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.