GOV.UK: the tea towel of the super site

If you work in the public sector, it's highly likely that the GOV.UK which is currently live is the one you'll have to put up with for years to come. Within 72 hours of launching the GOV.UK 'beta', GDS' attention was already drifting towards promoting - sorry, explaining - the sadly-misunderstood policies of its Coalition paymasters - all the nice things the government are doing.

It's quite likely that the vague yet upbeat feedback from GOV.UK visitors will enable GDS to go on ignoring the needs of people who work in public sector call centres, and our response teams who deal with the angry letters.  GOV.UK's design, taken from an abstract ideal about user behaviour, says the general public don't want any detail; hence,  GDS can abandon any logos, local navigation, tailored design or depth of content. It's a cunning approach because it means that GDS themselves don't need to spend too much time on content - it will fit into either a calculator or a fact sheet.

Fact sheet? Was that the GOV.UK thingy which wasn't a calculator, which had all the words on it? I can't remember.  We've been here before with the article page / chapter page concept Directgov cooked up back in 2006 or so. When it's not your content, 'web pages', of varying sizes, won't do; better to have a generic set of designs to plonk the words on to.

Otherwise you might have to spend time leaving GDS towers and visiting some ghastly public sector outpost where they've probably never even read .net magazine. 

It's an ideal way to manage a vast amount of public sector information. GDS, who are likely to have the same rotating cast of contractors as Directgov, won't need to fully understand anything they're putting online. It'll be a case of copy and paste.

The GDS party

Must be fun down there at GDS, according to Paul Downey:

Looking across the floor it’s difficult to tell who works for GDS and who doesn’t. There are no silos here; it is apparently not an elitist enclave. We don’t have assigned desks, sitting next to whoever we happen to be working with on a day-by-day basis. To succeed, GDS has to break down walls and work with domain experts regardless of where they’re from — the Whitehall project, which is in full sail, is a hubbub of graphic artists, designers, front-end developers, copy-writers and policy wonks from across government. 

Marvellous. Contractors, consultants and civil servants all sharing the love. That open invitation to spend time in the Gubbins call centre extends to them to, in case they stumble across this blog. 

I imagine working at GOV.UK is immensely fun and challenging. Building stuff is ace. And there's that tangible sense of excitement and purpose, one I consciously envy as I spend another day fixing bugs and dealing with complaints:

What we’ll be doing for the beta of GOV.UK won’t be finished. The design will be in beta as much as the rest of the site. We won’t get it right first time round. We’ll be putting stakes in the ground. Sketching out ideas we think might work, testing different solutions and setting a course for where we want this thing to head. It’s a huge, complicated task.

That was from Ben Terrett’s post on design on 19 January.  If it's true, maybe the GOV.UK we can see is only a work in progress.

Alas, Paul Downey suggests we're already stuck with the latest public sector web monolith:

I joined GDS because there’s nothing cooler than working on something that touches so many peoples lives. It’s not just the reach of the services being built for Gov.UK that I found attractive, but the importance placed on high quality, beautiful design and attention to detail ... I fully expect to to see the GOV.UK icons on tea towels in heritage shops in years to come.

GDS icons for GOV.UK

It's unlikely you'll be giving up any control to people who run services, then.

Let's see if they''re right about those tea towels, in five years time. I don't see any Directgov dog keyrings at Heathrow next to the Union Jack mugs.

But ambition is a noble thing, and I've no doubt there's plenty of talent at GDS.  It's a shame they've used a metaphor as a starting point. Ben Terrett’s post on design again:

In many ways the problem is similar to problem Kinnear and Calvert faced when designing the road signs in the 60′s. Before they came along Britain was littered with different signage systems all using different symbols, colours and typefaces which was at best confusing and at worst dangerous. With an exponential increase in vehicle traffic the government knew something had to be done. Kinnear and Calvert proposed one consistent system. One designed with the clarity of information as it’s goal. From then on Britain had a solution that became the definitive standard and was copied around the world.

Sound familiar? Swap signage systems for websites. Swap vehicle traffic for online traffic. That’s a challenge no designer could resist.

