
Why?
See title....
New Labour's Directgov is about to be tossed into the rubbish bin, after it was revealed today that Britain's public services website would be replaced by the Cabinet Office's single government domain on 17 October. That project, dubbed GOV.UK, surfaced into public view in May 2011 when Francis Maude's department initially …
"Additionally DirectGov is an abortion of a site, a pure navigation nightmare."
THIS. A thousand times this.
Anyone who thinks scrapping the DirectGov site is about party politics has never had to use the incomprehensible piece of crap. Even though it was released in 2004, it seemed to be the standard bearer for the very worst of 1990's web design.
- Every new government spends more time undoing stuff done by the previous government than actually doing anything they said they would.
To be fair, the conservatives did specifically say they would spend a lot of time destroying labours legacy. ID cards died swiftly as promised, and they do look like they are having a good go at trying to clearing up red tape; http://www.redtapechallenge.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/progess-to-date/
"It's quick and accurate to find information I need even if it then links back to Directgov for the content. "
That's designed to go away. Their <a href=”https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples#second”>Second design principle</a> (click "show examples") makes clear that they want this to be as content-free as they can possibly get away with, and only have it covering topics that noone else could ever cover and are of mass interest.
I guess there is no accounting for taste.
Personally I think it combines the aesthetics of a primary school summer fete flyer with the navigational smarts of a Victorian lawnmower repair manual.
I think the bright young things at GDS are going to be rather busy fixing things from October onwards.
It's not great. One thing I looked for today by typing in the search boxes on both sites:
"dividend tax rate"
DirectGov, 1st result links to:
Tax on UK dividends
How to declare income from dividends and how to calculate the tax you have to pay
gov.uk, 50 results, none of them obviously linking to the relevant info.
I find it hard to see where the DirectGov site is broken, so I'm not at all sure why it needed to be fixed.
Although it's been mentioned in the comments of a previous article, for an idea of how experienced the team is have a read of their (rather breathless) blog at http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
Though not all of the ideas are bad: https://www.gov.uk/tour and https://www.gov.uk/designprinciples
Oh, and you can always go 'fork them on GitHub' https://github.com/alphagov/
Good question. People will say it's typical of public or publically funded organisations. I disagree. I think it's the modern way in any large organisation:
Insane amounts of change for change's sake. No checks or balances on much fo that change. Decision makers can f#ck up and are simply not accountable for it. They move on to a higher paid job and all is forgotten until next time ... and so the process repeats. People need to have a stake in the changes they're making and they need to be accountable for those changes and whether they're necessary/successful. I saw this happen at a publically funded organisation where a new guy came into manage the IT dept out of absolutely nowhere. Turns out he was mates with the CEO, who also materialised out of nowhere, as did a plethora of random consultants and contractors. He awarded a contract for a new, arguably completely unnecessary, website to someone he'd worked with before. Danger Will Robinson Danger! An insane amount of money was then spent on this website which ultimately never saw the light of day. Boom. That guy disappeared, completely unaccountable for the f#ck up and the subject became instantly taboo.
Anyone with any knowledge of web development knows there are more cowboys out there than professionals. Doesn't even matter though - the people approaching them for websites very rarely have enough knowledge to make a wise, informed choice, so it has all become about the bells and whistles, the hard sell. That's all these cowboys have to do to get a foot in the door, presumably with a loss leader, then it's all about lying, deceiving, playing hardball and milking the contract for as much as they humanly possibly can. This has happened many times with both private and public organisations - NHS anyone? The problem isn't public or private, it's simply the oh-so-low bar we have accepted for ourselves, outr society and for work, where people are unaccountable, change is revered and unchecked, people can flit from one f#ck up to the next quite freely, and dishonesty has become a way of life. At this point the whole game needs changing I'm afraid.
"by the cost of running directgov"
One word - Steria
"and indeed the new version"
Three words - Government Digital Service
Government websites are a herd of cats. It will be quicker to create a flock of sheep than to amalgamate them into an elephant. In other words, provide toolsets and standards, don't build a mega-platform
just looked at the beta site.
looks like its been designed by linux code monkeys. i.e. no style at all.
i use 2x 1920x1200 monitors and i have to vertically scroll for 11 headings?!?!?! the text is massive even on my screen. isnt this for the blind or something? even stevie wonder could read this!
this will be unusable on a netbook too.
more money wasted. how come much bigger sites like amazon and play cost so much less to develop?
it doesnt even validate for such a basic page:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gov.uk%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
and the code is already basic fudges for all the IEs. basically its shite. where can i get massively overpaid to produce such drivel?
