Directgov is dead part 2

Time for a one-last, one-last post as Directgov is migrated to gov.uk. My prediction that gov.uk would fail to replace it by August 2012 in Absolute control: why Betagov will fail sort of came true, although it's mid-October 2012 so that seems somewhat churlish. Today I'm enjoying the post The emperor's new clothes and am looking to pick up some other perspectives:

Perhaps the departments will rebel, or the sponsors will move on, or delivery will be undermined by some cockups, or the team will tire of bureaucracy once they move into the transaction domain.

Well put. When Martha Lane Fox's warriors leave the citadel, they'll discover the real public sector world of organisations like Gubbins: labrinthine regulations, dreary call centres, moving targets, absense of digital strategy and, yes, resistance from people who work in customer contact like me. Come to think of it, have I changed my own point of view since I started writing this?

Anyway, as the original orange monstrosity is now offline, I have to applaud GDS for following through. Try to find that £1 billion in savings now, won't you?

£90.3m - money well spent!

I can't resist it. I was going to quit, honest. Yet how could I have missed this Guardian article from December last year?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/dec/09/national-audit-office-digital-investment-unclear-directgov-government-gateway-businessgovov

Benefits of government's £90.3m digital investment 'unclear'

National Audit Office accuses government of failing to measure the benefits of Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov

The government has failed to routinely measure the benefits of its main portals - the Government Gateway, Directgov and Business.gov - which together have cost £90.3m over the past three years, says the National Audit Office (NAO).

In its report titled Digital Britain one: shared infrastructure and services for government online, the spending watchdog accuses the government of making investment decisions without sufficient information on costs and benefits.

In 2005 the government began converging online services on Directgov and Business.gov in an effort to reduce its public service websites, of which there were more than 2,500. Since 2006 1,526 government websites have closed.

The NAO found only one instance where the government had estimated the benefits of its investment in online services. Business.gov, which provides government information for businesses, was reported to have saved business £21 for every £1 spent in 2010-11.

Although there are likely benefits to providing business information in one location, the NAO found that it was not possible to say how much of this benefit would have been delivered anyway, if the information had only been available from multiple websites.

There's another figure for how many websites got closed as a result of convergence - 1,526 in fact.

Sounds like that NAO report could be jolly interesting reading.

Here's my earlier speculation about the projected cost of government supersites and the reality: Whatever happened to that 400 million? 

Thank you, Slabman

Groan, I have to admit, after a three month break from posting that 'Directgov Must Die' has run out of steam. There are only so many ways to say the same thing. Tonight I couldn't even be bothered trolling the lastest smugfest on the GDS blog.

I might come back at some point when I have something new to say. In the meantime, I'd like to dedicate this post to Slabman, who has not only trolled GDS but taken time to comment on Directgov Must Die as well.

One day the madness will end!

Thanks to anyone else who visited, bye for now.

directgovmustdie@gmail.com

My groundbreaking new DVLA site

I'm not a web designer by trade, and working in the public sector my notions about the web are probably three years or so behind the rest of the internet. So, this is an opportunity for me to look deeply foolish. Here goes.

Here's the existing DVLA site at www.dft.gov.uk/dvla/ - 

interestingly, it's a microsite off the Department of Transport site, but the content pages exist on Directgov itself.

The DVLA site gives the following LHS navigation:

• Driver information
• Medical information »
• Vehicle information »
• Commercial services »
• Consultations »
• Recruitment »
• Freedom of information »
• Data release »

Then a further list when you go down a level, say, into 'Driver information' -

Driver information

Our drivers information can now be found under the Motoring section in Directgov. Directgov was created to provide all UK citizens easy access to public services in one place.  

Need a new or updated driving licence

How to apply for any type of photocard driving licence and how much it will cost

Change of address and name

How to use the Premium Checking Service

 

The links themselves go to pages of Directgov, where you immediately lose sight of navigation options and the other DVLA links:

 

In other words, the visitor is plunged into the Directgov problem. Quite a bizarre set up, but it reflects the business relationship between a supersite and its client organisations. 

The Government Digital Service (GDS) are looking to close departmental websites as well as Directgov itself. Here's the GOV.UK Beta version, which has minimal navigation, no DVLA logos and no landing page above it:

That individual page looks nice and clear. Does it improve DVLA's service to offer motoring information as atomised units rather than belonging to a hierarchy which visitors can easily grasp?

I expect the people from DVLA have an opinion. I'll see if I can get hold of any.

GOV.UK: 60 million users, 1800 user needs

Time to pop another GDS bubble, and this time it's a big one.

