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.

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. 

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.

Absolute control: why Betagov will fail

It would be a terrible shame if Betagov fails, just like Directgov failed. The people working on it have good track records and they're working on it with the best intentions. I wish them all the best. No, really.

Here are my criteria for Betagov to succeed:

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

2. Directgov is shut down on time
31st of August 2012. I'll be throwing a party to celebrate. See? No-one wants Betagov to succeed more than me.

3. Betagov achieves savings
Let's use Directgov's benchmark. For Betagov to succeed, they should publicly provide evidence that they have achieved actual savings. Let's give them, say, a year. We won't mention the £400 million again; any savings will do.

4. Betagov improves public sector web useability
Tricky one to prove. But apart from saving money, the point of giving absolute control to a team of people in London is to enforce high standards for online government services. I suppose they could create Directgov Dogs and COTA boxes for all? Let's give them a couple of years to achieve this.

5. Betagov abolishes government brands
We've seen how Directgov spent vast sums of money promoting Directgov, when they perhaps should have spent it on web services. But Betagov aims to remove all traces of Gubbins, Jobcentre, DVLA and Student Finance England from its new supersite.

What could possibly go wrong?

As I've covered in previous posts, government supersites are based on a series of easily-disproved assumptions about the way people use the internet. It has attracted disproportionate amounts of leverage and cash while producing web services which are mediocre at best. It's inevitable that pursuing the supersite dream will lead to new versions of the Directgov problem.

At the time of writing, the Betagov team is only just beginning to engage with the actual services they're supposed to represent. Sooner or later they will find out that the public want to be able to contact the passport service when their passport goes missing in the post, and no 'revolution' is going to change that.

Wow I'm really going heavy on the rhetoric in this post. What's up with me? This blog was supposed to be fun.

Again, if I'm proved wrong, I'll be the one throwing the party.

Hands up who likes Directgov?

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

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

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

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

The migration of Gubbins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directgov don't like Directgov

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

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

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

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

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

Let's just hope it happens this time.

The Directgov Problem

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

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

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

Directgov landing page

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

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

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

There is no breadcrumb trail.

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

This is the basic Directgov Problem.

Planning your job hunting

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

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

'In this section' links at the foot of pages

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

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

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

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

Global links on the left hand side

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

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

Cross selling is the first principle of Directgov.

The myth of cross selling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Third person government

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

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

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

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

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

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

Directgov Is Dead

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

www.alphagov.co.uk

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

Alphagov

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

---

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

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

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

I'll try - 

www.alpha.gov.co.uk

No, nothing there. 

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

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

Ah there we go - 

http://alpha.gov.uk/

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

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

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

Back soon.