It really has been so wonderful to spend years of your life milking Direct.CashGov for every pennypound it was worth, never having your code or Kerplunk-inspired website looked at to ensure it was worth the 32-bit integer on the invoice, let alone being held to account when none of it actually worked as envisaged.
Being invited back to fix failings on projects you've already been paid for, for subsequent fees, either because you did a half-arsed job the first time or did what was asked by ministers and civil servants who didn't know what they were asking for was also the most delightful experience.
But, all gift horses get looked in the mouth one day, and I guess this is the end of this particular gravy train. Still, at least I can draw some minor consolation that I'll be doing it all again over the next few years, just under a different name supervised by differently named ministers and civil servants.
If all goes to plan, I'll have enough gov.uk cash to afford an iPhone 5 this time next month.
Anyway, that's enough arseing about on my iPad from this god-awful, sweltering Malibu beach. Time to pay for a massage from a local chick whilst playing angry birds. Genuine thanks to every tax payer back in Blighty.
Ta.
Directgov's main source of info comes from all the local authorities inputting content locations on their own site into Directgov, so are they taking that massive database over to the new site? If they are, are they perhaps going to tell us web monkeys in local authority where we are supposed to log in too to update this info in the future?
If not then I presume we will have spent a lot of tax payer money on something even worse than DirectGov and that flies in the face of the centralised 'digital by default' agenda.
I'm not surprised, takes a lot to surprise me nowadays, especially after some of the completely bullshit conversations I've been forced to take part in today.
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I spent a year of my life helping to set up Directgov, and I thought their approach, way back when, was good: an easy-to-navigate site with really useful and helpful information. It more or less stayed that way, but obviously tidying up and trimming something ood, and perhaps easing in some better functionality, is not nearly as sexy as building a shiny new toy.
The cost of Directgov is, however, easy to understand: I was in a team of about 20, of which a quarter were contactors (incl myself) and we did the work while the others booked endless vacations, searched for funny audio tracks on the web, had tea break, etc. It was my first time working for a Govt dept and I was astounded and the barefacery of it. So: cost of staff + cost of workers = £gazillion.
Happy days are here again. The GDS people are all on short term fixed contracts, which may explain why they seem to be viewing this as a massive on-the-job training opportunity, without really caring too much about user-testing the end-result. It's probably why they also spend so much time networking and giving talks at various events - onwards and upwards!
""Moving departmental websites onto GOV.UK will, in due course, realise significant savings for the taxpayer,"
Exactly the same argument was used about binning open.gov.uk (the first single portal into government) following the Gershon review which closed CCTA.
Guess who I used to work for, and what I used to do.
Every quarter I have to pay VAT. In order to do so online (which is now obligatory), I have to have some kind of secret squirrel code to log in. It's so secret that it has to be sent to me in the post. Welcome to the 19th Century.
Actually I can't see why it has to be so secret. If anyone else wants to log in to my account and pay the VAT, you won't find me complaining.
Of course, the code never arrives in time for me to use it, because I do my VAT return at the eleventh hour. By the time I do the next return three months later, I've lost it.
Rule of thumb:
Is website going to be subsumed into gov.uk?
If useful, then yes.
Remember - GDS know better than you do what you want from government websites. They also know better than all the departments who have been tweaking their websites in tune with customer demand for years.
Back when I was contracting (swings lamp, etc.) in government, I had a lot of content that needed to go on directgov.
The web design may have been apalling, but the editors were very firm on making sure that the wording avoided the worst of the civil service's tendency towards buzzwords and the use of words like 'tranche', as well as the use of eight words where one would do.
Oh, the fights we had, trying to convince policy wallahs that it was alright to start leaving some of the footnotes out.
I have one of these - what do I use it for? Booking appointments for donating blood and, well, nope - that's it. It's worked fine for 8 years, but suddenly it needs to be killed off and replaced? Will I have to apply for a new ID in writing and then wait months for the new bit of shiny cardboard with the new totally unmemorable string of letters and numbers to turn up so I can access this one service roughly once every 3 months?