I thought about some alternative titles for this entry:

• GOV.UK: where the traffic comes from
• GOV.UK: Public services all in one maze
• GOV.UK: simplifying the impossible

Haha pretty funny ... I typed 'pubic' by mistake just then!

I should lead with the summary, Nielsen-style: GDS appear to be simplifying the public sector web, but they're using public (careful!) services all in one place as a design principle rather than an advertising tagline. GOV.UK is therefore guaranteed to be just as ineffective as Directgov at saving money while genuinely improving the public (fnarr!) sector. If they let the public (!!) sector run their own websites, they will automatically simplify public sector web content and allow us sorry them to make actual savings rather than hypothetical ones.

Do you actually need to keep reading? This entry is pretty much another cut and paste job. I said last time I'd try building something myself. I'm working on it, promise.

I'll reuse that blog title as a sub heading instead:

Simplifying the impossible

Plenty of GDS prose about the need to simplify.

Oh I can't wait for it. I was going to paste in the quotes then knock em down like skittles!! I'm going to say, 'but these are inherent problems from using a government supersite'. Here goes -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/11/its-all-about-the-words/

One of Directgov’s main principles was to simplify government language, but it also tried to cover all eventualities.  This often meant that the content was full of caveats and jargon, making it hard to scan (and we know that people tend to scan not read).

Trying to cover all bases meant that we often bombarded  users with information that most simply didn’t need. For gov.uk we are working to make sure that users can find relevant content, read, understand and leave.

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/16/smart-answers-are-smart/

Inherent to the content strategy of the citizen beta of GOV.UK is hiding complexity and building tools before writing content. Much of the detail of government policy is difficult for normal folk to grasp and understand – and the proposition of GOV.UK is that they shouldn’t have to.

Smart answers are a great tool for content designers to present complex information in a quick and simple way. Defining what they are – decision trees? calculators? tools? is immaterial – what they do is provide a reusable technical framework to build a quick and simple answer to a complex question.

Tom Loosemore himself has tweeted to say:

 'Every superfluous page we create is one more dead end for an angry, frustrated, confused user ' - @GovUK team seeking the irreducible core

Thanks for that. No superfluous pages, you say?

but ...

as for the needs of multiple users and target audiences, the use of caveats and jargon, the endless amount of potential information you can offer ...

here it comes ...

these are inherent problems from using a government supersite

so what did you expect? I mean GDS. Not you, reading my blog.

Simplifying the impossible sounds like a noble aim. But the trouble with impossible things ... oh dear, blogs posts I don't need to write, sentences I don't need to finish.

All of this complexity of theirs comes from combining the whole public* sector on one website.

* remember in high school science when a kid used to say 'orgasms' instead of 'organisms'?

The Needotron

I stumbled across this yesterday. It looks like a big excel spreadsheet with merged, coloured fields. It's an attempt to simplify the impossible:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/19/introducing-the-needotron-working-out-the-shape-of-the-product/

Working out the exact “shape” of the gov.uk beta has been a long, difficult process.  Working out what needs it should meet, how best each need should be met and then defining how the whole proposition hangs together are hard problems.

you said it, not me. Then some more about the content strategy -

Starting the long journey from ‘articles’ to ‘user needs’

We started with long lists of pages and search terms from Directgov.  These we rephrased into statements describing something you might need from the government. Things like “I need to report a lost passport” or “I need to learn what Jury Service involves”. This gave us around 1,800 individual user needs, (or “tasks”).
We then

• Decided which of these initial 1,800 user needs should be included in the beta
• Aggregated those needs which made more sense to be together
• Assigned a format  to each user need (in gov.uk-speak a ‘format’ is a type of webpage or webapp e.g. a multipart ‘guide’, a simple answer page, a ‘find my nearest’ webapp. There are getting on for 10 at the moment)
• Assigned a priority to each user need

And so forth.

It does sound jolly clever when they start talking about webapps, though. And that Needotron of theirs. It's OK that our web strategy involves meeting 1800 user needs. We've got a Needotron.

Did I explain the '60 million users' in the title of my post? That's the 60 million people living in Britain. I'm being unfair, there - GOV.UK have only defined the adult population of Britain as their user base, so it's only about 49 million. Although I expect some under-16s will stumble across it occasionally.

One service, one website

The reality is, over half of Directgov's current traffic (and hence GOV.UK's) comes from the customers of only four government organisations: DVLA, Jobcentre Plus, the Student Loans Company and the Passport Service.

So, why keep talking about the huge complexity of public sector web content when you can split it into multiple sites?

Directgov still get £23 million per year. I have to assume GDS will get a similar amount to run GOV.UK.

