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Comment by infl8ed | Hacker News Reader

IMHO UK currently holds the gold standard for this https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Most/many government services use the standard design architecture and, although it is not perfect, it is several orders of magnitude better than I've seen elsewhere.

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As mentioned in the piece - the designers at 18F were explicitly following the UKs lead here and were attempting to do just that before being DOGE’d in favor of some political hacks with no understanding or appreciation of the task at hand.

Thanks! Guilty as charged of not fully reading through the piece before commenting :)

Was 18F working?

Yes

Aside from all the actual success stories with products they rolled out, they'd built comprehensive guides for software procurement that were making every part of the government more efficient -- and then the ~arsonists~ experts at DOGE came through and deleted all of that work because some 'move fast and break things' toadies decided they didn't want to spend so much time on planning and they'd rather just build baby build.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250201222157/https://18f.gsa.g...

The guides have been archived on the "18F in exile" site for continued reliable public access [0][1]

[0] https://guides.18f.org/

[1] https://18f.org

Former CTO of a country here. Anything GDS did filled me with deep envy: it was beautiful and made so much sense and I had none of it at my disposal. Then Brexit. I was there in GDS offices a few weeks after the vote and the organization was being dismantled under my very eyes. See, the trick with such endeavors is not what you can drive centrally, it’s what you can make others implement. Reporting to the Man is a good way of creating pressure, but as the current examples in both UK and US show, you can’t sustain that pressure for, say 30 years. Also, centralization neither scales very well nor is democratic as it centralizes control and removes responsibility from the service owners. So how do you have something placed fairly low in the government working horizontally effect meaningful change in other organizations? Have tried it in a few countries, have a few answers and many questions, AMA.

I've done the same for a multinational with 1000 franchises-like subcompanies - trying to get them to conform to horizontal guidance. It is an impossible task, noone takes it that serious and are focused on imminent kpi and okr's.

My only success has been internal reviews of wcag compliance and the threat of fines if found lacking.

But for non digital design its embarrassingly hard

They are using a non-Arial font which already makes them better than 90% of what you see online.

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