Directgov dog and the magic comments box

There is a lesson for Alphagov/Betagov in today's blog post. This is what happens to revolutions when they start trying to build and fix things.

The first casualty of war is innocence. After Directgov's £83 million pound annexation of public sector websites, in pursuit of £400 million in savings that, like WMD, were never found, it's easy to forget that the regime's victims included its own people.

Directgov Dog

This cute pointy critter showed up for a couple of weeks back in 2009, if memory serves. Directgov Dog is a rare example of Directgov delivering on one of their plans.

Naturally, it took a bit of outsourcing to get this online - as I mused in Hands up who likes Directgov? the organisation doesn't seem to employ people who design or build websites. 

I rather liked Directgov Dog, though. He was a bit of light relief when one was trawling through pages of web content formerly owned by Gubbins, which had been hacked, slashed and stomped into Directgov's generic and unusable pages, to try to find where one had left that pesky paragraph of information that caused all those arguments with the editors when they tried to cut it down and rewrite it.

Mysteriously, after a couple of months (weeks?) Directgov Dog disappeared without trace. I've never heard why.

If there's one thing Directgov do, it's customer engagement. Perhaps they surveyed an ethnic minority who perceives dogs as unclean; or worse, misinterpreted the icon as indicating pages about food.

Talking of symbolism, the reason Directgov is orange is because Directgov's  research found orange to be politically neutral. It's a shame Directgov's London-based execs haven't paid more visits to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

Sorry, I digress again. Directgov Dog was even shortlisted for a design award -

http://awards.designweek.co.uk/benchmarks/2009/category/public-sector/directgov/directgov.php

Here's the summary:

Directgov is a Government brand that unites all its public services, making it accessible for everyone to understand and use. Bostock and Pollitt conducted a complete overhaul of the existing branding. A playful dog character was created by using key elements of the brand, such as an orange arrow for its head. The animation explained the services and where to find them. Other elements of the campaign were brought to life by creative agency MCBD, which developed animations for television and print advertising.

Let me see, now ... that was 2009. The Gubbins pages of Directgov haven't changed since 2007. It looks like the complete overhaul was only applied to the home and top pages of Directgov, the ones the politicians see.

We were lucky enough to get one change in the three years between 2007 and 2010, however.

Comment On This Article (COTA) boxes

Directgov must have been spending a lot of time and energy closing down other people's websites between 2007 and 2010. They didn't seem to invest the £83 million in their own website at all. If they'd remembered to visit Gubbins during this period they might have amended The Directgov Problem. A solution - for example, tabs or local navigation - wouldn't have been complicated or expensive and would have brought the Gubbins content on Directgov closer to the level of useability it enjoyed on gubbins.co.uk back in 2007.

We did get COTA boxes, though, in summer 2010 -

Directgov were so proud that they launched this new function with a personal email from one of their executives, complete with his picture.

They even remembered to copy in Gubbins this time.

To this day, the Directgov wikepedia entry contains details of the for-Directgov-groundbreaking achievement:

Comment on this Article

In April 2010 Directgov launched a "Comment on this Article" feature on each page. Users can give articles five ratings:
• Very useful • Quite useful • Unsure • Not very useful • Not at all useful

Directgov also invites users to leave comments (up to 500 characters) about how the page could be improved, but asks that users don't leave any personal details like name and address.

The data captured from Comment on this Article will be used for customer insight and product improvement. An overview of monthly ratings is available here http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/SiteInformation/DG_188378.

There was also a Directgov TV channel on Freeview at number 106. It closed down in 2010.

 Oh, that's a shame. the overview of monthly ratings is no longer available.

Hey, there's a forum post about the Directgov TV channel. Apparently they bought the license back in December 2008 -

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=951216

DirectGov new Freeview channel from Teletext

---

Teletext have obtained a licence for a Digital Television Programme Service (DTPS) called DirectGov.

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlic...monthly/200811

I bet that was expensive. Must remember to look up that loose end some time. Directgov TV.

Why a comments box was really really tricky for Directgov

A comment box isn't hard to make or implement. If you Google 'html contact box' the options come up fairly quickly. Most modern Content Management Systems allow you to implement the code yourself. So, if you run your own website and services for your own organisation, this would be a trivial improvement. If you create a comments on your own website, you can route it to the department or team who should be getting the comment.

