[lobsang]

GDS have done some excellent work in the past, especially around usability and design. Unfortunately since the various senior leaders have left and it's moved further into government/cabinet office they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves.

It's interesting that one of the original principles behind gov.uk navigation was that it should be secondary to Google. The focus was on getting people to the right page from Google/Bing/DDG (where they start) without the need to navigate gov.uk itself.

I also find it odd that the problem they identified from the Discovery was poor information architecture but their solution is to redesign the navigation menu. The use of the word 'topics' is also interesting. Again, GDS and gov.uks intent was to make it easier to access services, but the word service or a list of services isn't represented in either the current design or prototype.

[konamicode]

Out of interest - who are the senior leaders you’re referring to?

[lobsang]

Sir Francis Maude and the team he had around him untill about 2016.

I don't have the links to hand but there was some really great thinking going into what it meant to provide government services online at the time.

Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost.

There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017

Unfortunately GDS is now mostly toothless in all honesty

[smackay]

The GDS, even today, has an intrinsic beauty to it. It's really a marvel of engineering, though not the prettiest.

A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines.

Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds

[rikroots]

> Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost.

If this is true, then it proves everything that comes around, goes around. My first ever professional web development job was rebuilding the England and Wales Housing website[1], which was around the time that gov.uk was beginning its work to bring all central government online activity into the one site. The resistance from Government Departments - who all greatly value their semi-independence from the clutches of the Cabinet Office (and HM Treasury) - was immense!

I'm glad gov.uk won that fight: allowing each Government Department to have its own online presence, and their individual policies and procedures surrounding that presence, can never lead to a good outcome for people who have to access and use government services online.

[1] - Thank you, National Archives! https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20011030184204/ht...

[bibinou]

> There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017

it's @govdigerati

[varispeed]

> they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves.

I think a huge contribution to that were IR35 changes in public sector that created a brain drain. Talent was replaced by poor quality service from big consultancies.