Beautifully simple and incredibly fast to load. Well done Australia (hope the idiots who defunded it got kicked out of power after the last election and this will be fixed).
It's one of the objective in the long run but it does require a lot of work to get everyone on the same page.
I am currently working on implementing the "Système de Design de l'État" for a french governement service but unfortunately it is still pretty chaotic right now since there are many modifications of components with breaking-changes / no backwards compatibility with almost every releases.
Don't worry, I know it's not that easy, and good for you for sticking to the design system rules! My sarcasm was mostly directed to the chaos introduced in state services by giant consulting firms doing there own thing quick and dirty...
Yeah, in theory the French government offers a ton of super-useful APIs to its services (to automatically fetch paperwork for a procedure, for instance) but the big services use almost none of them.
OMG. This is HN! Can we please get a showcase of the best e-gov't website globally? Right away, when I saw that Italian gov't has a web design studio, I was curious! Do they have some beautiful, but highly functional websites that any Italians can share? (Apologies for positive stereotyping!)
Wait, the Germans, of all people, don’t have a standard government design system? Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one, and I’ll have to throw out my entire set of national stereotypes!
1. Our population is quite old thus many people in key positions are quite old and missed the transition to the digital world.
2. So. Much. Bureaucracy.
3. Another factor that doesnt help is that the government pays quite poorly compared to the private companies. Any semi talented dev will find a better position than working for the government
The bureaucracy can be a good thing, because it also makes it harder for the government to get information on its citizens, and I think this is deliberate after WW2. Making it hard to exchange information is annoying (I've heard fax machines were still in use during the corona pandemic) but serves as an additional layer of protection from hostile governments. Time will tell if digitizing everything in for instance Denmark (my country) was a good idea.
Number 3 is the same in Denmark. You can almost double your salary if you work for the private sector.
Public sector and the old people are not good at modern solutions, but German officials and companies in general are still very driven in organizing and standardizing the soul out of everything.
> Next you’re going to say the Swiss also don’t have one
Well... at a federal level there is, but it's a confederacy so most of the time you're interacting with a local canton which has it's own set of systems.
It's not entirely surprising. Germany is a federal republic, somewhat similar to the US, with some degree of autonomy for its member states. Switzerland is a confederacy.
This needs correcting. Germany and Switzerland are both federal states, they occupy the same spot on the notional spectrum. <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/The_path...> The comment would have a point if either state was unitary, but this is not the case.
Switzerland was a confederation prior to 1848, the now inaccurate name stuck for I assume sentimental reasons. The issue of republics is orthogonal to the topic under discussion.
My point is that they're both not the most centralised form of government. Even if Switzerland is officially a federation instead of the confederacy its name suggests, the point still stands.
It exists but I think it's undeniable that Germany is behind in many digital aspects, even in advertising. I think part of that is cultural (credit card acceptance and advertising being good examples) and another part existing bureaucracy.
Of all the examples in this thread, this is the only one that isn't a plain HTML page, but rather a pile of javascript that takes several seconds to load and shows nothing but an "enable javascript" banner without JS. Despicable, but also absolutely typical.
Edit: alright, CZ, UA and RU further down the thread are the same, I just hadn't gotten to those yet. Still, absolutely unacceptable for a government design standard.
This isn't even a government design standard (or government website for that matter). If looking into the impress you will find that it is run by a Verein that's promoting tourism. To quote:
> Promotion of Austria as a holiday destination.
There is a corporate design guide available [0] but from what I can tell it's more of a guide for "everything" not just websites.
Wait till you work with the team, and they decide to make all highlighted colors like a an extreme warning sign because "accesiblity" and 10 other dramatic choices and they prefer to be dominant debaters "I decide and you listen to me because you are not part of the team" instead of any reason.
They all use this design system: https://design-system.service.gov.uk. It's much more than just a CSS framework, it's full specifications on how to implement easy to follow and sensible UX.
I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.
Every local councill has a different payment system for colecting councill tax, and all of them fail in novel and unpredictable ways.
Last time they collected my name and address over the phone and got both of them wrong.
Then they were sending letter to a person that doesn't exist, to an address that doesnt exist, never used my email or phone number, didn't respond to my email, but still told me it's my fault!
I had the fun experience of my local (UK, major city) council sending debt collectors after me for non-payment of council tax while simultaneously (literally same week) asking what bank account to send the several thousand pounds they owed me for overpayment - because they failed to acknowledge that despite having moved address, I was still the same person, and their systems treated each address as an account not each person. They still told me it was my fault.
This is the difference between “council tax” a tax on property and “poll tax” a tax on individual people, and that went quite badly when it was tried... So it makes sense for the primary accounts to be per property. However you are quite right they should have a better understanding of a second layer of accounts being individual people.
