We’re opening up access to Gov.uk forms (opens in new tab)

Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too.

However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication, and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that scans my iris....

Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra tax to fund them.

I applied for a UK visa from South-Africa about a year ago. To start my application I had to submit a form on this domain. The navigation to the form was obscured by a giant banner about the Ukraine invasion and a message about how service levels might be reduced due to refugees... no matter how I resized my browser window I couldn't get to the part of the page behind the banner. Eventually I opened up the Dev Tools and added some CSS to hide the banner. The link was revealed and I could continue with my application

The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners.

The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.

> This is how internet services should look like.

Yes, definitely.

I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google?

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...

I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.

>This is how internet services should look like.

Thankfully I've noticed more sites copying gov.uk, very few but still positive.

The design, look and feel is great. Authenticating / proving your identity on the other hand is lacking: https://www.gov.uk/using-your-gov-uk-one-login/proving-your-...

Meanwhile, at least in some EU countries, you can authenticate using your identity card and USB smartcard reader.

Australia's somewhat similar too. I wouldn't call our government services optimal nor "simple", but it's clear they're all operating on the same design principles. At the very least it inspires confidence that they're operating on roughly the same guidelines at federal and state levels.

My first disappoint in the UK was the DVLA where I was sent to the older form.

If you stay around long enough you'll accumulate a few different log-in id's and find yourself redirected to legacy pages with no way of finding your way back.

The GOV.uk team loves moving things forward and leaving an awful lot of guff behind.

There is so much to be said for KISS, especially when you have to do an interface for "everyone" and not just a bunch of tech-savvy STEM people

When I was living in the UK I thought so to, but when I moved to another country (Poland) I realised 3 huge shortcoming of the UK's online gov system (perhaps they fixed it by now, I moved 6 years ago). These were: a unified way to authenticate oneself to all gov services, a way to sign electronic forms/documents in a legally binding way without having to buy a personal certificate and a establishing a standard "document submission receipt" that proves what and when you submitted.

I'll start why this really matters from the last item. Even after my move I kept my UK company for a while, I was making regular electronic VAT submissions until sometime in July 2021 I decided to deregister my company's VAT. I did that via HMRC's online form. In December I logged in to check to find out that any record of me doing that evaporated, and now I had an "estimated" VAT bill of around £5k. I submitted a zero return for the previous quarter I should've been deregister in and after I rang HMRC and 2 weeks later the balance "I owed" dropped to zero. I deregistered again and this time "it worked". However, I had no way whatsoever to prove I indeed deregistered before. The person I spoke to on the phone that day decided my story believable so I didn't get any fines. What if they had a worse day? Ability to reliably prove you submitted government documents when you say you did is extremely important. In the country I now live in(Poland) you get a cryptographically signed XML document you can use as proof. You get one from any level of government you submit stuff to online (taxes, local councils anything). There is an online service you can check the validity of such signature and the content is all readable with a text editor.

Then a way to electronically sign documents that is equivalent to your in person signature legally without any special equipment or software for free. And a way to authenticate oneself to government services(including national healthcare) Here any citizen (or a foreigner that registers) can do so with one "thing". There are few ways to authenticate, an app, an online bank account (all banks in the country support it), a national id with a nfc chip and a pin, or you go to a local council in person and they create an account for you with a usename/password +2FA(sms,or auth app). You can sign any document using an online service, there is a history of stuff you signed you can check and you have a "mailbox" you can use to receive documents instead of the post.

The system is mostly XML based and it uses ssl for signatures. I have no idea what they use in the backend (probably lots of java). One can also purchase certificates to use as a signature like in other EU countries. The government sites look reasonably modern with dynamic forms, but they deteriorate gracefully if all you want is to read them, but good luck getting forms to work without JS.

Personally I think they did a pretty good job with this system.

one of the many good measures of the company and country is their design system implementation.

love u gov.uk.

France launched a similar program and publish everything they can on Github

See https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/ and https://github.com/GouvernementFR/dsfr

Thanks so much for this! I’m the design system lead and this has made the team very happy.

> Wish there would be more like this from other governments.

There is:

Argentina - https://argob.github.io/poncho/

Australia - https://gold.designsystemau.org/

Canada - https://design.gccollab.ca/

Czech Republic - https://designsystem.gov.cz/#/

Estonia - https://brand.estonia.ee/?lang=en

Flanders - https://www.vlaanderen.be/digitaal-vlaanderen/onze-oplossing...

France - https://www.systeme-de-design.gouv.fr/

Germany - https://styleguide.bundesregierung.de/sg-de/

Greece - https://guide.services.gov.gr/

Italy - https://developers.italia.it/en/designers/

Netherlands - https://www.digitaleoverheid.nl/achtergrondartikelen/het-nl-...

New Zealand - https://www.digital.govt.nz/standards-and-guidance/design-an...

Singapore - https://www.designsystem.tech.gov.sg/

Switserland - https://swiss.github.io/styleguide/en/

United States - https://designsystem.digital.gov/

Ukraine - https://diia-en.fedoriv.com/

I fully agree.

Two of my favourites:

Holiday API I plug into every ecommerce site I work on:

https://www.api.gov.uk/gds/bank-holidays/#bank-holidays

Domain Email Security checker:

https://emailsecuritycheck.service.ncsc.gov.uk/check

Please share any other favourites!

Have been impressed with their work for years, the majority of my governments other IT bits are awful.

