lobsang's comments

Maybe I missed it, but I was surprised there was no mention of passwords.

Mandatory password composition rules (excluding minimum length) and rotating passwords as well as all attempts at "replacing passwords" are inherintly dumb in my opinion.

The first have obvious consequences (people writing passwords down, choosing the same passwords, adding 1) leading to the second which have horrible / confusing UX (no I don't want to have my phone/random token generator on me any time I try to do something) and default to "passwords" anyway.

Please just let me choose a password of greater than X length containing or not containing any chachters I choose. That way I can actually remember it when I'm not using my phone/computer, in a foreign country, etc.

The identity side has allways been a problem (P)politically and technically.

I think the original GDS was completely correct in basically forcing services not to have them, they are unnecessary for almost/all transactional inerteractions - where they are useful is for things with long term, cosistent interactions i.e. where theres an actual relationship, such as benefits or tax - unfortunatly HMRC and DWP both want to "own" the relationship as individual departments (or even benefits) rather than as a part of the government, and the UK is adverse to anything that looks like a national identity system (ignoring the fact we already have national insurance numbers for everyone(?), passport numbers, etc.)

Where I think the loss of critical thinking bites the most though are the small things:

- cookie banner on gov.uk

- my DVLA password, had to have numbers etc (despite password compostion rules not been a recommeneded best practice for almost 10 years [thanks NIST / GCHQ])

- forms are now so simple due to the mantra of "only ask one thing at a time" that you lose all context as you now have a page for "name", "date of birth" etc. instead of one page for "personal details"

I'm genuinely curious if people still think gov.uk is a good example - or I guess, as good as it was.

I'm slightly biased from past experience but my feeling is a lot of the critical thinking that went into gov.uk has been lost. I just can't see the original form of GDS having an cookie banner on gov.uk for example. These were the guys that rightly pointed out that there is no actual need for people to have user accounts to access most govenment services and that no one cares about what govt department they are forced to interact with and yet, I reccently had to create a DVLA account to get an updated drivers liscence (something that happens once a decade).

Not quite web 1.0 but I do wonder if there's a market for services that are closer to early web 2.0 products.

For example something closer to Facebook circa 2006. No infinite scroll, a simple timeline, basic media sharing.

Would it be possible to make a reasonable profit by offering simpler versions of existing services just without the engagement dark-patterns we currently have. And if so, could you create enough disruption to move the needle back slightly?

So, does anyone have a recommended alternative for a mail provider with support for custom domain names?

Like a lot of people this is literally the only reason I have a legacy workspace account.

Also, I guess, any recommendations for a decent IMAP client for Android?

Unfortunately, lots has changed GDS itself is now 2 or 3 times the size and each department employs their own teams of DDAT experts.

GDS is just another government bureaucracy at this point. Mores the shame.

Sir Francis Maude and the team he had around him untill about 2016.

I don't have the links to hand but there was some really great thinking going into what it meant to provide government services online at the time.

Unfortunately when he and the original team left and more people joined GDS / departments started to develop their own services a lot of direction and momentum was lost.

There used to be a twitter account @govdigirati that was great at satirising GDS after around 2017

Unfortunately GDS is now mostly toothless in all honesty

There isn't actually anything close to a standard user account for gov.uk

Again one of the original goals was that services shouldn't require a persistent account. Unfortunately that makes sense in 80% of cases but misses some important ones (Universal Credit, Child tax benefit, Tax).

For whatever reason the people looking at accounts also got fixated on identity (you are Sam Smith) rather than authentication (you have X credentials and have accessed the service before) combined with the UKs aversion to an identity system and central databases (we actually have several) it resulted in Gov.UK Verify, which, last I checked works about 30% of the time.

Ultimately the big departments (HMRC) just built their own thing and created user portals which GDS didn't like... So everyone argued and no one fixed the actual problem.

GDS used to recommend matomo, especially for services with 'sensitive' content (each service on gov.uk is actually developed, hosted and deployed separately). I know the foreign office used it, unfortunately the trend amongst the designers/analysts/product managers had been to push GA without any real thought process (because frankly it's easier than getting permission to setup and maintain a self-hosted product)

GDS have done some excellent work in the past, especially around usability and design. Unfortunately since the various senior leaders have left and it's moved further into government/cabinet office they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves.

It's interesting that one of the original principles behind gov.uk navigation was that it should be secondary to Google. The focus was on getting people to the right page from Google/Bing/DDG (where they start) without the need to navigate gov.uk itself.

I also find it odd that the problem they identified from the Discovery was poor information architecture but their solution is to redesign the navigation menu. The use of the word 'topics' is also interesting. Again, GDS and gov.uks intent was to make it easier to access services, but the word service or a list of services isn't represented in either the current design or prototype.

You could use <article /> instead (which I probably would). Jest tested it using dev tools, seems to work.

This, although I would call it the 'enterprise' model.

This is how teams in the UK Gov are structured (infact we have more roles [52 at last count]) and its horrible. Aside from the lack of ownership and autonomy at an individual level you also end up with increadibly fragile teams as theres no depth of experience.

If you have 7 people and they all do different things you spend more time finding things for people to do than working on valuable problems - much better to find people with overlapping skillsets in the domain you want to solve a problem then let them get on with it. So if you want to build some software - hire people that can write code, if you want to provide information - hire some writers. Hire smart people and they can do the bits around the edges 'enterprises' think they need specialsists for.

"A jack of all trades is master of none, but often times better than a master of one"

I think some of the comments so far here and in the artice might be missing the point - not helped by the use of word UX or the common interpreation as meaning UI.

I think the author is advocating that you start with understanding the expectations of the product, what should the user be able to do, what do they need to do, what does the market expect. From that you then work out what tradeoffs need to be made in different areas and how to make them.

In that sense I completely agree - starting with anything else is just going to impose restrictions and limitations that are likely to go against what you want to acheive.

Conversely I've worked with lots of designers who also suck at UX.

I think the first paragraph nails it. The people who are good at UX are the people who have the benefit of testing designs with users and iterating on them. Either for the problem at hand or with the benefit of past experience.

As an industry I wish we could get past the idea that your job title denotes your ability in one area or another.

I can definately understand the desire to have a USB-A port, its probably still the most common connector for keyboards, mice, external drives etc. HDMI would also be nice to support most common display devices without the need for a dongle.

I understand the remval of magsafe (as much as I liked the connector), SD card reader, network port and other older connectors but USB-A and HDMI are still prevalant among a lot of devices.

Less said about the origirnal touchbar removing the "esc" key (on a developer device) the better

How have you implemented the heatmaps and screen recording - looks like magic

"Can't is the won't of the people who don't"

remember getting told this as a kid by my mum or grandma. Didn't seem to stick though...

I find the difficult thing with this advise is that people always want to skip step 1.

From my experiance once you introduce the principle of refactoring repeated code into functions no one wants to repeat code and will go to great length to justify abstractions before they know if its needed.

I see this with teams following iterative product development processes as well - they never want to build the 'simplest thing' first and learn. There is usually an idea of the final product and people want to jump straight to that.

Would be interested to know if anyone else has seen this and how they have overcome those challenges.