The IT infrastructure around tax/HMRC is ridiculously complex. The “making tax digital” initiative is trying to fix that. The aim for business taxes, for example, is that each individual business will have a single tax account eventually, rather than separate once for each tax type as they currently do.
In the world of councils, an address is an account.
They just need to make sure that every address is paid for every day of the year - that's the way they maximize their revenue. They don't really who pays, as long as someone does. Hence the account system keyed on address.
You pay council tax on your address, not on an individual basis. So if you moved house and didn't tell them, they quite reasonably would have counted the payments towards your old address, not your new one.
I did tell them, the person I told said I could keep my automatic payments going, which I did for a year before they said I hadn't paid a year on the new address and had overpaid a year on the old address.
They then denied knowing that I had moved address, but didn't have an answer to "then why have you sent me a letter (to my new address) saying the payments for the old address should be refunded if you think I still live there?" (they literally denied knowing I had moved after sending the letters).
I appreciate that involved human incompetence not just a poor IT system, but a better system would have made the updating of me as a person paying council tax from one address to another seamless, then it would have flagged the problem sooner than a year in, and then it could have crossed my "debt" with my "overpayment" rather than passing it (in what I assume was another human mistake, but again allowed by the system) to a debt collection agency.
> I wish there was more buy in by local councils of this system, there are some incredibly poor local government sites.
You may be interested in Local Gov Drupal. Unfortunately they've defined themselves around a specific tool, rather than a design library, but maybe that was what it took to get them to come together. Seven councils are using the solution, and around 30 councils are involved in the initiative, but there is plenty of scope for the 300+ others to leverage the work and join the initiative.
/me former Drupal developer. Drupal makes super-heavyweight pages, and is a real pain to learn. There is no backwards compatibility between major releases; to upgrade, you have to rewrite your site.
I burned 8 years working on Drupal sites. I made a living, but I ended up hating Drupal with a passion.
Yikes. Drupal is complex enough to be a government in its own right. Stay far far far far FAR away from it and any company or agency that demands its use. It's an overengineered nightmare of opaque idiosyncrasies.
I can only speak for my council, which complains it has no money but has hundreds of millions in slush fund "for a rainy day" and keeps building new council offices or rental spaces that aren't even being used or getting the rent. There's a huge one they built that needs like 30k+ a month in rent, no takers for 18+ months now (as you'd expect in such a crappy area and a certain pandemic).
They also have terrible web based services, akin to Frontpage '97 on a good day.
I'm not so sure, I think there is a real NIH syndrome in local government IT services, they quite often want to build something themselves - but then as you said don't have the budget to do it properly. Using the design system, and sharing platforms using it, would be a significant cost saving.
Plus the (at times) antagonistic relationship between Whitehall and local government I think means they don't want to necessarily use something they associate with the incumbent administration.
Local gov doesn't have anything like the budget of central so they don't typically have the choice to build their own. Instead they're left with cobbling together behaviours from tens, maybe even hundreds, of disparate third-party systems, each independently solving the full stack of a given department's function. E.g. there's a dedicated system for planning approvals, another for administering blue badges, etc., etc.
These third-party systems are typically very cheaply made, with a very low maintenance budget, and don't provide anything like enough customisation to adhere to someone else's design system. If you're lucky you can add your own header/footer and set some main css colours to match your council's brand.
Coming from Denmark I'm impressed that they all use a uk domain, and they even have a system in place to distinguish official government websites from others.
In Denmark we are like: Need a domain for our common ID and login system? How about nemid.nu, where .nu is the TLD of Niue, but "nu" means "now" in Danish, so lol, let's use that. On top of like 7 other domains that users are randomly redirected between during use.
The UK. domain is one of the few that used to reproduce and enforce (almost) the gTLD hierarchy under itself, thus CO.UK., ORG.UK., GOV.UK., etc. (They gave up several years ago I think.)
(Unlike with almost every other ccTLD, UK is also not the ISO code for the country—GB is—and is instead “reserved”, which is why I must struggle to remember each time that the BCP 47 for Ukrainian-in-Ukraine is uk-UA.)
.au used to be third-level only too (or fourth-level in places, e.g. *.vic.edu.au for the state of Victoria), with careful rules about each, including things like requiring that the name match your business/whatever, trademark, or something your business sells or does (which eliminates the vast majority of squatting in theory without the additional “no squatting” rule, and in practice there wasn’t much, and also ensures surprisingly high quality of domain name meaningfulness and relevance), but this year they started doing second-level registrations with almost no rules, just about a free-for-all, after years of “public consultation” concluding with carefully-worded reasoning that I will uncharitably simplify to “why not?”, “we’ll make more money that way” and “everyone else is doing it”.
The sad fact of the matter is that structured and controlled ccTLDs where you knew what you were dealing with from the name alone are increasingly being supplanted by second-level domains.
