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.

APIs on GOV.UK: they do sound jolly clever

Government supersites exist in their own reality. The launch of the navigation-free, purely information-carrying GOV.UK site on 31 January was hailed as a bold step forward by blogs close to GDS. The project is still apparently under budget at £1.7 million although the man hours being spent by the organisations helping to create the content are likely to have pushed the real costs over this limit already.

Last week I blogged about how the GOV.UK (do we need to capitalise this in future?) project already seemed to be losing interest in our un-sexy old public services and starting to promoting government policies on its platform instead. Sadly, Tom Loosemore's revolutionary Warriors have rapidly picked up that bourgeois Directgov habit of sucking up to politicians. They really should drop in on one of our call centres these days.

To be fair though, if GOV.UK really is acting like a 'business start-up' in Martha Lane Fox's words, they need to keep their investors sweet. And one of the ways to do this is come up with some cutting-edge ideas. Killer apps. USPs.

Today I'll cover one of the current clever-sounding flat-earth ideas behind GOV.UK.

The sexy Application Program Interfaces of GOV.UK

Here's GDS bringing us up to date on that market for open APIs:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/07/where-are-those-apis/

All of the editorial content on GOV.UK is available in full via an API. It’s the same API we use to communicate between the editorial tools and the apps that produce the pages you see.

Kudos to GDS to sticking to their plan, as ill-advised as it is. They seem to be putting some distance between themselves and Directgov by managing to build anything at all (see Directgov dog and the magic comments box).

Here's an older GDS post about those APIs -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/22/building-apis-building-on-apis/

Public APIs are a vital feature of the modern web. Whether you’re looking at the ecosystem of Twitter and Facebook apps, tools for managing auctions on ebay, or code for embedding Youtube videos in a blog post, clear ways of integrating services are key for building more captivating web experience, and for bringing solutions to users where they are. It’s that latter point that underpins the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s report that: “the content, functionality and features of the service should … be widely available and open for re-use via syndication/apps.”

Martha Lane Fox called for these in Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution:

This increase in focus on end users should include opening up government transactions so they can be easily delivered by commercial organisations and charities, and putting information wherever people are on the web by syndicating content.

There's a strong whiff of Big Society about 'commercial organisations and charities'; presumably the '£1.3 billion, rising to £2.2 billion' of hypothetical savings promised in Directgov 2010 and Beyond involves removing a large number of public sector jobs like mine and letting private finance and er charities step in.

The problem with APIs

Here's where I could end up looking incredibly short-sighted 12 months from now ...

I'm only going on the GDS blog itself here, but I don't see it crammed with comments from private sector companies demanding syndicated content. There is, presumably, no commercial value in a government API. You can quote government content or link to it. Why spend your own web development budget adding content you didn't write, or breaking your site's look and feel with a government widget?

So far I haven't seen APIs used anywhere on the internet for government content and widgets. OK there was that one widget one of the government departments produced in 2010. The downloads were in the low hundreds. I'm not aware of seeing it on any websites.

It's been 14 months since Martha Lane Fox's Directgov 2010 and beyond. Is anyone out there looking for APIs of car tax information? Swine flu widgets?

APIs certainly sound dead new and exciting if you're talking to a consultant working in Whitehall. But we're actually talking about boring government web content. Not eBay auctions or blogs. Why not provide links to individual websites tailored to government services? The public can still get a definitive answer to their questions on something called a 'website'. A widget won't provide information in any context, sadly.

And thus pops GDS' theoretical bubble.

I could be wrong, of course. I spend my time building and fixing things on behalf of people who phone government call centres. I still work in 'websites', for heaven's sake.

Remember 'cross-selling'?

Since 2004, Directgov used their eccentric notion of 'cross selling' to build an unusable website saddled with the Directgov problem. The 'cross selling' notion goes against one of the fundamental principles of web usability - that users ignore anything that isn't of relevance to their immediate task. In practice, 'Cross-selling' was easily refuted within five minutes of looking at Directgov's actual Speedtrap analytics. It's telling that GOV.UK, while retaining the notion that citizens need all their information on a single domain, has quietly abandoned the notion of 'cross-selling' altogether.

Time will tell if public sector APIs become a force or whether this was simply an excuse to centralise control of the public sector web in Whitehall - while promising billions in savings, of course.

