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.

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.

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-...

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

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

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

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.

love u gov.uk.

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!

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 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.

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 think ultimately, it works quite well.

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

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

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...

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.

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

It's great that it's publicly available, like many other public stuff the French Government is doing like https://beta.gouv.fr/ or the tax calculators, but it's still funny.

It went from DIY open source to something more like the UK's model; in fact Canada is running with a number of UK-origin projects & ideas, like Notify, which is of course a good thing, we should all learn from each other's best practices and innovations.

You can set up filters and forwarding rules. It doesn't require a programmer or special knowledge to do so.

The queue can be viewed by one or many humans.

Messages don't have to be dealt with in-order.

read/unread state, stars, labels, drafts all allow construction of advanced workflows with no specialist knowledge.

Sure, all these things can be done better with special software, but there is a massive benefit to something that all your existing untrained and probably-not-well-paid employees can set up themselves.