Comments boxes become complicated when you implement them on government supersites.

If you have been forced to use Directgov you no longer have control over these small, cheap, localised improvements. You wait for the grace of Directgov to bestow one upon you.

The changes become vast because you have to have them agreed by (I presume) multiple executives and committees. Plus, Directgov don't have people who build and fix things (at least none that I've met). And the budget is being spent on adverts and cute pointy dogs and digital TV stations instead of websites. After all, the politicians won't notice whether or not Directgov are delivering comments boxes.

Gubbins had to request the results of the comments boxes to be sent to us. The first batch arrived a few months after they were launched. Of course, Directgov doesn't tailor its service to the various organisations it represents; so they were sent to a central team who had to censor out any personal information, sort it and forward it to the Franchise team, who forwarded it to Gubbins.

The COTA results showed that the 'Not at all useful' rating was, on average, over 50% of the results. Come to think of it, it's a shame that  Directgov feedback page has been taken down. Anyway, the results were sort of useful because we could compare the ratings across different pages and get verbatim comments. We still get these from Directgov every few months, as long as we request each time them and are prepared to wait.

I just went in and made a COTA comment to Directgov just now. A very constructive one involving Martha Lane Fox.

The future of web gizmos which we can do but Directgov can't

When it comes to innovation, government supersites with highly paid executives talk a good game, but we've seen how the reality ends up as pure spin with no substance.

At the time of writing, at the end of nearly five years and £83 million of Directgov convergeance, all Directgov had to show for their talk of improving the public sector web were COTA boxes and a few weeks of Directgov Dog.

Returning to Sharon Cooper's conference comments as reported by Computer Weekly in May 2011:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/05/500-rogue-gov-websites-nabbed.html

"We are thinking, should there be a DirectGov in five years time? Or should there just be a wholesale market-place of open APIs so every transaction is available, so that anybody can use that transaction and embed it in their own service?" said Cooper. "Should there just be a great big asset database on which we can build a version of DirectGov?

It's interesting that a senior Directgov executive should be considering a future without a Directgov, or even Alpha or Betagov. The 'wholesale market-place of open APIs' is certainly closer to Directgov Must Die's liking than a small group of London-based suits spending millions on marketing, with a tri-annual, derisory innovation for the people who actually run services.

I started Directgov Must Die in less than a minute, thanks to Google. The innovations don't come from governments. The commercial, decentralised, capitalist web spat out the code for comment boxes well over a decade ago and it's there for anyone to use, immediately, for free. Unless they're on Directgov.

I'm afraid, then, that the solution is for the government to go back to writing cheques for individual organisations to run their own websites, so that we can take our pick from the best technology out there. Whether than means a comments box or our own pointy dog.

What happened to that £400 million? Part 2

Er, I'm stuck now. I Googled 'varney report savings' and nothing came up about whether the £400 million savings predicted by Varney was actually saved. Nothing whatsoever. Did they save only £200 million? £2 million? £2? 20p? A 2p chew?

You can put together the total running costs for Directgov if you check a couple of sources -

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-06-30c.282044.h&

Jim Knight (Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)

The costs for Directgov in each financial year since 2004 are set out in the following table:

Financial year	£ million
2004-05	5.1
2005-06	10.5
2006-07	12.8
2007-08	13.9
2008-09	30.7

...

I believe after this the figures were approximately - 


2009-10 - £30 million
2010-11 - £23 million

... bringing the Directgov total to £126 million, over seven financial years.

Have I missed any millions here and there? According to Hansard, 'Expenditure on Directgov increased in 2008-9 in recognition to its increased importance in the Government’s strategy for online delivery of public services.' - in other words, the £83 million invested in Directgov since Varney, approved by the Comprehensive Spending Review in 2007, was to achieve the £400 million of savings by converging websites.

So, where's our extra £400 million?

Haha, only kidding, government is a big, complicated thing. You can't expect theoretical savings to appear on actual balance sheets. As Cross pointed out, Varney's figures were 'back of a fag packet' calculations. No-one seriously expected to save an actual £400 million.

