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 - part 2

This morning I was going to launch a devastating attack on Directgov and all its works, but I've become preoccupied with my own problems. I should know the difference between alpha.gov.co.uk and www.alphagov.co.uk - I'm sure it's something I need to read up on. Within ten years, everything I know about developing websites and online services will be obselete. There's no way I'll be able to keep up with a young university graduate. I'd better make sure I get a promotion to senior management by then.

I feel that one of the reasons why Directgov exists is because  of the anxieties of well-meaning middle aged civil servants and politicians. Instead of a multitude of government websites and services, with the risk that they will go feral if left unattended, why not just have one?

A good starting point for the history of Directgov is Michael Cross' interview with Jayne Nickalls in 2007, when Directgov was still in its infancy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/aug/22/guardiansocietysupplement.egovernment

At the moment, most e-government transactions go through thousands of agency, departmental and local authority sites. Directgov is supposed to replace the lot. Nickalls says rationalisation would be good for citizens: "All our research shows that people want a single channel to government." She says that once people find Directgov, they like it: "More than 80% of users think it's a very good site."

Rationalisation is a centrepiece of government IT strategy. Consolidating the rambling government estate in cyberspace was an idea promoted by Sir David Varney's review of government services, published by the Treasury last December. Varney estimated that the government could save £400m over three years by channelling all its e-activities through just two sites, Directgov and its business equivalent, businesslink.gov.uk.

However, the "supersite" scheme may be at odds with public agencies' desire to promote their own brand identities on the web. Nickalls says she is looking forward to the challenge. But does she realise she could be blamed for every problem encountered with government websites? "Of course!"

And blamed she was. On 20 November 2010, Nickalls announced her resignation, along with several high-profile members of the Directgov board. Some of us took this as a tacit admission that Directgov had failed.

Or did it succeed? As woeful as Directgov's design and navigation are, hundreds of government websites, many of them poorly written and inaccessible, were duly closed down and migrated. The government's momentum is still in the direction of greater centralisation, control and hierarchy. Nickalls announced that 'phase one of Directgov is complete' and by that time the Alphagov project was already underway.

On 23 November 2010 Martha Lane Fox published her 'letter' to the Minister of the Cabinet Office, Francis Maud -

Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution - Letter from Martha Lane Fox to Francis Maude

From page two, her Key Recommendations were -

1. Make Directgov the government front end for all departments' transactional online services to citizens and businesses, with the teeth to mandate cross government solutions, set standards and force departments to improve citizens' experience of key transactions.

2. Make Directgov a wholesaler as well as the retail shop front for government services & content by mandating the development and opening up of Application Programme Interfaces (APls) to third parties.

3. Change the model of government online publishing, by putting a new central team in Cabinet Office in absolute control of the overall user experience across all digital channels, commissioning all government online information from other departments.

4. Appoint a new CEO for Digital in the Cabinet Office with absolute authority over the user experience across all government online services (websites and APls) and the power to direct all government online spending.

I'm not sure what paragraph 2 means. I'm doomed unless I get that promotion. But the rest seems straightforward enough - easy enough for a middle aged politician to grasp, with a compelling sense of urgency.

From Nickalls' 'rationalisation' we have moved on to words like 'teeth', 'absolute control' and 'absolute authority'. Far from being scrapped, the Directgov ideal was taking on a more militant form.

Simon Dickson's recently Puffbox article 22 more well-paid GDS jobs up for grabs mentioned the £1.5 bill for GDS executive posts. Tom Loosemore's comment was:

Yes, you're correct, GDS is setting its very high indeed when it comes to digital skills. To deliver a gov.uk revolution GDS needs the very best developers, designers, operations & systems people in the UK. And that means offering appropriate salaries for world-class digital talent.

That's right, a revolution. I've got a feeling we'll be coming back to this notion over the next few months. There's not date for the revolution just yet but I understand the Beta version is going live for public comment in February 2011.

Directgov may be dead, but the rhetoric which kept it alive up until now is looking for a new host body.