exit page" all over it.
1. Lots - if not most - traffic is from mobile these days. Most people already know the fastest way to exit a page on mobile - the home button/action. Adding anything else is just adding confusion. 2. Unless you are going to great lengths - ie pre loading a page and maybe dropping parts of the dom and dealing with evidence in the history - are you actually doing anything much to help the user exit your site? How motivated/skilled a person are you defending against? 3. If your exit button is just a glorified link or redirect what is the point? It will still be in the history and if they have slow internet they could end up just staring at your site while the redirect loads. 4. For some organisations having such buttons is more about "showing" they have it than how useful it actually is to the user. 5. I have tried to push for a page/link to basic internet safety information. Educating visitors would be much better than trying to engineer their personal security day. 6. I've struggled to find good academic/research work on such features. Seems like it would be a good area for a UX researcher but I've not found much actual work.
Other methods for leaving the site still work. Even if the button isn't the best way to leave the site, if it helps in more cases than it hurts then it's a net benefit.
These buttons are essentially panic buttons, and when a person is panicking the big red exit button might end up being the only exit they can find.
My gut tells me that the big red button might not even get noticed.
But I can imagine that people accessing information about domestic abuse might not necessarily have regular access to internet connected devices, they might not know the best ways to act under stress. Maybe they won't notice the big red button, but maybe there is some chance that they will notice it, and therefore some chance it will be beneficial to them in that moment.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
I’m not an expert in that topic at all, so I may not use the preferred terminology in all instances. Sorry."
What the hell is this?
> I'm an agender (I use it/its pronouns), asexual, alterhuman robot. I'm also a shapeshifting critter on the internet.
This person has absorbed the idea that it's a sin to use natural language to talk about normal phenomena, and the idea that it isn't possible to know what kind of language wouldn't be sinful, but not the idea that maybe that isn't a desirable state of affairs.
The language apology-in-advance does feel a bit like overkill though. I'd suggest a generous interpretation is that, given how things often work these days, they don't want people to get caught up in discussions about terminology and just want to focus on the tech.
Some people, particularly people who've suffered domestic abuse, may not wish to be blindsided by a discussion of it when they think they're reading a technical blog.
Sounds like they are relying that a screen reader user is using a specific version of JAWS? Do they really expect people to upgrade JAWS to the latest version when it costs $1200? I understand it's important software for the audience still a lot of money.
I wonder why the gov.uk team are getting so much publicity(?) In the last few years.
As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
Irrational fear, I know, but I cant shake off the startup-vibes I'm getting when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
gov.uk got started, in part, because the 2009 financial meltdown left a lot of good startup designers and engineers with not enough to do (and made civil service jobs more attractive for a bit!)
It's a very broad topic to cover so I'll be terse with evidence/examples only. UK government provides a lot of open data and APIs for the country [0], [1]. They are free and pretty much not throttled. They have a license [2] for a lot of this data which is formal but nearly as free as John Carmack's legendary hacker-friendly "have fun" license [3]. There is also a lot of historical Ordnance Survey data and historical legislation data from the National Archives. And of course, you can see the openness in how they have built gov.uk, as blog articles appear on HN about it quite often.
There is also a lot of government infrastructure provided to local governments, such as gov.uk Notify [4] or a freely available NHS website CMS (which is why many NHS websites work the same). There is a guide [5] mostly intended for government services but free for others to use on building accessible, secure and quite good-looking websites.
Most other governments I lived under are either technically behind UK or they have very advanced tech capabilities in certain branches of the government only (such as the armed forces) but keep it out of the public eye. Ultimately, I think it is the culture of welcoming everyone's participation in technology that makes UK gov so forthcoming and open with their tech and data. Doing this is seen as kind and civilised, which is how governments want to be seen. Of course, there are still areas of improvement in how UK gov provides data, as there always are in everything.
Finally, I should mention you can find many BBC technology outreach programmes from the early days of home computing. They are all over YouTube if you search for "BCC home computing". There was and continues to be a lot of techno-optimism in the country. It is one of the admittedly not many things that persist from the pre-austerity times.
[1] https://www.api.gov.uk/index/#index
[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...
[3] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/README.TXT (before GPL became popular, id software code was distributed with this readme that said "Have fun")
Salaries play a significant role.
Unlike a lot of other countries, private sector salaries for SWEs suck in much of the UK, and gov.uk (in reality part of the Civil Service), GCHQ+MoD, and BBC can pay fairly competitively and give a fairly decent pension compared to private sector gigs.
That said, I'd disagree with NHS IT - it's almost entirely outsourced to regional MSPs who suck (and I say this as a former vendor who's helped sell products those guys use in NHS environments)
It’s likely part of their efforts to be more transparent, work with other governments and better support departments without having to be in 50 places at once. It’ll also help with recruitment.
Doesn't it make a lot of sense to be open about how a public service is built and delivered, maybe much more so than any for-pay service in fact?
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
I mean, unless the next PM is Zombie Thatcher, this seems like an excessive level of privatisation.
Wow, you learn something new every day!
Kinda weird that we got “Backspace to go back” out of web browsers some time ago yet this still exists, though.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
Also just a note that the first two GOV.UK links under "Research on this pattern" don't include live examples any more.
An upsetting but nonetheless incredibly interesting abnormal UX problem to solve. I appreciate seeing this much thought being put into things like this.