Bit of a shame for Gubbins, mind you. Remember, our costs went up when we converged to Directgov. We have our own customer transactions which we maintain ourselves and are paid for out of Gubbin's annual budget.  They're painted orange with a Directgov logo at the top, but they're essentially built and maintained by us.

Y'know if Gubbins had pledged to save, say, £5,000 a year by automatically switching our office PCs off every night, HM Treasury would have the right to see these savings somewhere on a balance sheet.

For Directgov, normal accounting practice doesn't seem to apply. As I said in my first post, we have to make special allowances for government websites.

I’d go direct, guv

Directgov's spending was cut in 2010 along with other cuts in the public sector. At the height of Directgov's 'success' they were spending £7 million per yearon marketing. That's the figure I seem to remember, anyway. It's a bit hard to find on Google now.

As recently as February 2010 Directgov were commissioning a £2.05 million TV ad featuring various B-listers, earning the censure of the Daily Mail - 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253496/How-star-studded-Government-TV-advert-featuring-Kelly-Brook-Helen-Mirren-costs-taxpayer-2million.html

A star-studded Government television advert - featuring the likes of Suggs from Madness and Kelly Brook - has cost the taxpayer more than £2million.

The eye-watering cost of the Directgov campaign includes the production, airtime and hiring the celebrities.

Quite a price tag for marketing a brand which would be closed down within a couple of years. If they do get rid of Directgov. But that's another story.

Hey, look. There's the Directgov problem again from a commentator -

The first time I saw the advert I was shocked by the self-indulgence of it and the ridiculous number of celebrities. I'd rather they spent the money on improving the clunky DirectGov website.

- Chris Z, Warwick, 24/2/2010 23:07

Sorry, I digress. The funny thing about this episode is that the Varney savings were still being cited three years after the Comprehensive Spending Review had started:

But Mike Hoban, the communications director for Directgov, said: "At a time of economic uncertainty it is essential that we give everyone in the UK easy access to important government information about taxes, benefits, job opportunities and education.

"Directgov will save the government £400m over three years. Therefore this is an investment that is important in helping the government save money."

Hang on a sec ... this was February 2010. The web convergence program had already been running for three years. Hoban was talking as if the £400 million savings were going to be made over the next three years.

It would have been an ideal opportunity for Hoban to have shared a spreadsheet of actual savings from the various government organisations who had closed down their websites to join Directgov; seeing as by then, Directgov had already swallowed £96 million of taxpayers money in pursuit of this £400 million.

Digital by default

As far as government white (orange?) elephants go, Directgov is a snip. Compared to £2.7 billion reportedly lost on a replacement NHS system, £96 million on an unloved orange website, and £400 million of vanishing theoretical savings will soon be forgotten by the general public.

The point is, when a government organisation runs its own web services, its expenditure shows up on balance sheets. After each financial year, the government can audit them on what they've achieved with their budget.

When you centralise web services into a government supersite, it becomes more difficult to account for expenditure. The ideals are too lofty, the aims are too vague, and the politicians don't want to be bogged down in the details. It happened with Directgov.

Let's be fair, though. If we haven't saved £400 million, at least we cut down on the number of government websites out there. According to Computer Weekly in April 2011:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/05/500-rogue-gov-websites-nabbed.html

Sharon Cooper, director of strategy and innovation for the Government Digital Service, told a recent Inside Government conference the unit had achieved Varney's target off shutting all unnecessary public sector websites and subsuming them into DirectGov by March 2011.

It had shut 287 websites by 5pm on 31 March, converging 95 per cent of all public sector information into DirectGov. But it had found another 500 websites that must be axed.

"There are still another 500 out there because we found a lot more in the process of trying to shut them down and that work is still going on," said Cooper.

Oh dear, were they hiding? So, we're still investing public funds to reduce the number of government websites, even though after five years, there is no evidence this causes any savings.

Again, as she mentioned Varney, this would have been an ideal opportunity to share a spreadsheet showing £400 million in savings.

Erm ... I'm confused again. How do you measure 'information' unless you work in quantum physics? They're reported that statistic as if it's a real number.

Real numbers versus Directgov numbers

287 is a real number, mind you. It wouldn't be hard to email 287 organisations and get them to say how much Directgov saved them.

