DWP - Services and benefits online | Hacker News Reader

DWP - Services and benefits online

dwp.gov.uk

This is a good reminder about how the "support popular browsers" approach of web development is flawed. And how sites, and thus the code driving them, live a lot longer than expected. This kind of technical debt accumulates, fixing it involves rebuilding it (probably a clean slate approach, since there are issues caused by the underlying Siebel baseline).

It's also a great comparison with the GDS Team's gov.uk initiative, the difference in quality is distinctively noticeable. That quality is based, not on the popular browsers of today, but based on the fundamental premise of the web as an open and platform neutral environment. I guess, in 5, even 10 years, this iteration of gov.uk will still be a reference example of a high quality web development build.

I know a couple of the GDS Team behind the gov.uk project are regulars here. To them, thanks for the amazing work, the attention to detail. I think this is the first time where a UK government organisation/agency is leading web development by example.

This is a great example of high quality web development being done at the fraction of the budget given to high profile government IT project failures. Certainly, smaller, agile, internal, passionate team of skilled individuals outperforms the huge contracts to IT/Consulting companies.

To be fair to the DWP, this is their old site.

One of the things the British Government is doing properly at the moment is their digital strategy, their new web site gov.uk has won multiple awards.

If you go to the DWP's home page it does tell you it's an old site, and should probably redirect, but it's unfair to criticise something that's not the current implementation. Most of the links from that front page go to the new gov.uk version, and I guess you'd have to work hard to find that error page if it wasn't already bookmarked.

I agree this, was an interesting thing to find.

This is the DWP homepage if you come via http://gov.uk:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-w...

As a Brit, the new Gov.uk site makes me feel very proud, even though I had nothing to do with it. :o)

As an American in the UK who constantly needs to find information about living here, it reduces massive amounts of frustration. Good on ya lads!

This prompted me to check my own government's main site (gov.ie). While not as slick, it does have pointers to a Citizens' Information site (http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/) and a simple, but useful page listing many common tasks, ordered by verb (http://www.gov.ie/services/).

It doesn't redirect because this is the only way to apply online for "Attendance Allowance (AA), Disability Living Allowance (DLA adult and child), Overseas State Pension – if you are a non-UK resident (including Channel Islands)".

You can download a PDF to mail in from the nice new site, but if you want to do it online the new site will direct you back here.

(Not wanting to seem harsh, some things are being done well, but let's not get carried away and forget all the many, many things that are still truly dreadful and need fixed.)

DWP are in the process of transitioning to their new gov.uk site. It's all well and good criticising their old website, but what do you propose they do about it? Transition to a new site? That's exactly what they're doing.

I'm proposing that we don't pretend that this is an old, unused site that someone has stumbled across because goverment IT is doing such a good job not breaking old hyperlinks.

It's still in active use and it's still terrible. Those are simple facts that doing the relatively easy job of moving a bunch of PDFs and static web content to a new site are not going to change.

Government IT (in the UK and elsewhere) has been, and still is, totally fucked up. Let's not hide from that fact because it's only by publicizing the sorry state that it's in that things like alpha.gov.uk can get any traction compared with the traditional way of doing things. But even that's low-hanging fruit compared with the regular billion pound disasters that government IT procurement regularly delivers.

Nobody is pretending anything. It's the old DWP website. The DWP has a new home on gov.uk, which is much better, and is transitioning — actually rather quickly, given all the red tape that must be involved — to this new site as we speak.

The old website only persists because a few remaining functions have not been transitioned yet. It's rubbish, but it's actively being replaced. Criticising it is pointless.

It's interesting that you refer to alpha.gov.uk. The gov.uk site left the alpha stage and officially launched in October 2012, and as much as government IT projects are usually a disaster, you can't deny gov.uk is a major step in the right direction.

Have you got any evidence that it's actively being replaced?

All the most popular links on gov.uk take me to a very nice landing page with an overview, but if I actually want to do something they all link out to the existing web apps. Some of which I've used and are not terrible, but not likely to win many design awards either.

It's great that the UK government is no longer consistently failing at the simple task of putting information online, but anything past the 20th century web still seems beyond them. Hopefully it's the next step, I don't really envy the people that need to make that cultural change happen. I do however feel it's more likely to happen sooner if we don't pretend that it'll just happen magically by itself.

Well, the GDS team are pretty open and transparent. Why not go take a look a their blog where they go into quite a lot of detail about their plans?

I did look actually, the stuff I found all had a strong "content" focus. Which is the obvious place to start but as they say themselves, reflecting on getting every ministerial dept on board and their first six months: "it’s barely the end of the beginning".

I did spot a mock-up of a form for reporting lost Passports, which when I googled for it was a nice 3 question form which after processing your answers used that information to give you a link to the correct PDF form to fill in and post (ok, to be fair it gave some helpful extra contextual info like the relevant countries embassy info, but to be unfair if you ask it about an Adult passport, then want to know about a child passport--because I'd imagine losing your whole families passports at once is relatively common--it forces you to answer the remaining 3/4 questions again).

So, some little steps in the right direction as far as web apps for interacting with government are concerned.

I find it quite ironic since I see being confined to IE as having a disability. It almost serves to me as an inspiration to keep myself intact.

I can't speak for their digital strategy but their universal jobmatch site is abysmal. A truly awful piece of work.

https://www.gov.uk/jobsearch

That's just redirecting to the old Directgov/Jobcenter site, which I've always felt was quite good at what it did. It might not be the prettiest, but it's not awful.

I don't claim to have an eye for design so its aesthetic appeal is difficult to judge but as far as functionality goes, it leaves a lot to be desired. The site has removed the ability to search by category which, for me at least, was an important way of searching.

I think you're seriously over-stating how bad it is.

I mean it was designed to be used on a touch-screen interface by people of all ages, they're going to have to lose some functionality for that alone.

What functionality is precluded by the use of a tablet?

The front page of http://dwp.gov.uk/ says in pretty big writing "We have moved to www.gov.uk/dwp"

Which is a much nicer site:

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-w...

Of course, they could break every link out there to their old site if they wanted, but instead they're implementing redirects for all the high-traffic pages.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Manchester city council site: http://www.manchester.gov.uk/

Definitely not what you might expect!

Wow! That's the best looking government run site I've seen

Agree. I always think great photography makes a world of difference to a design too.

It looks pretty swish and its responsive,

Beautiful - though navigation suffers a bit from the lack of hierarchy.

Manchester are on it. Free wi-fi in a number of places and MadLab. As a resident I'm not that surprised :)

MadLab's good, but TechHub's even more awesome! http://manchester.techhub.com

shameless plug! Yeah, I go there for Bootstrap Business Club and it's a good space.

I like the way they apologise in advance to those with accessibility issues. That's a nice touch.

Looks like Siebel (now Oracle owned)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siebel_Systems

I think you are right, probably means they dont have anyone to look after it.

Not sure about this specifically, but the DWP use Siebel extensively all over the place.

Why is everyone ready to kissarse the Gov's new website? Its still is an utter pile of shit, they've only cleaned up a bunch of pages, all the main stuff is still stuck in the old ugly website.

That is grim.

BREAKING: Government bureaucrats fiendishly bad at IT. Film at 11.

Nice throwaway comment written without actually having much of a clue about what the UK Government is doing with its web presence.

My comment could also be paraphrased as "Why was this link submitted to HN?"

No, it couldn't. if that was your intent, flag the submission.

Or set aside your bias and take a look at what the GDS team is doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com