[dan_pixelflow]

A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site. The GDS (Government Digital Service [0]) and the GDS (Government Design System [1]) - who run the posted link too - are doing a great job. Want to renew my passport? Easy, same UI/UX for getting a drone license, taxing my car and filing for benefits. Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there!

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit... [1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

Edit: Yes, I know the UK Gov's system for benefits isn't easy to understand. That's on the Gov, not GDS :)

[mkdirp]

> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site.

In my experience gov.uk has been vastly superior compared to other websites for a long time. Gov.uk seems to be more consistent with everything than most company websites are.

[0898]

Agree. Compare the process for renewing your passport with the experience of logging into My eBay. Gov.uk is something the UK can be really proud of.

[12ian34]

Agreed. I was delighted that my passport renewal process from first applying all the way to getting my new valid passport was about 12 days. The UK government's digital services is honestly a big factor in keeping me a UK resident

[35mm]

As someone now experiencing Spanish gov systems after getting used to gov.uk - 100% yes. They’re actually really quite good.

[BoxOfRain]

Yeah the British government's IT projects have a bad reputation but credit where credit's due gov.uk is really good in my opinion. I remember reading (probably here) that it was designed with a philosophy of 'our users don't have a choice but to use our software, so we must make it as un-infuriating as possible'.

[bertil]

Like a lot of users of the services of several government, gov.uk is consistently the best for many reason: simplicity, language clarity, accessibility, very lean design. There’s a certain… brand, i.e. the four aforementionned qualities taken as far as possible, that I really like -- but not everyone enjoys the assertive use of screen space. Just remember: visually impaired people pay taxes too.

But for web developpers, that’s not all: it’s very deliberate, there’s detailed public guidelines, a scrutiny that developpers of the most popular open source project might recogonise. The overall result is that the people working there are very good. They are principled, and typically very complementary of the independent-minded polymath that many of us have worked with. They understand accessibility in detail and many dimensions (think: both rare handicaps and aging web-clients).

I’ve worked with several and I would strongly recommend considering experience at the Government Digital service (GDS) as a very good signal on a CV, akin to senior role at a big tech, or early engineer at a successful start-up.

[toyg]

Credit where credit is due, this is the legacy of the Cameron government (although the conversation started under Brown, iirc, it was the first Cameron cabinet that really pushed it, by basically setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM). The efficacy and power of GDS has since ebbed and flowed, but clearly they managed to entrench some great practices that continue to this day.

[ColinHayhurst]

Exactly, through recall this was Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government, so Nick Clegg (you might have head of him) may have a claim.

Actually the credit should go to the brilliant and dedicated people in GDS doing great work; though I do not know enough to pick out names. The UI/UX and implementation was first class from the get go.

As a Brit my life is made remarkably easier as a citizen and startup entrepreneur. The benefits to the UK ecomnomy are enorous but not measured. In contrast my personal experience of govt engagement when setting-up and running startups in US between 1991 and 2013 were painful. And would have been very painful without help (thank you YC).

Finally if we are going to give leadership credit it should go to Francis Maude [0]. He happened to be my local MP, so I met him quite a few times, and he was most helpful and astonishingly effective in helping us navigate two big challenges we had in facing down, shall we say, "unethical quango-business partnerships". A remarkable, thoughtful man and effective operator, who was in government over three decades [1].

[0] https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2012/10/16/gov-uk-the-start/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude

[gm3dmo]

+1 for Francis Maude because he definitely grokked it.

Martha Lane Fox also deserves mention for: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/directgov-2010-an...

They all tore up the rulebook. The rule being: Government can’t do computers. Outsource to favourite big consultancy. Twenty years were wasted on that nonsense approach.

Some of the greatest resistance comes from the big departments who are actively hostile to many of the changes required to work in this way. There’s a lot to be said for a round of golf at The Belfry with the splendid chaps from the IT consultancy your department spends £2bn a year with.

Golf days: https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/abfe49d3-f24c-4b93-b8e...

[Zenst]

I recall GDS being initiated for internal DOH stuff circa John Major, going into Blair era (yip was there when Blair took over the role).

Not that I'd attribute it to any PM, believe it was driven by the government security services (which department/flavor I could not say).

That all said, it may of been a different aspect but certainly has a longer story than told. With that, it started as an intranet project iirc.

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story/ has some insight but that seems more to cover the more public web aspects and even they say it is "a story" not "the story".

So be fascinating to peace the "full story" and history together.

GDS was a whole catchment in the early days, that included the phone services and that was contracted to Mercury telecom at one stage, or aspects were. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Communications

If any credit should be laid, it would be upon the civil servants and associates that came up with the initiative, who sadly will probably remain nameless even if their names were known. Politicians just green light so much and claim credit, so much goes on behind the scenes of any government. With that, best think of politicians as orchestra conductors who depend upon musicians knowing how to do things, often able to do things right without eye sight of the conductors at times.