Presumably the total comes to at least £83 million pounds - the running costs of Directgov, post-Varney. That means £289,000 per website.

A professional website can be built for £10,000. I'm no expert on web infrastructure but I imagine the hosting needs of a government organisation would run to roughly the same amount of money. So, a new information-carrying website could have been built in 2008-09 and hosted for three years for £40,000.

Seven such websites could have been produced for each website which was converged onto Directgov. I would expect that if you ran user testing on said £10,000 website it would perform better than the same information being presented on a government supersite.

Y'know, a broke graphic design graduate would probably build you a decent information-carrying website for £100. Maybe I'm being naive about how much websites cost in the public sector? This is all getting terribly confusing.

Remember, Directgov only hosts pages of text. It has no interactive functions, unless you could COTA boxes and the email service. The transactions (people ordering a new driving license etc) are still hosted by the organisations themselves.

So, like the Varney figures, this all sounds ever so slightly fishy.

That '500 websites' number sounds a bit made-up too. Did Varney have 787 websites in mind when he came up with those £400 million of savings? By the sounds of things he forgot to tell Directgov.

Post script

Returning to the Daily Mail article:

But Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude called Government advertising and marketing spending ‘out of control’.

He added: ‘Labour seem more focused on squandering our money on vanity PR projects rather than actually addressing the pressing problems of the country.’

It's interesting that the £2.05 million on an advert attracted Maude's condemnation at the time; but £126 million on a government supersite didn't influence the direction of government web services under Maude's control after he took power.

What happened to that £400 million? Part 1

Quick history lesson. I've just read up on this stuff myself, this very morning. In December 2006 'Service transformation: A better service for citizens and businesses, a better deal for the taxpayer' was published by HM Treasury. Sir David Varney's report recommended the following:

On ‘e-services’:
19. Directgov and Businesslink.gov funding be put on a more secure basis within the 2007 CSR to develop them as fully transformed services;
20. in the 2007 CSR, the Government investigates a funding arrangement for Directgov and Businesslink.gov that puts these services on a stable financial footing, incentivises
departments to contribute to services that secure cross-government benefit and allows for
the expansion of functionality of these services;
21. sponsorship and leadership rests with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions for
Directgov and the Paymaster General for Businesslink.gov;
22. government establish a clear performance indicator for citizen and business facing website rationalisation, which focuses on establishing firm targets to reduce progressively the number of websites over a three year period. In particular rationalisation targets should include:
- a freeze on the development of new websites providing citizen or business e-services
created by departments, agencies and non departmental public bodies, unless
authorised by the Ministerial Committee on Public Services and Public Expenditure
Sub Committee on Electronic Service Delivery — PSX(E); and
- by 2011, almost all citizen and business e-services migrate to Directgov and
Businesslink.gov and all e-transactions are provided through these two primary
websites. This means that all departments will have one corporate website, utilising
shared infrastructure and all other sites will be closed;

Here's why:

2.14 The taxpayer should expect savings from the improved efficiency of government, driven by a focus on reducing inefficiency and duplication. For example:
- by the third year of the 2007 CSR, early estimated savings for face-to-face services of
at least £250-300 million per year from rationalising face-to-face provision across
central and local government estates, before taking account of the potential savings to
be made by sharing provision across central and local government and from shifting
demand to cheaper channels;
- by the third year of the 2007 CSR, savings of 25 per cent of the cost of contact centre
operation (around £400 million per year), before rationalisation options are
pursued; and
- up to £400 million saving over three years associated with e-service improvement
including website rationalisation, channel shift and shared infrastructure, if every
department rigorously applied the agreed policy.
2.15 These savings should form part of the Government’s value formoney programme being taken forward as part of the 2007 CSR.

Marvellous idea. Instead of multiple services and websites, you converge, rationalise and centralise to save money. There are well over a billion pounds of savings in those paragraphs, but the one we'll focus on is the £400 million on web hosting.

