Things we learnt designing 'Register to vote' | Hacker News Reader

Things we learnt designing 'Register to vote'

designnotes.blog.gov.uk

33 pointsjoelanman19 comments

> 2. It’s easier to discover what to add than what to remove

> Seeing that very few people had a problem on this step enabled us to hide the help text behind a link – making the screen simpler for the majority.

Awesome. So often I work with people who don't have the courage to at least try/test a solution that doesn't treat the people who will use the product like an idiot and instead populate as much instructional text as possible.

Regular testing with users is key to an approach like this - we mostly test every couple of weeks, sometimes going weekly if there's a particularly sticky problem to solve

I can't believe these clowns are still using Google Analytics. Who the hell thinks that an advertising corporation in a foreign country that has no privacy regulations should be profiling and tracking my activity when I interact with my government. That includes interactions like registering to vote, 'anonymously' reporting crimes[1], applying for a passport[2] or driving licence[3].

Thankfully the gov.uk hipsters haven't got to the inland revenue sites so at least Google doesn't know my tax details. Yet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985916

[2] https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport

[3] https://www.gov.uk/apply-first-provisional-driving-licence

Do you have a UK-based, secure, and trustworthy alternative?

Apache/NGINX logs. Like we used to do before everybody decided to "outsource" that task.

Hosting service doesn't provide access to the log files? Get a better hosting service, as that used to be a fairly standard feature. CDN or caching proxy doesn't give you the log files (or at least summarized stats)? Start demanding they provide that feature, or switch to a different service/vendor.

Existing log parsers are missing some type of statistical analysis that Google provided? Option 1: Do you really need that feature, or is it simply "cool" or "might be useful"? Option 2: write it yourself; doing stats on log files isn't particularly hard.

I never understood why everybody was so quick to give Google such massive amounts of valuable data in exchange for something as trivial as a log parser and a few gnuplot charts. None of this needs as 3rd party.

Besides: why do you assume that the analysis provided by google-analytics is accurate? A lot of us block {,www.,ssl.}google-analytics.com and are not included. You cannot opt-out of the apache log and still get the page.

I did not even know this was possible, thanks for bringing it to my attention. As someone who has had numerous electoral roll forms sent piled up in my letterbox, refusing to cease since repeatedly filling them in and sending them back, it's great for the government to provide this.

Big thanks and congratulations to the team that delivered this.

I used this tool a couple of days ago when I moved house. It was a real joy. Good job, GDS team.

Noticed this strange date entry form: http://imgur.com/fdaUEi1

I wonder how many people correctly understood that you have to select a month and enter a year in the second field.

Good spot! I'll raise it for fixing

I love the gov.uk people. Their design principles doc is still bookmarked for me https://www.gov.uk/design-principles

"Things we learned"

It seems[0] as though in british english (.gov.uk) learnt is acceptable.

[0] http://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/5331-Ues-of-Learne...

"Learnt" and "learned" are both acceptable spellings. The issue is that the former is an adjective and the latter is a verb (past-tense).

See my comment.

There is no issue. Both learned and learnt are acceptable and attested for the verb, pace the OED:

    learn, v.
    Forms:  Pa. tense and pple. learned /lɜːnd/ , learnt /lɜːnt/ .

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=learned%2C%20learnt

"Things we learned". When you say "learnt", it's when used as an adjective (a describing word).

For instance "My knowledge of grammar is learnt". When you're using it as a verb (a doing word), it's "learned" i.e. "Today, I learned something".

Today you learned about "learned", hopefully that's your lesson "learnt".

This is especially important because we also have the adjective "learned" e.g. "the scholar was widely regarded as a wise and learned individual".

Interesting - do you have a source for that?

According to the sources I can find "learnt" is the English and "learned" the American version http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/learned_learn...

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