[unfocussed_mike]

There was a significantly renewed manifesto-driven push to open source/open standards with the coalition in 2010; some of gov.uk really is down to Cameron rejecting the (Microsoft/EDS/Fujitsu-heavy) approaches of the previous administrations.

I don't really like giving them credit for anything but there it is.

[ColinHayhurst]

Agreed and thank you for the memory jogging link: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/story-2010/

Martha Lane Fox, bless her.

And the brilliant Tom Loosemoore, also behind https://www.theyworkforyou.com/

https://www.writetothem.com/

https://www.fixmystreet.com/

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

[toyg]

What is there now was significantly rehashed under the first Cameron administration. I remember talking to a few insiders at PyconUK, around 2010-11, and they were saying they basically had carte blanche to nuke it all from orbit and rebuild how they saw fit. The government wasn't particularly popular at the time (what with the sweeping cuts to social services), but the people in question were adamant that, on digital services at least, the big guys really wanted to make a difference for good, and that it was a clean break from the past - hence why they were going to places like PyConUK to recruit motivated forward-looking people. That government effectively lasted 5 years, so they did a lot of work in that timeframe. I later heard through the grapevine that the waters got choppier after 2016, and I've not really heard anything after 2019 (beyond the occasional coded grumble on twitter), so I don't know how things are today.

> it would be upon the civil servants and associates that came up with the initiative

From what I understand, the power of this was precisely that it came from people outside the career civil service. Although this narrative came from Conservative quarters (who occasionally indulge in civil-service bashing), I find it credible. Established powers in the system tend to have established friends among deep-pocketed vendors, particularly these days that doors tend to revolve quite furiously. For all the good they did elsewhere, one undoubtedly bad legacy of the Blair-Brown years was eccessive trust on friendly vendors vs in-house.

[heurisko]

The Cameron government learned the lessons of the massively wasteful failed IT projects from the Blair era (see Fujitsu NHS contract).

The GDS started well, but I don't think the GDS can continue to cruise on its earlier reputation. It too has started to fall back into the bad old days of massively wasteful projects with unclear scope, such as the Verify system, that is absorbing hundreds of millions of pounds for dubious benefit [1].

"Unfortunately, Verify is also an example of many of the failings in major programmes that we often see, including optimism bias and failure to set clear objectives." [2]

I think the idea of GDS is a good one, but evidently it needs to continue to reevaluate itself to avoid regressing into what it was originally setup to avoid.

[1] https://www.computerweekly.com/opinion/Back-to-the-past-with... [2] https://www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-verify/

[chrisseaton]

> setting up a skunkworks group that answered directly to the PM

Isn't that massively excessive? Why does the Prime Minister need to be spending his time listening to a report direct from a team implementing software services?

[toyg]

Because otherwise the effort will end up in the quagmire of civil service politics, the sort of stuff you see on "Yes Minister" (greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture).

With a direct line to the PM, every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor), GDS could go "ok, shall we take it up with the PM then?" and that would be the end of it.

It's effectively the nuclear option, in terms of civil-service management, but sometimes it's the only way to get stuff done.

[djhn]

> greatly exaggerated, of course, in the same way "Silicon Valley" exaggerates Californian startup culture

Which is another way of saying it conveys the reality more realistically than a documentary could ever get away with.

[blitzar]

> every time a mandarin tried to block things (likely in order to favour his golf buddies from this or that vendor)

There seems to be a much longer history of MPs and PMs being corrupt than the mandarins.

[axg11]

Gov.uk is _the_ primary way that anyone interacts with the UK government. Why shouldn't it be one of the highest priority aspects of government? I don't think the Prime Minister was sitting in on daily standups and sprint planning, but it makes sense that they should have a good overview of progress and development in GDS during its infancy.

[rswail]

Effectively it was in the PM's department directly, which means it was not subject to cross-department jealousies etc. Watch some series of Yes Minister, even though set in the 1970s and 80s, it's still all true.

[BoxOfRain]

The Thick of It is supposedly not far from the reality either.

[toyg]

Armando Iannucci is a national treasure and a credit to the Italian diaspora (and to Scotland).

[BoxOfRain]

If anyone deserves a knighthood for services to comedy, Iannucci would be one of my top contenders!

[xboxnolifes]

If there is an alternative approach that has been showing similar or better results, I'm ears.

[somnium_sn]

I've moved from Germany to the US and then to the UK. gov.uk is by far the most impressive government website i've encountered. Accessible, consistent and just works. Really a good show of what a government website can offer if done right.

[llampx]

The German idea of an online platform is a website developed by Telekom (outsourced by them to the lowest bidder) which makes available the fax number of the Behörde, and the timings that the fax machine will receive incoming faxes.

[hughrr]

That's as German as you get. I'm sure there is a German idiom for "that's how it's always been done and the change is someone else's fault" because that's the attitude. Had that a couple of times in shops. Business is bad because we're closed at peak times and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because we don't accept cards and that's the customer's problem. Business is bad because our customers don't have fax machines these days and that's the customer's problem.