On 21 December 2006 a skeptical Michael Cross from the Guardian covered the Varney report in his Guardian article When good ideas for government sites go bad citing the £400 million figure

A new plan reckons the government could save £400m over three years by rationalising this virtual real estate. ... As usual with economy drives, the proposals are a blend of common sense and back-of-fag-packet calculations. They appear in a report by Sir David Varney, former chairman of HM Revenue and Customs, published with the pre-Budget report earlier this month. The big idea is to converge the 4,000-odd government websites into two - Directgov for citizens and Businesslink for businesses. The ambition isn't new, but Varney proposes mechanisms that might make it happen.

I haven't come across the calculations Varney used to come up with £400 million either, although I expect they're out there somewhere. 

Varney did happen, up to a point. Large public sector services such as DVLA, Jobcentre and student finance are now on the Directgov platform, although the transactions themselves often remain with these organisations. Instead of a DVLA website, information about driving licenses lives on Directgov. At the time of writing there are still large, un-converged services such as www.hmrc.gov.uk with 120,000 web pages. 

But there was always a catch. Cross' warnings go to the heart of The Directgov Problem:

Varney proposes a freeze on all new websites providing e-services unless authorised by two cabinet committees. By 2011, he reckons, "almost all citizen and business e-services" will have migrated to Directgov and Businesslink. This will leave all departments with one corporate website each, with all other sites closing down.

At a time when government says it is encouraging frontline innovation and devolution, this is centralisation gone mad. Channelling all public services through a single desk in Whitehall has long been a Treasury dream, but goes directly against the spirit of the web. There is no evidence that centralisation will do anything other than stifle innovation. By all means, let's have a strong core service. But let's also allow public servants with bright ideas to launch them locally. The potential improvements are surely worth more than a few million saved on hosting fees.

As far as innovation goes, the only change Directgov came up with in the last three years were changing the links from black to blue, and installing the ill-fated 'Comment On This Article' boxes at the foot of pages.

But let's not get off track. The main saving which comes from Web rationalisation is on hosting fees. There's no mention of reducing public sector web staff, such as myself; curiously, Varney only focuses on increasing Directgov at the expense of public sector websites.

Saving money at Gubbins

I can't speak for any other public sector organisation but for Gubbins the savings didn't happen. We already have enough web infrastructure to run a basic website to contain the Gubbins information held on Directgov. Our human resources portal, for example, is more complex as it involves actual transactions rather than pages full of text.

We still build and develop the Gubbins online service ourselves, although it's painted orange and we have to run all our decisions by a rotating cast of Directgov editors and managers, which has added to our costs.

As I've said, Varney could have recommended making savings by making people like me redundant. The Directgov editors are simply duplicating my job by writing and publishing our web content. Sadly, sitting hundreds of miles from our call centres and IT staff, they don't actually know much about our service. Creating a centralised bureaucracy hasn't improved our service or reduced my workload. So, I'm still here.

Maybe Gubbins is a unique case, and that £400 million has been saved elsewhere in the public sector web?

I'll do some more digging.

Hands up who likes Directgov?

Not Gubbins, that's for sure. Back in 2007 we began the process of shutting down our own website and moving the content across to Directgov. We had our own website, just as we have our own forms, letters, marketing, call centers, IT, mailroom, lawyers, accounting, printing, reception and tea lady. We clean our own offices. None of these things are run from Whitehall. But it was deemed that our website should be.

In 2007 Directgov were already running a Product Review. direct.gov.uk was going to get new colours and layout. It was a brave new world. Directgov accepted they weren't very good and needed to change.

We didn't have anything planned for gubbins.co.uk. Everyone agreed it was fit for purpose.

We went ahead and converged anyway. There were a few tense meetings about it at Gubbins board level. One of the Gubbins board also sat on the Directgov board, although I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.

The migration of Gubbins

We turned the Gubbins web content into Directgov web content. It wasn't easy. Because of The Directgov Problem we couldn't trust our customers to navigate Directgov properly. So, we had to put everything on big pages. There are no anchor links to help people find anything. We had to make the most of it. Our service is now run from Directgov and our letters and publications were updated to send customers to direct.gov.uk/gubbins.

I work in the web team. We don't like it. As a rule of thumb, an update which took an hour now takes a day on Directgov. We can't make our own updates. We have to send everything to a Directgov editor in a word document.

