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 -
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment