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.

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.

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.

Ten things Directgov actually does

As discussed in hands up who likes Directgov, Directgov actually doesn't do websites or public services. Not really. It creates generic web content for public services on a supersite. The tricky bit, the transactions, are still handled by the same public sector organisations, but they're given a Directgov logo. It spends its actual time and money on PR and marketing.

This post is really about the psychology of government supersites. If you like, these are the rules a Directgov (and hence a Betagov) tend to follow.

Things are changing, of course. The Government Digital Service are going to do websites and public services on behalf of the rest of us. There's no chance whatsoever they're just going to create another unaccountable hierarchy of executives. 

1. Promise the world
When you invest a large amount of money into something which isn't designed to run at a profit, you can let your imagination run riot for what you're going to achieve. For Betagov, the ambitions are even greater than Directgov. They'd better get round to publishing some success criteria, with timescales and costings so that we can decide whether it worked or not at the end of the time period.

2. Use rhetoric as strategy
In other words, base your strategy on a phrase which sounds good. 'Public services all in one place' creates the Directgov problem. They used a catchy marketing tagline along with some flat-earth assumptions about 'cross-selling' to create the clunky, overpriced behemoth we've been stuck with since 2007. 'Useable online public services' might have been better for a mission statement; but sadly useable services don't tend to flourish on a government supersite.

3. Use hypothetical savings
As discussed in what happened to that £400 million, in 2006 the Varney report promised £400 million in savings through 'e-service improvement including website rationalisation, channel shift and shared infrastructure'. It also alluded to £250-300 million in savings from 'rationalising face-to-face provision across central and local government estates' and 'savings of 25 per cent of the cost of contact centre
operation'. That comes to over a billion pounds in hypothetical savings which never showed up in the three years after the Comprehensive Spending Review.

In his blog post 'The second lever' GDS' Mike Bracken estimated that close to 1 billion pounds were wasted in avoidable calls to HM government in 2009/2010 alone. Quite a dramatic figure. 'If we can move a fraction of these to compelling, digital transactional services with very high completion rates, the savings are quite clear.'

The stakes are high, then. GDS need to start publishing plans and timescales for how they're going to reduce that £1 billion per year in phone calls. After three years or so, that would surely justify their existence.

4. Charm the politicians
No-one likes Directgov the website, yet the supersite concept consistently appeals to middle-aged politicians. Most things on the internet flourish if they appeal to vast numbers of people, and vanish if they don't. Directgov exists wholly on the goodwill of small numbers of people in power.

Perhaps a grand sounding, cutting edge website and organisation helps reassure people who grew up before home computers; as well as keeping everything London-centric and making noises about hypothetical savings.

5. Live in its own bubble
Government supersites live in their own reality. As I said in my first post, we have to make special allowances for government websites. They don't live by the 'innovate or die' law of the real internet. This is why COTA boxes, the one paltry Directgov innovation in three years, was heralded as a bold step forward; and why GDS' online petitions for 10 Downing Street are showing up in GDS promotions for Betagov. £83,000 for something which allows people to give their opinion over the internet wouldn't be that remarkable in the real world.

6. Create jobs for suits
After four years I would have expected to meet some designers or developers at Directgov; but by and large, apart from the content editors, all you meet are managers and executives. They are a fixture at public sector conferences and their quotes appear in the press. Where are the people who build and fix things?

Things are changing, however - the Cabinet Office are currently recruiting large numbers of developers and designers. But are they better place in London, than placed with the organisations who provide public services?

7. Centralise control
Give credit where it's due. Nothing can go on Directgov without it passing through the editors. And Directgov does at least have a published style guide with consistent rules. Maybe the 287 websites which were closed by Directgov after 2007 all had terrible content. It's difficult to see how content writers and editors in the organisations who ran these organisations couldn't have achieved the same thing with less bureaucracy, however.

There are risks associated with all government communications being centralised in one or two buildings in London. The lower half of the current Alphagov design is essentially an advert for the government in power. It would be very easy to declare a state of emergency, lock down the government CMS and use the one government supersite to publish one's own agenda. Something to think about, unless I'm just getting paranoid in my old age.

8. Collective responsibility
It's difficult to find one person who will accept responsibility for the Directgov problem, as it is no-one's fault. The whole website was arguably Jayne Nickall's fault, which was why she resigned in November 2010. Apart from this, it's been impossible to improve the public services which have moved on to Directgov over the past four years. You speak to a franchise of managers and editors, but not to anyone in Directgov Central. You won't find a designer to improve your corner of Directgov - these jobs are outsourced, and no-one has time for your service.

9. Customer engagement
Again, give the devil his due - Directgov like nothing better than the notion of customer engagement. In the many years of attempted product relaunches and enhanced templates, they have spent large amounts of money talking to the general public. I'm not sure what they did with the less-than-enthusiastic responses to the Directgov Customer Focus Labs website they launched in late 2009. 

The trouble is, customer feedback needs to be focused on specific things in order to create specific improvements. GDS tend to be selective when running customer engagement. Although no-one likes Directgov, GDS don't tend to run, say, comparative studies where you book your driving test on Directgov, then book it on a prototype of a tailored DVLA website. The latter might suggest the general public value a dedicated website for a government organisation, rather than a supersite. Gubbins' own customer feedback tends to suggest the latter. Then again, who pays the piper ...

10. Enforce 'One size fits all'
No matter what point you're trying to get across, it needs to fit on a 300-750 word generic Directgov article with minimal pictures, generic colours and little local navigation. Betagov are going down the same route, treating all government content as equivalent no matter how simple or complicated it is.

The single domain

If you're Francis Maude, the 'single domain' project sounds like something revolutionary, which will achieve vast savings, and help ensure your middle-aged party aren't left behind by all this frightening new technology which can, in itself, help win and lose elections. It seems strange that a Tory politician, from the anti-bureaucracy, free market mould should be so keen on something which resembles a Socialist command economy - less individual responsibility, more 'government knows best'. 

In reality the "100s of sites, 100s of designs, 100s of platforms" represent an ecosystem of government web services which haven't been Directgov-ised. If we're going to continue down the road of absolute, centralised control, there need to be clear goals in place.

My prediction is that in three-four years time, someone else will be calling for a fresh revolution. And thus it will all start again.

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.