We keep getting different Directgov editors to work with. When a new one starts, they don't know anything about Gubbins. They don't seem to know much about writing for the web either. When we send them something to update, they rewrite it. When we explain why we want something written a certain way, they argue. When we want a new page, they have to submit a form to the shadowy Publishing Board, who we've never met.

According to Government on the internet: progress in delivering information and services online By Great Britain: National Audit Office 2007, the UK is the only country who has tried to 'centralise content' across the public sector web. It's funny that no-one's run research to see if centralising content actually works.

Directgov gave us access to the Stellant CMS and Speedtrap analytics, but these are slow, old and tired. Chances are they haven't been replaced since 2006.

Moving to Directgov was supposed to save Gubbins money, but our costs have gone up. We have our own web infrastructure, so we haven't saved any money on hosting. We have the same number of writers and developers but they spend their time negotiating with people from Directgov.

We still run the same online services. Directgov the website doesn't really do anything. You can't book an appointment with it. To do that, you have to leave Directgov and move to gubbins.direct.gov.uk. We still run these screens but they're painted orange and have the Directgov logo painted on them.

Every time we build or fix something, we have to run it past the Directgov editors, the Directgov design team, the publishing board, and usually some other executive with a clever job title who we haven't heard of before.

'Why can't we get our website back?'

Dear me, if I had a penny for every time I was asked that.

Our directors still don't like it. One of them worked out the move cost us an extra £200K of avoidable phone calls. Half of the people who phone try finding the answer to their question on the website first.

Our call centers don't like Directgov either. They keep asking why we have to use it.

Our writers and marketing people don't like it. They keep writing 'we' when we have to say 'Gubbins'. We have a teeny Gubbins logo on our landing page of Directgov, rather than a website built by our own designers.

Our customers don't like it. When we show them a gubbins.co.uk prototype build by our own designers, they prefer it.

Our stakeholders don't like it. Even people who don't work on the web for a living know about things like local navigation, breadcrumbs and tabs. 

The product review in 2007 didn't come to anything. Or Project Austin, which came after that. Apparently everyone is excited about Betagov although Gubbins aren't so sure.

Directgov don't like Directgov

You'd think there was someone out there who liked Directgov. But Directgov the organisation don't like Directgov the website either.

You'd think there was someone out there who could say - we built Directgov. We've shown that it's improved the public sector web. The design is fit for purpose. It's as good as any website that was built by the private sector.

Such a person would be a web designer. But Directgov doesn't have any web designers. At least none that have ever visited Gubbins. It has plenty of publishing, PR and marketing people. In fact, that's all it seems to have. They outsource anything technical or anything which involves building websites.

In late 2010 Directgov paid Gubbins an actual visit. They didn't meet our web team, of course, just the board of directors. It was about the time Jayne Nickalls and the top brass all resigned or retired.

They admitted Directgov wasn't very good, just as they had in 2007. However it was 'not Directgov's fault'. Plus we'd had the benefits of cross selling from the Directgov platform. And there was a radical new Directgov on its way called Alphagov.

Let's just hope it happens this time.

The Directgov Problem

I'm getting ahead of myself. I haven't covered the basics of why Directgov has to die. This isn't controversial stuff, mind you. Even Directgov don't like Directgov the website.

www.direct.gov.uk is better than your average amateur site. It looks like a reasonably modern website circa 2005. The home page is still reminiscent of the now-abandoned American government website www.yougov.com. There's plenty of Public Services on offer.

Go down to a landing page and you come face to face with the Directgov problem -

Directgov landing page

I click into 'Gubbins for beginners' and I lose track of 'Financial support for Gubbins' and all the other pages in the 'Gubbins' section.

If I click on 'Home' I go back to the Directgov home page, not the Gubbins one.

If I click on Contacts, Do it online, Newsroom or Video, I no longer get Gubbins content.

There is no breadcrumb trail.

When I reach an article page, I lose sight of all the other article pages.

This is the basic Directgov Problem.

Planning your job hunting

Here's an example from the 'Jobseekers' section. Haha, 'Jobseekers' - there's a New Labour phrase if I ever heard one. Like 'Public services all in one place'. Or 'Weapons of mass destruction'.

When I'm in the article page Planning your job junting I lose sight of the other pages in the section 'Planning your job hunting' - 'Getting that job', 'Letters and job application forms' and so on. 