Remember poor old Directgov Innovate? Last post 2010 -

From the New Labour rhetoric of 'Public services in one place' GDS are talking a more private-sector, free market language with APIs. Alas, the coalition's 'Big Society' idea shares its initials with 'Blue Sky'. Amongst other things.

Post script: Open standards

In contrast, the cabinet office is offering a consultation on Open Standards:

Information Technology across the government estate is expensive and the way that government departments previously purchased IT has resulted in hundreds of small, separate platforms operating across a landscape of disconnected, self-contained departments.


Our approach will enable the Government to work collectively together but effective open standards for software and systems are required to ensure interoperability between software systems, applications and data. Within the Government Digital Service we are already demonstrating how collaboration between departments, along with a clear focus on the user, delivers better public services for less. Open Standards are crucial for sharing information across government boundaries and to deliver a common platform and systems that more easily interconnect.

To offer you a morsel of optimism with Directgov Must Die's stodgy diet of cynicism, allowing GDS to create and enforce standards across the public sector web is a good thing.

Someone please ban GDS from creating more government supersites, and cut their remit back from 'everything'. If you do, we might start seeing some real savings and real improvements.

gov.uk launch: a quick digression about all the nice things the government are doing

I had today's blog post all planned out in my mind. I was even going to review the other blogs covering the gov.uk launch like a grown-up sub-academic.

OK here goes -

Delib - 'Looks great! Hypothetical savings!'
Puffbox - 'Looks great! More search less navigation!'
Helpful technology - 'Looks great! More centralised control!'
Disambiguation - 'Why most UX is shite'

Haha I'm sure the timing of the last post was just an unfortunate coincidence. UX and web consultants don't like to knock the government supersite idea too much, although Puffbox's Simon Dickson is known for his healthy scepticism. Over the years Directgov must have provided a nice little earner for hired guns.

OMG a digression of a digression. No, what genuinely appalled me twenty minutes ago was the revelation that not only would gov.uk feature public services, it's going to feature extensive PR on the policies of the government of the day:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/03/government-policy-a-spotters-guide/

Later this month we will unveil another bit of our GOV.UK beta – the element that explains the work and workings of government. This is intended to replace the many separate sites run by government organisations, simplifying things for people who are personally or professionally interested in how government works and what it is doing.

So far so good. It always tickled me pink that the same organisations who forced Gubbins to converge to Directgov would have to find themselves going through content editors to get anything published on the web. Those editors will be sitting in separate buildings, if not separate cities hundreds of miles away. They could wait for years on end for a Project Austin to not show up as well.

Naturally GDS are putting hypothetical users first:

In developing this component we’ve found ourselves returning frequently to the question: “what is government policy?”

Not “what is government policy on issue X” (a separate problem which I will return to in a minute) but, more philosophically, what is and isn’t a government policy and how do you know when you’ve met one?

Apparently GDS need to comply with FOI as well so all this government openness and accountability would be a terribly good thing.

Here's where the stench of evil becomes overpowering:

Working definition

Our ambition in creating GOV.UK is radically to improve the user experience of government, and that includes explaining government policy in a clear and consistent way.

The current Government is on record as saying: “It is our ambition to make the UK the most transparent and accountable Government in the world”.

Being able to identify, aggregate and explain government policy is critical to our doing that.

The ICO study cited two workable definitions:

• a course or general plan of action to be adopted by government, party, person etc. (OED)
• the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver “outcomes”, desired changes in the real world. (Modernising Government White Paper, 1999)

We’d like to suggest a third, the one we’re working to in the beta of GOV.UK, which is:

• statements of the government’s position, intent or action

See the rhetorical metamorphosis there - from 'user experience' to 'identify, aggregate and explain' to 'statements of the government’s position'.

It's impossible to explain the government of the day's policies without advocating them.

Here's a quick reminder of how Alphagov looked:

Alphagov test site

Why, roughly half of it was devoted to promoting, sorry, explaining the workings, of the government of the day, wasn't it?

In the middle of the lower half there was a smiling, happy portrait of David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the garden of No 10 Downing Street. 












Presumably you need to see that smiling, optimistic picture of Dave Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Garden Of Future Promise when you're off to find out about public services.

They could have used a more neutral picture to express the somewhat dull idea of government structure and policy but I expect this was the photo the Coalition had lying around.