Prod that metaphor and it pops like a ... [remember to think up simile before hit publish]. A road system is something a central government has to control. Websites don't need to belong on one domain. We're still working from 'Public services all in one place' as a design principle; I believe I've covered elsewhere how this makes for mediocre, expensive, blinkered government web services. It's nice of GDS to admit GOV.UK creates a 'problem'; although they suggest this presents an opportunity for Blighty to lead the world again, rather than an inherent problem caused by using rhetoric instead of a theory which can be proved or disproved.


It's the opposite of the Tower of Babel: force the online population of the UK into one structure with one design and they'll all start speaking the same language.

Another rant over

I'm getting terribly lazy with these posts, aren't I? All I'm doing is copy and pasting. GDS are at least building things, something Directgov weren't committed to in any real way since around 2007. I should stick my neck out and build something myself.

Documenting everything they're doing in a blog is admirable too. Even if GDS are wrong, at least they're wrong in a transparent, accountable way. That could be their real legacy. I'll put their blog onto a teatowel.

Tom and Martha: do come and visit our call centre

This blog is dedicated to removing Directgov, a process which GDS have already started. However, to improve the public sector web, we need to get rid of the assumptions behind Directgov and get the people in charge to look for a fresh approach.

It seems strange that the Gubbins perspective is so different from that clever GDS team down there in Whitehall. I think spending some time in our call centre would do GDS a world of good. And if it turns out we're just yokels who don't understand their vision, they could use the time to talk us round.

The Tom and Martha show

Tom Loosemore of GDS and Martha Lane Fox appeared on BBC news to talk through the launch of GOV.UK. The interview starts with defending the supersite principle and moves through familiar themes - the government has too many websites (920 by Fox's reckoning back in August 2010); rationalising them all into one will reduce costs, drive people online, and improve the usability of government transactions.

By 5.07 Fox is talking about government's long term IT commitments, where the government signs long term contracts for 'hundreds of millions of pounds for services that are substandard'. In contrast, for GDS:

This is completely new way of developing. This has been a team of people, very small, very cost-effective, doing things iteratively, releasing things as they go, getting feedback; never saying, "this is what we're going to build, it's going to take us five years and it's going to cost us hundreds of millions" - quite the reverse - treating it a bit like a start-up but a start-up with the appropriate level of credibility and … gold-standard security. 

It's a seductive argument. However, we're talking about the entire public sector web here. I think some kind of plan is in order, with costs and timescales. No-one else in the public sector web has the luxury of providing services without a plan. The GDS revolution is in danger of producing more years of malaise.

The thing about 'revolutions' is that they only take place in countries with poor infrastructure and no free elections, where only a minority have a stake in the government. A revolution usually involves replacing one unelected cartel with another. Our previous regime didn't do much apart from shut down our websites.

Martha and Tom's week at Gubbins

I think a week answering the phones in our call centre would do Tom and Martha a world of good. The warriors of GDS really need to spend some time with the enemy. The people who work in actual public sector offices are likely to have a different perspective from London consultants who have a vested interest in a centralised public sector web. A 'smart answer' on GOV.UK seems just that - until you've spent days fielding calls from people who tried to find their answer and couldn't.

People in our call centres answer telephone queries which are both complicated and repetitive. Government information is demanding. Unfortunately, Gubbins use Directgov rather than a website designed around our users. Our online service is run by editors and consultants in London who have never visited our offices. GOV.UK has even less content than Directgov and no contextual pictures or branding, third-person content, and very little navigation to differentiate our service from anyone else's. So people are likely to go on phoning us rather than trying to find their answer online. 

Gubbins staff have a lot of negativity and cynicism towards that bloody awful Directgov website. No-one's told them there's a revolution going on. In between calls, Tom and Martha could show them a bit of GOV.UK and try to talk them around. It's not exactly BBC news, but Martha could even help address the digital divide, in case any of them are still using bits of paper to renew their car tax.

Serious offer. Do get in touch.

APIs on GOV.UK: they do sound jolly clever

Government supersites exist in their own reality. The launch of the navigation-free, purely information-carrying GOV.UK site on 31 January was hailed as a bold step forward by blogs close to GDS. The project is still apparently under budget at £1.7 million although the man hours being spent by the organisations helping to create the content are likely to have pushed the real costs over this limit already.