'In this section' links at the foot of pages

The usual place for local navigation - links to adjacent pages in the information architecture - is on the left hand side.

People read web pages in an F-shaped pattern. The left hand side is where they are most likely to look on a web page. See F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content for more details.

Instead of putting these links on the left hand side, Directgov put them at the foot of the page.

The left hand side is used for the 'global links' - 'Crime and justice', 'Education and learning' and so on.

Global links on the left hand side

That seems inconvenient. Why not put all the 'job' links where you can click on them? We mentioned this to Directgov several years ago. Why didn't they do anything?

Because this is 'Public services all in one place'! You might want to renew your car tax or apply for a student loan after you've applied for a job. This is known as 'cross selling'.

Cross selling is the first principle of Directgov.

The myth of cross selling

Directgov suits mention cross selling a lot. These days they freely admit Directgov isn't very good but they reckon Gubbins are still lucky to have cross selling opportunities by being on Directgov. Whenever someone looks up swine flu, they'll realise they need to look up Gubbins too.

Trouble is, people using the internet blank out everything which doesn't seem relevant to their immediate task. They are blind to adverts. They scan for information and don't stop to read much. This is the first principle behind web useability. Try reading Gerry McGovern or Jakob Nielsen for more information on this sort of thing.

So, people reading up on swine flu are highly unlikely to want to read about Gubbins. Especially since government services are pretty boring. YouTube and Facebook are only a click away when you're on the Internet. No-one wants to read about car tax unless they can avoid it. 

In this way, cross selling is an idea from traditional marketing that doesn't seem to apply to the new medium of the internet. Is there any proof cross selling exists? Well, Directgov have never published any, as far as I know. They don't like to question the proposition of Directgov very much. It could lead to some big orange existential crisis.

I've got some proof, though. I checked the Directgov analytics for Gubbins. According to that, people only click on the global links 0.5% of the time.

So, your average user visits 200 Gubbins pages before viewing any other Directgov content.

So, all in all, 'Public services all in one place' doesn't seem like the best online strategy for the government to follow. This ideal has led to the design decisions made by Directgov, resulting in a rubbish website. 

Directgov's local navigation is relegated to a place where you can't see it, to make way for the global navigation. Which people don't use.

Must mention it to Directgov next time they drop by. Which they don't.

Third person government

'Public services all in one place' also dominates our web content. Instead of saying 'we will contact you by phone' we say 'Gubbins will contact you by phone'.

Instead of using Gubbins logos, colours and styles, we use Directgov logos colours and styles.

It's like Marxism - build a system perfect enough and the state will melt away.

Until your passport gets lost in the post and you need to phone an actual call center.

Lest I'm harping on about a failed website which is due to be closed down, Betagov shows every sign of taking the 'third person government' principle even further. No landing pages, no logos, no contact details.

There is absolutely no chance whatsoever this will all go horribly wrong.

Directgov Is Dead - part 2

This morning I was going to launch a devastating attack on Directgov and all its works, but I've become preoccupied with my own problems. I should know the difference between alpha.gov.co.uk and www.alphagov.co.uk - I'm sure it's something I need to read up on. Within ten years, everything I know about developing websites and online services will be obselete. There's no way I'll be able to keep up with a young university graduate. I'd better make sure I get a promotion to senior management by then.

I feel that one of the reasons why Directgov exists is because  of the anxieties of well-meaning middle aged civil servants and politicians. Instead of a multitude of government websites and services, with the risk that they will go feral if left unattended, why not just have one?

A good starting point for the history of Directgov is Michael Cross' interview with Jayne Nickalls in 2007, when Directgov was still in its infancy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/aug/22/guardiansocietysupplement.egovernment

At the moment, most e-government transactions go through thousands of agency, departmental and local authority sites. Directgov is supposed to replace the lot. Nickalls says rationalisation would be good for citizens: "All our research shows that people want a single channel to government." She says that once people find Directgov, they like it: "More than 80% of users think it's a very good site."

Rationalisation is a centrepiece of government IT strategy. Consolidating the rambling government estate in cyberspace was an idea promoted by Sir David Varney's review of government services, published by the Treasury last December. Varney estimated that the government could save £400m over three years by channelling all its e-activities through just two sites, Directgov and its business equivalent, businesslink.gov.uk.