While charming politicians is one of the ten things Directgov actually does, to their credit, Directgov always remained politically neutral. Now GDS seem to be crossing a sinister line to appease their paymasters.

Oh dear, there I go with the rhetoric again. Here's more from GDS themselves - their italics:

Towards a language for describing policy

To fully answer the question “what is government policy on issue X”, though, we need not only to identify government policies reliably but also to find a naming convention and consistent language to explain them.

We’re trying out one possible approach to that in the beta, using a new ’policy definition’ format to apply a structured set of sub-headings on each policy, as below. The first two (‘the issue’ and ‘actions’) are mandatory headings, everything else will be optional – a flexible framework to describe policies of different flavours and at different life stages.

The issue – the problem or opportunity, and government’s aims
Actions – what government is doing/will do/has done to address the problem or seize the opportunity
Background – how the policy has developed to date, why the government has chosen this course and rejected other options, including the evidence
Engagement – who government has asked/is asking/will ask, when and how
Impact – who benefits or is otherwise affected
Bills and legislation – the legal framework in which this policy is operating, and how the policy might change that legislation
Partner organisations – what government and non-government organisations are involved, and in what capacity
Related news, speeches, publications and consultations - how the policy is evolving through announcements and publications (displayed automatically by creating associations in the publishing system)

The headings are experimental and might be wrong. The approach may, faced with the complex ebb and flow of a policy-making machine which lacks an “everyday need for a precise definition”, prove too simplistic.

But simplification is absolutely the point here. The goal is to produce a comprehensive, coherent, constantly updated list of everything government is saying it will do or is doing, and to allow people to dig into that information in ways that makes sense to them.

That's all right, then - they're on a mission to explain. And if the government of the day's policy happens to be an illegal war or a bank bailout, you'll find plenty of information which justifies their position; published by the same people who publish all other government content, on the only government domain left.

I remember from visiting Directgov there was an air of nervous excitement when a member of the cabinet office was in the building. They're a lot closer to people in power than they are to people answering the phone in stressful government call centres.

In What happened to that £400 million? Part 2 I wondered why the Tory like Francis Maude would support a government supersite in principle - "less individual responsibility, more 'government knows best'". Now it seems the politicians have a vested interest in supersites which go beyond hypothetical savings.

Apart from the fact that 72 hours after the gov.uk launch GDS already seem to be losing interest in the task at hand, this predicts the worst scenarios yet for new versions of Directgov.

Next time maybe I'll get back to gov.uk's shortcomings - if GDS let me.

gov.uk: the Next Step of the No Plan

Kudos to GDS for keeping their word this time and launching Betagov - sorry, gov.uk - in January 2012 as they said. However, the public sector web is a world of continually lowered expectations, and it's hard to see anything revolutionary about gov.uk. 

Gov.uk is a website with no transactions and very little local navigation. Credit where it's due: it's nicer-looking than Directgov and dispenses with the oppressive global navigation which a different hierarchy of consultants came up with for Directgov in 2006, the version which is virtually unchanged today.

It's a long-overdue replacement for Directgov, but at the moment it's still not clear whether Directgov will be closed on schedule in August 2012.

It's part of a project costing £1.7 million; although with the existing Directgov and other government bodies contributing man hours, it seems ...

Hang on a minute, what the hell's this?

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/03/government-policy-a-spotters-guide/

Betagov launch: how wrong I was

I'm the kind of contrarian who enjoys being proved wrong. In my posts Betagov, Betagov - wherefore art thou Betagov? and Dear GDS: when's that Betagov launch date? I strongly implied that the Betagov launch was going to drift and probably wasn't going to happen at all.

In Absolute control: why Betagov will fail I gave my criteria for Betagov to succeed. The first one was:


1. It's launched on time
31st of January 2012, I believe.

Yet here we have it in all its minimalist glory: www.gov.uk

I'll be happy to be proved wrong through criteria 2-5 as well. So, hats off to GDS and let's keep the skepticism for another day. 

Betagov, Betagov - wherefore art thou Betagov?

With apologies to the Bard. As you might recall from your A-Level English, Juliet's lament means 'why are you Romeo?' rather than 'where are you, Romeo'? Indeed, over 2012 people might be asking where Betagov has gotten to. They've got a lot of user testing to do before they come up with something that isn't worse than Directgov itself. Combining a government supersite with accessibility is like ... damnit, Dorian ... Shakespeare would have nailed that with a simile. What's wrong with you tonight?

