Building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - GOV.UK
Oh, how I wish that every team building for the web would use this sensible approach!
Link tags: gov
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DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies | Ian Betteridge
This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:
What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK
“Make the logo bi… exactly the same size.”
You know when a new boss takes over a company and the first thing they do is declare an immediate rebranding? It turns out that the monarchy has been doing that for generations.
Kind of annoyed at React
React was never able to stand on its own merits as a framework (as its merits are few). Now the cracks are really starting to show.
How Certain Algorithms to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed – The Markup
A terrific piece from Aaron Sankin that goes from Waldsterben to software development via firefighting and the RAND corporation.
Bureaucracies use measurements to optimize and rearrange the world around them. For those measurements to be effective, they have to be conducted in units as relevant as possible to the conditions on the ground.
Time team: Documenting decisions & marking milestones · Paul Robert Lloyd
Here’s the transcript of Paul’s excellent talk at this year’s UX London:
How designers can record decisions and cultivate a fun and inclusive culture within their team.
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.
Accessibility Personas
Personas are often toothless, but these accessibility personas from gov.uk are more practical and useful than most:
Each profile has a different simulation of their persona’s condition and runs the assistive technology they use to help them.
You can use these profiles to experience the web from the perspective of the personas and gain more understanding of accessibility issues.
Accessibility strategy – GOV.UK Design System
The primary goals of this strategy are to inform decision-making and enhance the success of accessibility-related activities within the GOV.UK Design System team.
Interestingly, accessibility concerns are put into two categories: theoretical and evidenced (with the evidenced concerns being prioritised):
- Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
- Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.
The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023 - Infrequently Noted
It is not an exaggeration to say that modern frontend is so enamoured by post-scarcity fairy tales that it is mortgaging the web’s future for another round of night drinking at the JavaScript party.
Strong—and true—words from Alex.
This isn’t working for users or for businesses that hire developers hopped up Facebook’s latest JavaScript hopium. A correction is due.
I concur.
Frontend’s failure to deliver in today’s mostly-mobile, mostly-Android world is shocking, if only for the durability of the myths that sustain the indefensible. We can’t keep doing this.
If you disagree, I encourage you to dive into the data that Alex shares.
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.
Reinventing W3C Governance
To be honest, I’m not all that convinced by Robin’s arguments here about overhauling the governance model at the World Wide Web Consortium (partly because the way he describes the current model sounds pretty okay to me). But I’m very interested in what he has to say in the broader philosophical sense about using values to solve problems:
A value is worth something if it’s there to help you when the rubber hits the road and starts hydroplaning. Sure, you’ll need a handful of high-level lofty values as reminders, if only because there’s always a vocal guy (it’s always a guy) who thinks it’s just outrageous to put people before profits. But mostly you want Values You Can Use.
That might be the best description I’ve come across yet for design principles: values you can use.
When we say that engineering is about trade-offs, we’re saying that engineers solve their hardest problems using values (which they call “heuristics” because everyone’s entitled to be fancy some). In implementing a system, you might need to decide between an option that provides people with the best experience, another that delivers the greatest value to the shareholders, and yet a third one that makes the control centre blinkenlights dance in the prettiest way.
“The internet wasn’t designed to breach national boundaries” - Rest of World
Say you’re into the indie web without saying you’re into the indie web…
The internet wasn’t really convenient in 1994 or 1995, but it was a very collaborative space.
There was a moment where we replaced this idea of the internet being a medium that we can all write to and participate in to one that is mediated. That happened at some point after social networks started to arrive and when the smartphone started to arrive. It’s a combination of the nature of those platforms and the prevalence of the technologies, which meant the economic rewards of getting this right rose significantly.
And so there’s a really distinctly different feel in the 2013, or 2014, internet to the one that you might have had in 1997, or 1998. It’s not just that it’s easier and I’m yearning for a world of cars with manual choke and manual transmission and crank-up starter handles, but it’s that the programmability of the internet and its endpoints has turned into something that is increasingly permissioned by major platforms.
Design System Day, Thursday 22 July 2021
This looks interesting: a free one-day Barcamp-like event online all about design systems for the public sector, organised by the Gov.uk design system team:
If you work on public sector services and work with design systems, you’re welcome to attend. We even have some tickets for people who do not work in the public sector. If you love design systems, we’re happy to have you!
Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement - Service Manual - GOV.UK
Using progressive enhancement means your users will be able to do what they need to do if any part of the stack fails.
What a terrific short guide to sensible web development!
- Start with HTML
- Using interactive elements
- Adding the extras
- Building more complex services
- Testing your service
- Do not assume users turn off CSS or JavaScript
- Case studies and related guides
A future owners test // Cennydd Bowles
I’d like to see more of this thinking – maybe we could call it the future owners test – in contemporary responsible tech work. We mustn’t get so wrapped up in today that we overlook tomorrow.
Prioritizing users in a crisis: Building the California COVID-19 response site
This is a great case study of the excellent California COVID-19 response site. Accessibility and performance are the watchwords here.
Want to know their secret weapon?
A $20 device running Android 9, with no contract commitment has been one of the most useful and effective tools in our effort to be accessible.
Leaner, faster sites benefit everybody, but making sure your applications run smoothly on low-end hardware makes a massive difference for those users.
Design Can Change the World - But It’s Up to Us to Make it So by Daniel Burka
There is a huge world out there where design isn’t embraced, where designers are clawing for resources, and where design isn’t prioritized. Most of the organizations that are changing your world don’t know much about design, aren’t looking for designers, and won’t even understand what designers are talking about when they show up at the front door.
The Ugly Truth about Design Systems
The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:
- Current design systems thinking limits free, playful expression.
- Design systems uncover organisational disfunction.
- Continual design improvement and delivery is a lie.
- Component-focussed design is siloed thinking.
It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.