Recently I was with a German friend and she nearly fell on her ass when I showed her that you can actually pay at a car parking machine in the middle of nowhere with Apple Pay here in the UK.

[barbazoo]

I still remember last time I visited. One Sunday morning, I went to the Bäckerei and tried to pay for my Brötchen and Stückchen with my card and they just looked at me in disbelief. I quickly realized my mistake but it was too late. I had no cash so I left without any baked goods.

[jlelse]

Thankfully that changed since 2020. Now many bakeries accept cards.

[KineticLensman]

> Want to renew my driving license? Well, that's yet to move from the old DVLA site, but it's all getting there

Some important UK government services are still lagging behind. DVLA, since you mention it, has a mix of okay and truly appalling services. I'm in the position of trying to renew my driving licence after it was revoked for medical reasons. It's now six months since my cardiac arrest and I now meet the medically-fit-to-drive criteria. But, I face an 84 day delay in my application being processed, as detailed on the DVLA's 'how-slow-are-we-today' page [0], which is actually labelled as a COVID-19 update. Furthermore, I have to post a paper application form to them as they haven't yet digitized the medical review service [1]. This is life-wrecking stuff for anyone who needs a driving licence for their work or similar.

I do like the gov.uk sites in general, but a lot of the back-office stuff is still disastrous. Some of this is due to strike action and COVID, but a big part of the problem is the continual failure of the various UK Govt departments to successfully manage large IT projects.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update

[1] https://www.gov.uk/reapply-driving-licence-medical-condition

[hughrr]

The (old) DVLA web site is merely a shallow front end for the 30 year old incompetent bureaucratic triangle of carnage that hides behind it.

To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.

[KineticLensman]

> To get a decent result on any IT project you have to fix the organisation behind it before you even think about replicating that organisation digitally.

Exactly. I've seen this myself back in the day when I supported the MOD's system development (simulators for training, as it happens). As a techie, I was asked to develop some interoperability middleware between disparate systems. As my career matured, my focus changed to trying to get the systems to use common interfaces protocols / standards. Then I thought - why can't they have common requirements since may of them are doing very similar things, and drive tech commonality top-down. So I started working with the respective acquisition teams to get them to adopt common conventions. Then I started to question why they had disparate acquisition teams in the first place. This turned out to be because there were multiple customer project teams. Why was that? Because the different tribes in the army (infantry, armour, etc) didn't speak to each other at that level.

I eventually realised I was seeing a sort of example of Conway's Law [0], and was finally able to develop a proper briefing for a senior decision maker who was concerned about the technical / contractual complexity at one of his training schools (which had multiple different types of simulator, each with out own through-life support programme). This I believe finally led to some coherence-focussed reorganisations of the MOD teams involved, which was perhaps the most impactful thing I achieved in a couple of decades working in this space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

[jsmith99]

Does the DVLA driving license service still only work during office hours? I couldn't believe they had an online system for renewing licences but it couldn't be accessed at night. Allegedly it's based on an ancient system that can't be trusted to be left running unattended.

[KineticLensman]

Not actually tried this, as the online systems don't support the service that I need in the first place.

Part of the problem is that they have multiple back-office legacy systems. I remember reading recently about a modernization of the personalised number plate system. This was apparently completely separate from the licence management so could be modernised quite easily. How convenient that it just happens to be a good revenue generator for DVLA, so presumably it was easier for someone to justify the development costs.

[jayflux]

> A bit off-topic, but gov.uk is quickly improving into an actual usable site

Where've you been?

Agree with your points but the things you mention have been around for almost 10 years now (driving license/passport renewal easy UX etc). I renewed my passport around 7 years ago and it was much easier to use then. It's true there's some services that tail off into the older systems (and you can tell), but the modern things gov.uk has owned have always been good since launch.

[nielsbot]

FWIW San Francisco is doing something similar. The have a digital services department and want to convert all city websites to the same design language:

https://digitalservices.sfgov.org https://medium.com/san-francisco-digital-services

[chippiewill]

gov.uk was great from the day it launched.

It continues from strength to strength.

[KaiserPro]

not so much, some of the redesigns ripped out the usable data and replaced it with holding pages. Specifically to do with immigration, that hit us a couple of years ago.

However its pleasing to see a site that works well on crappy computers.

[rmvt]

off-off-topic: i've recently discovered (through a job listing) that the moj has been doing some open-source work around all the software they use to manage prisons and prison-related stuff. surprisingly interesting - e.g. https://github.com/ministryofjustice/prison-api

[jsmith99]

That organisation has a repo called Welcome People into Prison?! It even has a nice ASCII banner https://github.com/ministryofjustice/hmpps-welcome-people-in...

[jpswade]

I wouldn’t say quickly exactly, this has been years in the making, it’s much better than it used to be.

[systemvoltage]

The UK Design System's page banner takes up 70% of the vertical space on my browser.