Nonetheless, the question that the test subjects, the big players like DVLA, DWP and Student Loans Company and eventually GDS themselves are going to be asking is: why do you have to be a Betagov at all? What was so wrong with government services having a website each?

GDS are doing their homework, of course:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/27/search-data-user-needs/

There are over 300,000 searches carried out weekly on Directgov, with over 125,000 different search phrases. The most popular term, ‘jobs’, is searched for 4,500 times a week. At the other end of the spectrum there is a ‘long tail’ of 100,000 phrases that are only searched for once ...

Using this data to identify needs that are not being met by government can be daunting. However, it is possible to filter or group it to pick out emerging trends and unsatisfactory user journeys.

125,000 different search phrases. I would expect the number of different search phrases was somewhat lower on each of those 287 websites you killed and absorbed like some glutinous horror from a John Carpenter film. You're going to have your work cut out improving public services now.

It's OK though, you give one example of something Directgov's dramatic intervention managed to improve -

During the run up to a recent Christmas, a growing volume of searches that included the words ‘Christmas’ and ‘payment’ was spotted. We also noted that users were not clicking on the (irrelevant) results presented to them. Delving deeper, we were able to see what else those users looked for. This identified an unmet user need: benefit payment dates over the Christmas period. HMRC published an article on Directgov and, as we were able to supply the relevant keywords that users were searching for, the search engine-optimised article ranked well in Google quickly.

Do HMRC not listen to customer phone calls at all? Or check their own web analytics? I would have thought that people have been phoning up about their xmas benefit payment dates every single year since the dawn of the welfare state. Some local knowledge would have paid off there.

Luckily Directgov swooped and stuck their HMRC article on a seperate supersite; and thus another feel-good piece of anecdotal evidence about public services being improved by centralisation was born. [note before publish: explore Spielberg metaphor here].

I expect you've got your beady eyes on the vast HMRC website these days; not the complicated transactional stuff where you submit your tax returns, of course - just the pages of static content. They should be easy enough to prune, transplant and paint a non-branded Betagov white. You'll be needing some success stories in the next couple of years so converging HMRC might do the trick.

Haha, oh dear, I slipped into the second person again. I used that trope on my last post. Probably best I leave this one be. Maybe I'll go and comment on GDS a bit.

Dear GDS: when's that Betagov launch date?

Dear Government Digital Service (GDS),

To avoid making the same mistakes as Directgov, and condemning the public sector web to another decade of malaise, you need to change your approach. In theory you've been given absolute control and absolute authority. You need to use your powers wisely.  The first step? Abandon government supersites.

Martha Lane Fox's open letter was enough to save Directgov and put you on a path of even greater centralisation, based on the same hypothetical savings as Varney. Maybe this open letter will get you to start engaging with the public sector. 

What you've promised us

In theory Betagov (that probably won't even be what it's called) will have a huge impact on the UK public sector. It could even have a huge effect on life in the UK.

Fox and Francis Maude have promised a billion pounds worth of savings in the public sector web. As we saw in What happened to that £400 million? Directgov received £83 million over several years in pursuit of £400 million in web-related savings that never materialised. A billion pounds is a lot of money - chances are we'll notice having that extra amount in the bank. You therefore have a lot at stake.

If you succeed in creating hyper-efficient online services and close co-operation between government departments and bodies, much of the existing government infrastructure will become obselete. We won't need as many job centres, DVLA offices, or local authority offices; while the call centres and response handling offices for post will have a far lighter workload. Citizens will use online services without having to write to the government or call. In theory, Betagov could make much of the public sector vanish, in the same way that Amazon and eBay are laying waste to our high streets.

I assume my own job will be part of this billlion pounds in savings. Don't worry, my inner Tory rejoices at this. A lot of my job involves arguing with Directgov editors and emailing word documents around.

If Betagov creates a system where my job is performed more efficiently from London, and no-one needs to phone our call centres, I could go off and work in, oh, I don't know, ecommerce. I'd become a private sector producer instead of taking the government's money as a foot soldier in an army of bureacrats.

So when's the launch?

As far as Gubbins know, Betagov is due in January 2012, so it's being launched between now and a week on Tuesday. Directgov will be closed completely by August 2012.

Your blogs have gone a bit quiet on the matter. Why so coy?