Last week I blogged about how the GOV.UK (do we need to capitalise this in future?) project already seemed to be losing interest in our un-sexy old public services and starting to promoting government policies on its platform instead. Sadly, Tom Loosemore's revolutionary Warriors have rapidly picked up that bourgeois Directgov habit of sucking up to politicians. They really should drop in on one of our call centres these days.

To be fair though, if GOV.UK really is acting like a 'business start-up' in Martha Lane Fox's words, they need to keep their investors sweet. And one of the ways to do this is come up with some cutting-edge ideas. Killer apps. USPs.

Today I'll cover one of the current clever-sounding flat-earth ideas behind GOV.UK.

The sexy Application Program Interfaces of GOV.UK

Here's GDS bringing us up to date on that market for open APIs:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/02/07/where-are-those-apis/

All of the editorial content on GOV.UK is available in full via an API. It’s the same API we use to communicate between the editorial tools and the apps that produce the pages you see.

Kudos to GDS to sticking to their plan, as ill-advised as it is. They seem to be putting some distance between themselves and Directgov by managing to build anything at all (see Directgov dog and the magic comments box).

Here's an older GDS post about those APIs -

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2011/09/22/building-apis-building-on-apis/

Public APIs are a vital feature of the modern web. Whether you’re looking at the ecosystem of Twitter and Facebook apps, tools for managing auctions on ebay, or code for embedding Youtube videos in a blog post, clear ways of integrating services are key for building more captivating web experience, and for bringing solutions to users where they are. It’s that latter point that underpins the recommendation in Martha Lane Fox’s report that: “the content, functionality and features of the service should … be widely available and open for re-use via syndication/apps.”

Martha Lane Fox called for these in Directgov 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution:

This increase in focus on end users should include opening up government transactions so they can be easily delivered by commercial organisations and charities, and putting information wherever people are on the web by syndicating content.

There's a strong whiff of Big Society about 'commercial organisations and charities'; presumably the '£1.3 billion, rising to £2.2 billion' of hypothetical savings promised in Directgov 2010 and Beyond involves removing a large number of public sector jobs like mine and letting private finance and er charities step in.

The problem with APIs

Here's where I could end up looking incredibly short-sighted 12 months from now ...

I'm only going on the GDS blog itself here, but I don't see it crammed with comments from private sector companies demanding syndicated content. There is, presumably, no commercial value in a government API. You can quote government content or link to it. Why spend your own web development budget adding content you didn't write, or breaking your site's look and feel with a government widget?

So far I haven't seen APIs used anywhere on the internet for government content and widgets. OK there was that one widget one of the government departments produced in 2010. The downloads were in the low hundreds. I'm not aware of seeing it on any websites.

It's been 14 months since Martha Lane Fox's Directgov 2010 and beyond. Is anyone out there looking for APIs of car tax information? Swine flu widgets?

APIs certainly sound dead new and exciting if you're talking to a consultant working in Whitehall. But we're actually talking about boring government web content. Not eBay auctions or blogs. Why not provide links to individual websites tailored to government services? The public can still get a definitive answer to their questions on something called a 'website'. A widget won't provide information in any context, sadly.

And thus pops GDS' theoretical bubble.

I could be wrong, of course. I spend my time building and fixing things on behalf of people who phone government call centres. I still work in 'websites', for heaven's sake.

Remember 'cross-selling'?

Since 2004, Directgov used their eccentric notion of 'cross selling' to build an unusable website saddled with the Directgov problem. The 'cross selling' notion goes against one of the fundamental principles of web usability - that users ignore anything that isn't of relevance to their immediate task. In practice, 'Cross-selling' was easily refuted within five minutes of looking at Directgov's actual Speedtrap analytics. It's telling that GOV.UK, while retaining the notion that citizens need all their information on a single domain, has quietly abandoned the notion of 'cross-selling' altogether.

Time will tell if public sector APIs become a force or whether this was simply an excuse to centralise control of the public sector web in Whitehall - while promising billions in savings, of course.