100%. Well maybe 99%. The tax free childcare website is very frustrating.

> the people behind the scenes of gov uk

Those would be the people commonly refered to as incompetent traitorous woke lefty cultural marxists refusing to do the will of the people by the fair and balanced media.

Please refrain from talking in absolutes, when you got 3 comments on your question yesterday.

Progressive enhancement is nice, and user friendly, and better UX overall. But when you get started with modern frontend stacks nowadays it's out of the question. Whereas, I and others like me, that use a classical backend framework that spits out HTML might do a better job (but not always, due to time and budget).

I've never heard this being called progressive enhancement before. I always thought it was just the obvious proper way to do things, but that people don't do it out of laziness. It's nice to know there is a name I can use to refer to it.

I used to design sites like this explicitly in the mid-00s. I would explicitly test with no js and no CSS. I still aim to do it to this day, but it's hard to get others to do it when most web devs are happy to throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.

> No frills or silly scroll jacking animations plus javascript hogging contraptions that we see in almost all websites these days.

Still the cookie warnings though :-( I've just visited on my phone the forms page linked in the title, and the first thing that greeted me was a full-screen page-blocking dialog with some cookie nonsense. You can't interact with the contents of the page until you decide how you feel about cookies.

I can understand that, but I think it's very subjective. For example, it's an opportunity to explain what the form is, and give any other information (do you need the form? do you need something else?) before the option of, if you're in the right place, click here to begin.

I think ultimately, it works quite well.

This is actually an explicit decision, designed to maintain consistency of the user experience across GOV.UK services in terms of information architecture and content design. It's not something that departments choose to do (or not), and is codified in the GOV.UK Service Manual: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/get-a-domain-na...

This is so that search can work, they index service start pages so they have results for services that are hosted on other domains. There is also something about having a consistance UX, at least to the point of handoff to the service (which might not have been updated yet). The start pages also provide the user with guidance were say the service might be only avalible at certain times, or if you need documentation ready before you use it.

The fact the forms load so fast makes this less of a problem.

If the form took 10 seconds to load after clicking 'start now', I'd be more frustrated.

Japan is so terrible because every service does it’s own thing. The absolute best I’ve seen was the national census, which seems to actually have a website not designed before the year 2000.

But it’s still inconsistent with all other government services.

I'm British. I have no insider information about what the Government Digital Service do about other departments' use of their toolkit, but just as a citizen, I can tell you that the difference between the GDS sites and external ones is extremely stark.

The passport application form[1], for instance, is smooth and well-designed, and the questions are well-written - a good example of the Government Digital Service's excellent design and solid implementation. Perhaps the only downside is the rather disconcerting photograph evaluation tool that suggested to me that my photograph was 'invalid' due to being 'in black-and-white', somehow missing my blue chequered shirt. The whole of the Gov.UK site loads very quickly for me, which is an additional benefit of the focus on accessibility. You can 'view source' on your Web browser and see the very comprehensive metadata, both as JSON-LD and traditional <meta> tags.

The 'Universal Credit service'[2] (the recent social welfare system), however, was seemingly not developed by the Government Digital Service, and it shows! It is still marked as 'Beta' years after release, uses a shockingly insecure authentication for sensitive personal data, and has a video conferencing system that can't show video. To top it all off, they very politely request feedback... but provide no feedback form.

I think that illustrates well how easy it is for an excellent toolkit to be abused in the hands of the incompetent or the underfunded, not that the latter is likely to apply in this case[3]! I hope this provides some context related to your question.

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/apply-renew-passport

[2]: https://www.universal-credit.service.gov.uk/sign-in

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Credit#Implementatio...

This is the double edged sword of making a standardized toolset like this available.

It’s now easier than ever to make a government form!

And, even when a process might be better delivered via a different mechanism… a form becomes a low friction way to do it.

And a bad form might be worse than no form.

My condolences

It looks like this service is intended to replace the kind of random "notify us of a missing manhole cover" type forms that are found in their thousands on government websites. For those types of applications, emailing the form to a relevant mailbox is probably the correct thing to do, and in many cases it's the way the existing forms already work. Only a small fraction of government services will have their own custom backend application supporting them.

I get the sentiment, but an email is just a standardised queue. What were you going to do after the HTTP PUT? My guess is it onto a queue.

As far as I know, the audience for gov.uk forms is teams that have no developers. So for that audience, email is very much the right approach.

Often the thing you are replacing is 'fill in this pdf and email to this inbox', so it allows people to improve things for external users without changing their workflow.

Old school HTML Forms don't require an active backend. They can be a purely static site.

> surely HTTP PUT of an XML or JSON document to a user nominated URL

This is the bit that's more tricky than a static site. And then you need to do something with the data.

The main intent here is for non-technical folks to be able to replace the tens of thousands of low volume PDF forms, not for technical ones to use it while building actual services.

You can optionally pass an onSubmit function that will return the fax number that the form should be submitted to after printing.

it is really cool but at the same time I can not stop smiling when the governement is telling you of about the best practices how to use web technologies, it is just funny

Even the NHS website is so clean and accessible. I think every EU country should just adopt their format.

gov.uk manages some of the content using Whitehall which looks like a custom CMS using Ruby on Rails https://github.com/alphagov/whitehall

nhs.uk is built using Wagtail, a Django based CMS.

It's actually full open source (MIT licence): https://github.com/alphagov/