You've published slides to show that in the case of 'Tax' and 'Going to court' Betagov shows some improvements on Directgov -

http://www.slideshare.net/DigEngHMG/betagov-content-testing-1312012-final

Smashing, that's a start. Your new supersite may work better than one which is virtually unchanged from five years ago.

You've shown that 'Betagov works better than Directgov for two sets of users, under two limited sets of conditions.'

Next comes the extrapolation. From Nick Breeze's blog post:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/13/quantitative-testing-betagov/

By way of context, if (and it is a big if) the same level of improvement were mirrored across the live service, a Betagov-style product could lead to:

• Over 1 million more user needs being successfully met each month (aka a million frustrating & expensive failures avoided)
• Users saving over 215,000 hours of their time each month
• Quantifiably lower levels of user frustration, and higher levels of user reassurance

Come on. Tell us how much that would save? Don't be shy. We love hypothetical savings here at Gubbins. Sometimes we dip into them and go for a slap-up feed at Witherspoon's. Mum's the word!

Hypothetical users

Time to re-cap Leisa Reichelt's blog post Opportunities lost – AlphaGov from 19 May 2011.

Who is the audience?

At no point that I saw did the AlphaGov team ever apparently think deeply about what kind of an end user they were going to prioritise. They talk about ‘thinking about who our users were’ and having a ‘user-base of all the entire adult population of a country’.

As User Experience practitioners we know that although you might want the whole country to use whatever you’re designing, you need to put a ring around the kind of users you MOST want to support ...

You can’t take a User Centred approach to design when your user is ‘Everyone’. You need to define who your users are. You must clearly identify the behavioural characteristics that you most want to support and focus on designing to best support these ...

AlphaGov sends a message that you can say you’re doing User Centred Design but you don’t have to show any evidence of a UCD process – audience definition, research, user involvement, design principles that actually track to specific behaviour attributes.

It's therefore going to be difficult to mirror the results of your testing, on two limited scenarios, across a supersite which offers a range of vastly different services.

And thus your new website will fail to offer the usable experience we should expect from a modern website.

You might improve the overall supersite experience, you might not. I haven't seen any navigation so far. Without local navigation, you get the Directgov problem.

But to build tailored navigation, information architecture and content, rather than 'one size fits all' pages spat out by your CMS, requires considering individual user experiences. In other words, you need to start treating motorists differently from people wanting to find out about their pension and people looking for jobs.

But it's a lot easier to do this on individual websites rather than government supersites. And the organisations who provide public services know a lot more about their audiences than you do.

Are you starting to see the problem?

What you can accomplish in 2012

We're already a year on from Martha's open letter to Francis Maude. Again, in theory you've been given 'absolute control' and 'absolute authority'. What are you going to do with it?

Redesigning and relaunching Directgov is the easy bit. The content is already there. Word 2003 documents full of tracked changes are flying around through cyberspace as we speak. It's funny how your technological revolution doesn't involve that much new technology. But you know best.

You'll probably encounter some resistance from the government departments and bodies who actually provide public services. Hopefully they'll be polite about it. But they'll have a 'myopic view of their own service' as you put it on that training course I went on in Hercules House. They'll want improvements for their own customers, not theoretical improvements for 'the entire adult population of a country’. The debates will become drawn out and complex.

Not to worry, when you do launch Betagov (February? time to publish that date somewhere) it's only for public feedback. Hopefully you can get that bland sort of 'yes looks better' and 'yes I'd tell my friends' feedback you can pass upwards to the politicians.

If you stay the course and don't allow Betagov to become another Project Austin, you will launch it in earnest and close down Directgov. I think August 2012 is somewhat optimistic, based on the amount of stakeholders you have currently using Directgov.

Let's say you will migrate the content by the end of 2012. Two years after Fox's open letter, you will have completed the first step of your revolution, replacing Directgov.

Years three and four - things start getting tricky

At this point, you're going to need to start producing some kind of measurable improvement in public sector usability, as well as the billion pounds of savings.

If you continue on the path of centralising the rest of the public sector on to a single domain, this will take up all your time and resources. You'll have crossed paths with HMRC by now - are you going to bring online tax returns, and a mountain of web pages on to Betagov as well?

Because the first two years of GDS' existence were spent on creating a government supersite, you'll have to stick with it.  Trouble is, the new Directgov will ensure that the front end for government services remains poor. They'll reach for a phone or letter rather than using online transactions.

