[lobsang]

I'm genuinely curious if people still think gov.uk is a good example - or I guess, as good as it was.

I'm slightly biased from past experience but my feeling is a lot of the critical thinking that went into gov.uk has been lost. I just can't see the original form of GDS having an cookie banner on gov.uk for example. These were the guys that rightly pointed out that there is no actual need for people to have user accounts to access most govenment services and that no one cares about what govt department they are forced to interact with and yet, I reccently had to create a DVLA account to get an updated drivers liscence (something that happens once a decade).

[glenjamin]

I think a lot of the more recent issues with gov.uk are the result of some defanging of the central service, leaving departments with more rope to do their own thing and believe that they know best.

Identity in particular is a complex subject, AIUI the original Verify project had to exist in the shadow of the No2ID campaign, which led them to avoid a centralised ID system. This then led to a much more complicated approach that was unable to cater for the needs of some of the departments.

For example, HMRC needed individuals and companies to be able to log in, and for whatever reason this was deemed unworkable with Verify, and thus they build the grandly titled "goverment gateway" auth system - and then I would assume that other depts saw this and decided that meant they could or should build their own auth systems too.

[odiroot]

It depends. Usually local councils' websites are purely terrible.

DVLA is mostly very good, I'd say. Especially when dealing with vehicle registration, ownership change, taxing etc.

HMRC is in a category that I'd call "scary". Their website is nice and all but if you ever get locked out of their mobile app for confirming identity (or you delete it by mistake), it's really hard to fix the issue. This is connected to the fact that UK has no national ID card so they use various heuristic to confirm your identity.

UKVI is probably the worst as they don't offer a consistent experience. You can tell that some of their websites were developed in early 2000's and never updated.

[p_l]

UKVI has been driven for years by doctrine of "hostile environment".

Making the page (or their services) work well is in contradiction to the goals set by management.

[helipad]

It's hit and miss, but I still largely like it when I have to interact with it.

I just re-registered to postal vote from overseas, and the information and links were a labaryinth, often sending me in circles.

Out of exasperation – since I thought my use case didn't match what I was looking for – I clicked the big green "Start" button on the wizard and it worked swimmingly.

When re=applying for a passport in the recent past it was great too, even allowing me to upload a photo from my phone.

Perhaps they have focused on some key interactions that would typically be seen as complex.

[robertlagrant]

The Identity side of GDS has definitely been the worst. I wonder if due to the politics around that service, the thinking has stopped and the Just Get It Done, Even If It's Silly crowd has replaced it.

[lobsang]

The identity side has allways been a problem (P)politically and technically.

I think the original GDS was completely correct in basically forcing services not to have them, they are unnecessary for almost/all transactional inerteractions - where they are useful is for things with long term, cosistent interactions i.e. where theres an actual relationship, such as benefits or tax - unfortunatly HMRC and DWP both want to "own" the relationship as individual departments (or even benefits) rather than as a part of the government, and the UK is adverse to anything that looks like a national identity system (ignoring the fact we already have national insurance numbers for everyone(?), passport numbers, etc.)

Where I think the loss of critical thinking bites the most though are the small things:

- cookie banner on gov.uk

- my DVLA password, had to have numbers etc (despite password compostion rules not been a recommeneded best practice for almost 10 years [thanks NIST / GCHQ])

- forms are now so simple due to the mantra of "only ask one thing at a time" that you lose all context as you now have a page for "name", "date of birth" etc. instead of one page for "personal details"

[matteason]

They're having another crack at it with GOV.UK One Login: https://www.sign-in.service.gov.uk/

I've participated in some user research with the team building it and I've also designed GOV.UK services pre-One Login that needed to verify people's identity. It's obviously a very difficult problem to solve when there's no universal central ID database. The people working on it are definitely cognizant of the failure of Verify and they're keen not to repeat it.

I do hate the 'GOV.UK One Login' name though. It's previously been called 'GOV.UK Account' and 'GOV.UK Sign In', I'm not sure what was wrong with either of those.

[robertlagrant]

Renaming stuff is the easiest job, so it gets done first :) Thanks for your work on gov.uk. I interviewed (a five hour interview!) with GDS about 6 years ago, and it was a nice place. I declined the offer in the end, but it always looked very promising.

[daguar]

I broadly think this is correct, and that GDS has drifted significantly.