Remember poor old Directgov Innovate? Last post 2010 -

From the New Labour rhetoric of 'Public services in one place' GDS are talking a more private-sector, free market language with APIs. Alas, the coalition's 'Big Society' idea shares its initials with 'Blue Sky'. Amongst other things.

Post script: Open standards

In contrast, the cabinet office is offering a consultation on Open Standards:

Information Technology across the government estate is expensive and the way that government departments previously purchased IT has resulted in hundreds of small, separate platforms operating across a landscape of disconnected, self-contained departments.


Our approach will enable the Government to work collectively together but effective open standards for software and systems are required to ensure interoperability between software systems, applications and data. Within the Government Digital Service we are already demonstrating how collaboration between departments, along with a clear focus on the user, delivers better public services for less. Open Standards are crucial for sharing information across government boundaries and to deliver a common platform and systems that more easily interconnect.

To offer you a morsel of optimism with Directgov Must Die's stodgy diet of cynicism, allowing GDS to create and enforce standards across the public sector web is a good thing.

Someone please ban GDS from creating more government supersites, and cut their remit back from 'everything'. If you do, we might start seeing some real savings and real improvements.

gov.uk: 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/

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.

What happened to that £400 million? Part 2

Er, I'm stuck now. I Googled 'varney report savings' and nothing came up about whether the £400 million savings predicted by Varney was actually saved. Nothing whatsoever. Did they save only £200 million? £2 million? £2? 20p? A 2p chew?

You can put together the total running costs for Directgov if you check a couple of sources -

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2009-06-30c.282044.h&

Jim Knight (Minister of State (the South West), Regional Affairs; South Dorset, Labour)

The costs for Directgov in each financial year since 2004 are set out in the following table:

Financial year	£ million
2004-05	5.1
2005-06	10.5
2006-07	12.8
2007-08	13.9
2008-09	30.7

...

I believe after this the figures were approximately - 


2009-10 - £30 million
2010-11 - £23 million

... bringing the Directgov total to £126 million, over seven financial years.

Have I missed any millions here and there? According to Hansard, 'Expenditure on Directgov increased in 2008-9 in recognition to its increased importance in the Government’s strategy for online delivery of public services.' - in other words, the £83 million invested in Directgov since Varney, approved by the Comprehensive Spending Review in 2007, was to achieve the £400 million of savings by converging websites.

So, where's our extra £400 million?

Haha, only kidding, government is a big, complicated thing. You can't expect theoretical savings to appear on actual balance sheets. As Cross pointed out, Varney's figures were 'back of a fag packet' calculations. No-one seriously expected to save an actual £400 million.

Bit of a shame for Gubbins, mind you. Remember, our costs went up when we converged to Directgov. We have our own customer transactions which we maintain ourselves and are paid for out of Gubbin's annual budget.  They're painted orange with a Directgov logo at the top, but they're essentially built and maintained by us.

Y'know if Gubbins had pledged to save, say, £5,000 a year by automatically switching our office PCs off every night, HM Treasury would have the right to see these savings somewhere on a balance sheet.

For Directgov, normal accounting practice doesn't seem to apply. As I said in my first post, we have to make special allowances for government websites.

I’d go direct, guv

Directgov's spending was cut in 2010 along with other cuts in the public sector. At the height of Directgov's 'success' they were spending £7 million per yearon marketing. That's the figure I seem to remember, anyway. It's a bit hard to find on Google now.

As recently as February 2010 Directgov were commissioning a £2.05 million TV ad featuring various B-listers, earning the censure of the Daily Mail - 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253496/How-star-studded-Government-TV-advert-featuring-Kelly-Brook-Helen-Mirren-costs-taxpayer-2million.html

A star-studded Government television advert - featuring the likes of Suggs from Madness and Kelly Brook - has cost the taxpayer more than £2million.

The eye-watering cost of the Directgov campaign includes the production, airtime and hiring the celebrities.

Quite a price tag for marketing a brand which would be closed down within a couple of years. If they do get rid of Directgov. But that's another story.

Hey, look. There's the Directgov problem again from a commentator -

The first time I saw the advert I was shocked by the self-indulgence of it and the ridiculous number of celebrities. I'd rather they spent the money on improving the clunky DirectGov website.

