Every interaction I have with the UK government (taxes, passports, NHS, voting) is exceptionally well designed, accessible, and usable. It’s shocking.
Especially as a dual citizen who is subjected to the polar opposite dealing with the US equivalent.
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Can you give examples? I'm curious as an American citizen to know what we are missing 👀
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Their blog is probably the best starting point:
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This week I had to interact with another country's "new" consular appointment system.
- often 60-second page load times
- 30-second round trips for 3KB JSONs
- uses jQuery
- And of course, bad UI
I thought, why don't they just copy gov.uk?
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I have a similar experience in the UK, coming from Germany where paperwork is king, the UK are surprisingly driven by common sense, for the most part.
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"for the most part", yeah except for Brexit!
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The majority of services haven’t been developed by GDS directly but by third party suppliers whilst asking to GDS standards. But totally agree that the “new” gov.uk layouts are great.
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An underappreciated skill in the world is designing procurement processes for the digital age, creating IT contracts that result in a healthy partnership and services which are sustainable for the long term.
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It's also feels like there's lots more to come which is exciting! e.g. insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2021/01/07/the
Although I do sometimes worry that the centralised GDS approach smothers/constrains local government e.g.
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The Tom Forth item linked to (docs.google.com/document/d/1zb) is a little dyspeptic: "The current approach, the GDS approach, has failed. The first thing that people right across the UK government need to accept is that it has failed". Perhaps GDS would like to cheer him up?