GDS could spare a million pounds each, per year for a DVLA,  Job Centre Plus, Student Loans Company and Passport services website.

A website costing a million pounds would be a highly attractive, usable thing if each organisation ran it properly. That's a million pounds per year of design, hosting, graphics, and a dedicated professional web team.

Smart answers? Calculators? No problem. Get the code from JQuery. Syndicate the content? Easy.

For the DVLA one you will have a target audience (you can cut out everyone under the legal driving age, for a start). DVLA can start calling themselves 'we' again in their web content, rather than referring to the people providing the service in the third person. The website can have it's own tailored navigation and design, and some nice pictures of cars for users who need contextual images. I'd be astonished in DVLA didn't have some kind of web team already but let's say for the sake of argument they could spend £500,000 per year on designers, developers and writers.

Most of all, dvla.gov.uk would have fewer than 1800 user needs to meet.

Come up with autonomous websites for pensions and benefits and there'd be very few of those 1800 user needs left for GDS to meet with their own supersite. Not that they'd be out of a job, though. They could spend some more time producing sites for their friends in politics.

Wonder if the politicians' needs were among that 1800?

GOV.UK: the tea towel of the super site

If you work in the public sector, it's highly likely that the GOV.UK which is currently live is the one you'll have to put up with for years to come. Within 72 hours of launching the GOV.UK 'beta', GDS' attention was already drifting towards promoting - sorry, explaining - the sadly-misunderstood policies of its Coalition paymasters - all the nice things the government are doing.

It's quite likely that the vague yet upbeat feedback from GOV.UK visitors will enable GDS to go on ignoring the needs of people who work in public sector call centres, and our response teams who deal with the angry letters.  GOV.UK's design, taken from an abstract ideal about user behaviour, says the general public don't want any detail; hence,  GDS can abandon any logos, local navigation, tailored design or depth of content. It's a cunning approach because it means that GDS themselves don't need to spend too much time on content - it will fit into either a calculator or a fact sheet.

Fact sheet? Was that the GOV.UK thingy which wasn't a calculator, which had all the words on it? I can't remember.  We've been here before with the article page / chapter page concept Directgov cooked up back in 2006 or so. When it's not your content, 'web pages', of varying sizes, won't do; better to have a generic set of designs to plonk the words on to.

Otherwise you might have to spend time leaving GDS towers and visiting some ghastly public sector outpost where they've probably never even read .net magazine. 

It's an ideal way to manage a vast amount of public sector information. GDS, who are likely to have the same rotating cast of contractors as Directgov, won't need to fully understand anything they're putting online. It'll be a case of copy and paste.

The GDS party

Must be fun down there at GDS, according to Paul Downey:

Looking across the floor it’s difficult to tell who works for GDS and who doesn’t. There are no silos here; it is apparently not an elitist enclave. We don’t have assigned desks, sitting next to whoever we happen to be working with on a day-by-day basis. To succeed, GDS has to break down walls and work with domain experts regardless of where they’re from — the Whitehall project, which is in full sail, is a hubbub of graphic artists, designers, front-end developers, copy-writers and policy wonks from across government. 

Marvellous. Contractors, consultants and civil servants all sharing the love. That open invitation to spend time in the Gubbins call centre extends to them to, in case they stumble across this blog. 

I imagine working at GOV.UK is immensely fun and challenging. Building stuff is ace. And there's that tangible sense of excitement and purpose, one I consciously envy as I spend another day fixing bugs and dealing with complaints:

What we’ll be doing for the beta of GOV.UK won’t be finished. The design will be in beta as much as the rest of the site. We won’t get it right first time round. We’ll be putting stakes in the ground. Sketching out ideas we think might work, testing different solutions and setting a course for where we want this thing to head. It’s a huge, complicated task.

That was from Ben Terrett’s post on design on 19 January.  If it's true, maybe the GOV.UK we can see is only a work in progress.

Alas, Paul Downey suggests we're already stuck with the latest public sector web monolith:

I joined GDS because there’s nothing cooler than working on something that touches so many peoples lives. It’s not just the reach of the services being built for Gov.UK that I found attractive, but the importance placed on high quality, beautiful design and attention to detail ... I fully expect to to see the GOV.UK icons on tea towels in heritage shops in years to come.

GDS icons for GOV.UK

It's unlikely you'll be giving up any control to people who run services, then.

Let's see if they''re right about those tea towels, in five years time. I don't see any Directgov dog keyrings at Heathrow next to the Union Jack mugs.