- Chris Z, Warwick, 24/2/2010 23:07

Sorry, I digress. The funny thing about this episode is that the Varney savings were still being cited three years after the Comprehensive Spending Review had started:

But Mike Hoban, the communications director for Directgov, said: "At a time of economic uncertainty it is essential that we give everyone in the UK easy access to important government information about taxes, benefits, job opportunities and education.

"Directgov will save the government £400m over three years. Therefore this is an investment that is important in helping the government save money."

Hang on a sec ... this was February 2010. The web convergence program had already been running for three years. Hoban was talking as if the £400 million savings were going to be made over the next three years.

It would have been an ideal opportunity for Hoban to have shared a spreadsheet of actual savings from the various government organisations who had closed down their websites to join Directgov; seeing as by then, Directgov had already swallowed £96 million of taxpayers money in pursuit of this £400 million.

Digital by default

As far as government white (orange?) elephants go, Directgov is a snip. Compared to £2.7 billion reportedly lost on a replacement NHS system, £96 million on an unloved orange website, and £400 million of vanishing theoretical savings will soon be forgotten by the general public.

The point is, when a government organisation runs its own web services, its expenditure shows up on balance sheets. After each financial year, the government can audit them on what they've achieved with their budget.

When you centralise web services into a government supersite, it becomes more difficult to account for expenditure. The ideals are too lofty, the aims are too vague, and the politicians don't want to be bogged down in the details. It happened with Directgov.

Let's be fair, though. If we haven't saved £400 million, at least we cut down on the number of government websites out there. According to Computer Weekly in April 2011:

http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/05/500-rogue-gov-websites-nabbed.html

Sharon Cooper, director of strategy and innovation for the Government Digital Service, told a recent Inside Government conference the unit had achieved Varney's target off shutting all unnecessary public sector websites and subsuming them into DirectGov by March 2011.

It had shut 287 websites by 5pm on 31 March, converging 95 per cent of all public sector information into DirectGov. But it had found another 500 websites that must be axed.

"There are still another 500 out there because we found a lot more in the process of trying to shut them down and that work is still going on," said Cooper.

Oh dear, were they hiding? So, we're still investing public funds to reduce the number of government websites, even though after five years, there is no evidence this causes any savings.

Again, as she mentioned Varney, this would have been an ideal opportunity to share a spreadsheet showing £400 million in savings.

Erm ... I'm confused again. How do you measure 'information' unless you work in quantum physics? They're reported that statistic as if it's a real number.

Real numbers versus Directgov numbers

287 is a real number, mind you. It wouldn't be hard to email 287 organisations and get them to say how much Directgov saved them.

Presumably the total comes to at least £83 million pounds - the running costs of Directgov, post-Varney. That means £289,000 per website.

A professional website can be built for £10,000. I'm no expert on web infrastructure but I imagine the hosting needs of a government organisation would run to roughly the same amount of money. So, a new information-carrying website could have been built in 2008-09 and hosted for three years for £40,000.

Seven such websites could have been produced for each website which was converged onto Directgov. I would expect that if you ran user testing on said £10,000 website it would perform better than the same information being presented on a government supersite.

Y'know, a broke graphic design graduate would probably build you a decent information-carrying website for £100. Maybe I'm being naive about how much websites cost in the public sector? This is all getting terribly confusing.

Remember, Directgov only hosts pages of text. It has no interactive functions, unless you could COTA boxes and the email service. The transactions (people ordering a new driving license etc) are still hosted by the organisations themselves.

So, like the Varney figures, this all sounds ever so slightly fishy.

That '500 websites' number sounds a bit made-up too. Did Varney have 787 websites in mind when he came up with those £400 million of savings? By the sounds of things he forgot to tell Directgov.

Post script

Returning to the Daily Mail article:

But Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude called Government advertising and marketing spending ‘out of control’.

He added: ‘Labour seem more focused on squandering our money on vanity PR projects rather than actually addressing the pressing problems of the country.’

It's interesting that the £2.05 million on an advert attracted Maude's condemnation at the time; but £126 million on a government supersite didn't influence the direction of government web services under Maude's control after he took power.

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.