A bit of internet trivia is the oz.au domain. In the late 1980s, the Australian universities were connected in a network with names ending .oz.
When the TLD .au arrived, .oz was renamed .oz.au. So my email address at Elec Engineering at Melbourne University was <name>@ee.mu.oz.au.
And then a few years later, the third-level structure got formalised. Melbourne Uni, for instance, switched from mu.oz.au to unimelb.edu.au.
I for one missed the typographic economy of the ee.mu.oz.au domain.
None of this really matters, of course, except that a sensibly designed structure with a clear underlying rationale, and historical context for a small number of exceptions, makes everything easier to understand :)
Yeah, those old *.mu.oz.au subdomains seem to have steadily disappeared. When my eldest brother was there somewhere around 2005–2010 Computer Science were still actively using cs.mu.oz.au (I think all their email and web stuff was still there), but even that seems to have lost its A records now, though it’s still got a third, interesting NS record (compared to ee.mu.oz.au which has only two boring NS records, edns-*.unimelb.net.au), mulga.cs.mu.oz.au, which is still talking A.
Another bit of historical trivia that now becomes mundane: csiro.au.
They're built using the gov.uk design system[0], which is not just a CSS framework! It also has a lot of guidelines and requirements to make sure that the pages you're building are accessible to everyone
It's actually a pretty cool thing to browse through - they have some good advice on how to make things accessible and not confuse users. Each pattern tends to have supporting research as to why things should be done like that.
The fun part is the design system backlog[0]. There is an absolute wealth of information in there, along with plenty of opinions for designers in various departments, feedback from rounds of user research, alternative approaches to common problems. I spend a lot of time in there.
This thread on notification banners is an excellent example[1].
I think if this was started today they'd fit into GitHub's discussions better than issues, as that's what they're used for. Eventually, with enough support, these things might make it into the design system.
I think the UK Gov digital service is pretty well regarded for their clear and accessible UI/UX, not to mention their technical writing. They've got a decent amount of open APIs/data too.
I wish more governments would do this to be honest - instead of having hundreds and hundreds of different agencies/localities all hiring different web designers all expressing their artistic preferences of how a website should work.
I applaud the UK for this - the US and its various federal agencies/states/cities/towns should consider the same, not only as a cost saving measure, but making the experience predictable across many different sites.
I find it exceptionally galling that the so-called Inflation Reduction Act sends $80 billion to the IRS, of which $15 million is earmarked “to fund a task force that would study the cost and feasibility of creating a free direct e-file program.” Spoiler alert fellas - it’s feasible, and it should have been done 20 years ago.
I feel like the quickest, easiest, and most politically paletable approach would be for the government to just buy Intuit.
The market cap is $130B, three quarters of which could probably be recovered by reselling the half of the business that deals with foreign/international accounting and large business accounting.
Just keep the stuff for individuals and companies with under 250 employees in the USA. Then make all that software available for free.
Over time, integrate that software deeper into IRS processes - for example, the software could autofill fields with stuff the IRS already knows. The web based stuff could go onto a .gov website and become the official way to file accounts and taxes.
Edit: TLDR Nice clean graphics, shit UX for the actual thing you are trying to do, here’s an example:
Nice that the Universal credit page is 17 seconds faster, but has anyone else noticed how they use dark patterns to screw you out of money you are due by making it really hard to submit accurate year end accounts if you have submitted an estimate at Tax credits renewal time because you didn’t have your year end accounts yet. The only way is to phone and go on hold for 2-4 hours or to write a letter to an address that is not listed anywhere on the website. I am having to pay back £75 / month of tax credits that I was legally due because I didn’t manage to submit this information to the correct place by the deadline. What is even more annoying is they have all this information as tax returns are submitted to the same government department and have all the information they need. The two departments even share the same bank account number for tax payements and tax credit repayments and use the same letterhead. They used to sync this information automatically but they changed the system at some point around 10-12 years ago. I can’t imagine why they have done this apart from it is designed just to screw money out of small business owners and sole traders that don’t make much money e.g. cleaners, hairdressers, window cleaners, dog walkers etc. It’s not setting a very good example if you want people to be honest and declare all their cash income!
TFL is a "Statutory Corporation" which is funded both by grants from local government and commercial income, the majority from rail+bus fares but also from activities such as advertising. There is a significant quantity of advertising placements provided by TFL, in the stations, on buses, bus stops, and as it seems on their website.
TFL was almost bankrupted by Covid, I for one will give them a pass on the ugly advertising on their site.
However, looking at [0] and [1], advertising only covers about 1% of their budget. That banner ad will be tiny fragment of that.
Things like "we have so little money we had to replace half our homepage with ads" is a good sob story, and will help them get billions in government funding, even though the ads probably only bring in a few thousand pounds.