However, the "supersite" scheme may be at odds with public agencies' desire to promote their own brand identities on the web. Nickalls says she is looking forward to the challenge. But does she realise she could be blamed for every problem encountered with government websites? "Of course!"

And blamed she was. On 20 November 2010, Nickalls announced her resignation, along with several high-profile members of the Directgov board. Some of us took this as a tacit admission that Directgov had failed.

Or did it succeed? As woeful as Directgov's design and navigation are, hundreds of government websites, many of them poorly written and inaccessible, were duly closed down and migrated. The government's momentum is still in the direction of greater centralisation, control and hierarchy. Nickalls announced that 'phase one of Directgov is complete' and by that time the Alphagov project was already underway.

On 23 November 2010 Martha Lane Fox published her 'letter' to the Minister of the Cabinet Office, Francis Maud -

Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution - Letter from Martha Lane Fox to Francis Maude

From page two, her Key Recommendations were -

1. Make Directgov the government front end for all departments' transactional online services to citizens and businesses, with the teeth to mandate cross government solutions, set standards and force departments to improve citizens' experience of key transactions.

2. Make Directgov a wholesaler as well as the retail shop front for government services & content by mandating the development and opening up of Application Programme Interfaces (APls) to third parties.

3. Change the model of government online publishing, by putting a new central team in Cabinet Office in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments.

4. Appoint a new CEO for Digital in the Cabinet Office with absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APls) and the power to direct all government online spending.

I'm not sure what paragraph 2 means. I'm doomed unless I get that promotion. But the rest seems straightforward enough - easy enough for a middle aged politician to grasp, with a compelling sense of urgency.

From Nickalls' 'rationalisation' we have moved on to words like 'teeth', 'absolute control' and 'absolute authority'. Far from being scrapped, the Directgov ideal was taking on a more militant form.

Simon Dickson's recently Puffbox article 22 more well-paid GDS jobs up for grabs mentioned the £1.5 bill for GDS executive posts. Tom Loosemore's comment was:

Yes, you're correct, GDS is setting its very high indeed when it comes to digital skills. To deliver a gov.uk revolution GDS needs the very best developers, designers, operations & systems people in the UK. And that means offering appropriate salaries for world-class digital talent.

That's right, a revolution. I've got a feeling we'll be coming back to this notion over the next few months. There's not date for the revolution just yet but I understand the Beta version is going live for public comment in February 2011.

Directgov may be dead, but the rhetoric which kept it alive up until now is looking for a new host body.

Directgov Is Dead

It's ironic that this first post is a eulogy on Directgov, since thirty seconds ago when I made this blog I proclaimed it had to die. Directgov the organisation is now the Government Digital Service and Directgov the website is now due to be replaced with a revolutionary new government website -

www.alphagov.co.uk

Hang on a sec ... what's this?

Alphagov

Hello and thanks for stopping by.
This is the domain related to the Alphagov project but there is nothing here.
We will be launching our alpha in early May and we will put details up at that time.
See you then!

---

alphagov.co.uk
Internet solutions provided by Namesco Limited - Sunday 06 November, 2011

It's not www.alphagov.com - that's taken by a commercial company, as is www.betagov.com. 

Silly me. I forgot the .gov in the domain. I work with Directgov every single day in a professional capacity yet there I slipped back into my usual web browsing behaviour. I forgot that government websites have their own URL conventions. In other words, we have to make special allowances for government websites. 

I'll try - 

www.alpha.gov.co.uk

No, nothing there. 

I'll go back to the Puffbox post about Alphagov - I'm pretty sure there was a link there -

http://puffbox.com/2011/05/11/ten-things-alphagov-gets-right/

Ah there we go - 

http://alpha.gov.uk/

I'll need to finish this first post now. I'd planned to have an initial rant then make my morning coffee. But then, finding Alphagov took more time than it took me to create this Google blog. 

According to www.alphagov.co.uk's holding page it was launched a year ago today. A year seems like a long time for building a website. 

But for a Directgov, a year isn't enough time; just as £30 million a year isn't enough money.

Back soon.