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Putting growth at the heart of GOV.UK’s strategy - Government Digital Service

This may mark the beginning of Gov.uk’s decline. The top-listed priorities are the very antithesis of starting with user needs. Instead from now on it’s going to be about growth, shiny new technology, having a native app, and literally pivoting to video.

It’ll be interesting to see if they try to maintain their existing design principles while simultaneously abandoning them.

The impact of removing jQuery on our web performance - Inside GOV.UK

Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.

It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.

How and why we removed jQuery from GOV.UK - Inside GOV.UK

This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!

Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.

Why you should hire a frontend developer - Technology in government

This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.

That’s front end, not full stack.

What I Learned in Six Years at GDS ◆ 24 ways

Blogging about what you are working on is is really valuable for the writer because it forces you to think logically about what you are doing in order to tell a good story.

It’s also really valuable to blog about what you’ve learned, especially if you’ve made a mistake. It makes sure you’ve learned the lesson and helps others avoid making the same mistakes.

Introducing the GOV.UK Design System - Government Digital Service

The Gov.uk design system is looking very, very good indeed—nicely organised with plenty of usage guidelines for every component.

Guidance on using components and patterns now follow a simple, consistent format based on task-based research into what users need in order to follow and trust an approach.

How we’ve made GOV.UK Elements even more accessible

A nice run-down of incremental accessibility improvements made to Gov.uk (I particularly like the technique of updating the title element to use the word “error” if the page is displaying a form that has issues).

Crucially, if any of the problems turned out to be with the browser or screen reader, they submitted bug reports—that’s the way to do it!

We’ve updated the radios and checkboxes on GOV.UK | GDS design notes

I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.

Results of the 2016 GOV.UK assistive technology survey | Accessibility

The Government Digital Service have published the results of their assistive technology survey, which makes a nice companion piece to Heydon’s survey. It’s worth noting that the most common assistive technology isn’t screen readers; it’s screen magnifiers. See also this Guardian article on the prevalence of partial blindness:

Of all those registered blind or partially sighted, 93% retain some useful vision – often enough to read a book or watch a film. But this can lead to misunderstanding and confusion

Working with mobile technology - Digital Service Manual - GOV.UK

Excellent guidelines from GDS on providing services that work well on mobile. The watchwords are:

• responsive design,
• progressive enhancement,
• open data, and
• emerging technology (service workers, notifications, etc.).

Native and hybrid apps are rarely justified.

Research with blind users on mobile devices | Accessibility

Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:

Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.

This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).

It’s ok to say what’s ok | Government Digital Service

I really like this list. I might make a similar one for the Clearleft office so what’s implicit is made explicit.

It’s ok to:

• say “I don’t know”
• ask for more clarity
• stay at home when you feel ill
• say you don’t understand
• ask what acronyms stand for
• ask why, and why not
• forget things

GOV.UK elements

I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.

Spotlight – a pure JavaScript application for GOV.UK Performance

Progressive enhancement with isomorphic JavaScript, as practiced at Government Digital Services.

Improving accessibility on GOV.UK search | Technology at GDS

Alice Bartlett shares her experience of getting aria-live regions to work in a meaningful way.

Open standards for contact details and calendar events | Technology at GDS

I’ve been suggesting h-event and h-card as open standards for UK government sites.

What’s the design process at GDS? | Government Digital Service

A look behind the scenes of gov.uk. I like their attitude to Photoshop comps:

We don’t want a culture of designs being “thrown over a wall” to a dev team. We don’t make “high fidelity mock ups” or “high fidelity wireframes”. We’re making a Thing, not pictures of a Thing.

And UX:

We don’t have a UX Team. If the problem with your service is that the servers are slow and the UX Team can’t change that, then they aren’t in control of the user experience and they shouldn’t be called the user experience team.

Paul Downey - just doodling - YouTube

A lovely little profile of Paul and his sketches.

The Web Is Agreement! The URI Is The Thing!

How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement? | Government Digital Service

The research behind GDS’s research that one in every 93 users of gov.uk is not receiving JavaScript …and it’s not because of JavaScript being disabled in their browser either. As ever, progressive enhancement is most useful in dealing with the situations you don’t anticipate.