You won't have addressed the transactions themselves, much. The power to change these will remain with the public sector organisations who process the application forms and own the customer accounts. You may plan to build and host new versions of the transactions under your direct control down there in Whitehall. However, this will take decades rather than years.

Governments will come and go, and as your existence relies on the good will of politicians rather than on users, you will need to keep proving yourselves.

The solution

There is a way out. Prove your absolute authority by giving us our websites back.

The majority of Directgov traffic is dominated by a small number of services - motoring, jobs, pensions and student loans, if memory serves. You call these 'flagship services', which is nice. Unless that's a euphemism for the most complicated services with the most demanding owners.

These are big organisations with their own web teams. Let them do their work. We're not converging all the public sector call centres into one, so why have we tried to do this with websites? Focus on something achievable.

Become an organisation that tracks the progress of government services. You will have the power to censure those that fail to make any progress, or even threaten them.

If you like, focus on reducing the amount of avoidable calls and lessons people make to HM government. Measure the overall number over time and get the public sector to put plans in place for how they'll get people to use online services instead.

When you discover an area of government where the rules are too messy and complicated to develop effective online services, feed this back to the civil service and parliament. Public services are only as complex as they want them to be.

The alternative? Years are going to go by while the theoretical savings, based on the experience of theoretical users, aren't going to show up. Expect commiserations from Martha Lane Fox while your board resign and retire one by one; or a new government move you and change your name again. 

I feel for you GDS, I really do. I wish I had more power myself - working on a public sector web team, you rely on government policies which change year by year. Websites can only do so much. Some transactions were probably easier to complete on bits of paper. Our customers will always give up and phone us when they encounter something tricky. You need to decide what is possible to achieve while you still have time and good will on your side.

Time to choose your battles.

Yours sincerely,

Your nemesis,

Dorian of Gubbins.

How to make Directgov work

It's a new year. Time for some positivity. There are some ways in which a centralised government organisation responsible for online services could work. It would be effective if we limit its scope and keep it to a budget and deadlines.

The trouble is, GDS is trying to be all things to all men. It's responsible for publishing web content; building a government supersite; enforcing standards of useability; saving money; and building toolkits and uniform government transactions. Phew!

Having responsibility for all these things create a conflict of interest: for example, Directgov are responsible for Gubbin's web useability, but don't tend to be critical of the Directgov problem which is a consequence of the rubbish website they make us use.

Here's a quick list of things which the Government Digital Service (GDS) could focus on in order to become effective:

1. GDS runs a government wiki

A government supersite can't hope to capture all the information people might potentially need when interacting with government. So, GDS should focus on creating a single government wiki to contain all the high level stuff, and let government organisations offer their own websites.

The version of Betagov due to go live at the end of January (February? They're being slightly coy with dates) will only contain generic information for each service, so it's shaping up to be more of a wiki than a web service anyway.

2. GDS becomes a government web standards authority

All government organisations need to have a plan to become WC3 compliant. GDS review the plans and check for progress; perhaps making annual visits to review the results of any evaluations or customer engagement.

3. GDS becomes the organisation which writes the cheques

As long as they don't become the people who build and fix the services themselves, GDS could approve funding for all web projects, ensuring that they keep costs down and figure in useability and accessibility in each project.

4. GDS focus on creating innovations

Didn't work with Directgov, or Innovate, as far as I can see; but GDS seem to fancy themselves as being able to create widgets and sparkly new code for the rest of the public sector. So, let them do pure research and take some of the development burden off the other government bodies

5. GDS become a government news agency

The Directgov paradigm is already focused on 'publishing' rather than offering services. Let Directgov focus entirely on awareness campaigns and leave the missing passports, renewing driving licenses etc to the bodies that provide these services. GDS spend a lot more time around politicians and the civil service than yokels who work in the public sector, anyway. It's a hierarchy thing.

5. GDS focus on reducing avoidable government contact

Ever work in a call centre? It's no fun. You spend most of the day answering the same old questions over and over again. People should find the answers on useable government websites instead. Didn't happen with Directgov.

So, again, GDS becomes an auditing body that ensures citizens don't have to spend their time phoning public sector call centers or writing angry complaint letters. Life improves for everyone. And apparently there's a billion pounds of savings to be made per year from reducing 'avoidable contact'. Sorted.

Happy new year.