But ambition is a noble thing, and I've no doubt there's plenty of talent at GDS.  It's a shame they've used a metaphor as a starting point. Ben Terrett’s post on design again:

In many ways the problem is similar to problem Kinnear and Calvert faced when designing the road signs in the 60′s. Before they came along Britain was littered with different signage systems all using different symbols, colours and typefaces which was at best confusing and at worst dangerous. With an exponential increase in vehicle traffic the government knew something had to be done. Kinnear and Calvert proposed one consistent system. One designed with the clarity of information as it’s goal. From then on Britain had a solution that became the definitive standard and was copied around the world.

Sound familiar? Swap signage systems for websites. Swap vehicle traffic for online traffic. That’s a challenge no designer could resist.

Prod that metaphor and it pops like a ... [remember to think up simile before hit publish]. A road system is something a central government has to control. Websites don't need to belong on one domain. We're still working from 'Public services all in one place' as a design principle; I believe I've covered elsewhere how this makes for mediocre, expensive, blinkered government web services. It's nice of GDS to admit GOV.UK creates a 'problem'; although they suggest this presents an opportunity for Blighty to lead the world again, rather than an inherent problem caused by using rhetoric instead of a theory which can be proved or disproved.


It's the opposite of the Tower of Babel: force the online population of the UK into one structure with one design and they'll all start speaking the same language.

Another rant over

I'm getting terribly lazy with these posts, aren't I? All I'm doing is copy and pasting. GDS are at least building things, something Directgov weren't committed to in any real way since around 2007. I should stick my neck out and build something myself.

Documenting everything they're doing in a blog is admirable too. Even if GDS are wrong, at least they're wrong in a transparent, accountable way. That could be their real legacy. I'll put their blog onto a teatowel.

Tom and Martha: do come and visit our call centre

This blog is dedicated to removing Directgov, a process which GDS have already started. However, to improve the public sector web, we need to get rid of the assumptions behind Directgov and get the people in charge to look for a fresh approach.

It seems strange that the Gubbins perspective is so different from that clever GDS team down there in Whitehall. I think spending some time in our call centre would do GDS a world of good. And if it turns out we're just yokels who don't understand their vision, they could use the time to talk us round.

The Tom and Martha show

Tom Loosemore of GDS and Martha Lane Fox appeared on BBC news to talk through the launch of GOV.UK. The interview starts with defending the supersite principle and moves through familiar themes - the government has too many websites (920 by Fox's reckoning back in August 2010); rationalising them all into one will reduce costs, drive people online, and improve the usability of government transactions.

By 5.07 Fox is talking about government's long term IT commitments, where the government signs long term contracts for 'hundreds of millions of pounds for services that are substandard'. In contrast, for GDS:

This is completely new way of developing. This has been a team of people, very small, very cost-effective, doing things iteratively, releasing things as they go, getting feedback; never saying, "this is what we're going to build, it's going to take us five years and it's going to cost us hundreds of millions" - quite the reverse - treating it a bit like a start-up but a start-up with the appropriate level of credibility and … gold-standard security. 

It's a seductive argument. However, we're talking about the entire public sector web here. I think some kind of plan is in order, with costs and timescales. No-one else in the public sector web has the luxury of providing services without a plan. The GDS revolution is in danger of producing more years of malaise.

The thing about 'revolutions' is that they only take place in countries with poor infrastructure and no free elections, where only a minority have a stake in the government. A revolution usually involves replacing one unelected cartel with another. Our previous regime didn't do much apart from shut down our websites.

Martha and Tom's week at Gubbins

I think a week answering the phones in our call centre would do Tom and Martha a world of good. The warriors of GDS really need to spend some time with the enemy. The people who work in actual public sector offices are likely to have a different perspective from London consultants who have a vested interest in a centralised public sector web. A 'smart answer' on GOV.UK seems just that - until you've spent days fielding calls from people who tried to find their answer and couldn't.

People in our call centres answer telephone queries which are both complicated and repetitive. Government information is demanding. Unfortunately, Gubbins use Directgov rather than a website designed around our users. Our online service is run by editors and consultants in London who have never visited our offices. GOV.UK has even less content than Directgov and no contextual pictures or branding, third-person content, and very little navigation to differentiate our service from anyone else's. So people are likely to go on phoning us rather than trying to find their answer online. 

Gubbins staff have a lot of negativity and cynicism towards that bloody awful Directgov website. No-one's told them there's a revolution going on. In between calls, Tom and Martha could show them a bit of GOV.UK and try to talk them around. It's not exactly BBC news, but Martha could even help address the digital divide, in case any of them are still using bits of paper to renew their car tax.

Serious offer. Do get in touch.