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: uk
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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.
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.
LukeW | Ask LukeW: New Ways into Web Content
I like how Luke is using a large language model to make a chat interface for his own content.
This is the exact opposite of how grifters are selling the benefits of machine learning (“Generate copious amounts of new content instantly!”) and instead builds on over twenty years of thoughtful human-made writing.
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 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.
UK ICO: surveillance advertising is dead
Behavioral ads are only more profitable than context ads if all the costs of surveillance – the emotional burden of being watched; the risk of breach, identity-theft and fraud; the potential for government seizure of surveillance data – is pushed onto internet users. If companies have to bear those costs, behavioral ads are a total failure, because no one in the history of the human race would actually grant consent to all the things that gets done with our data.
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
LukeW | “Mad Libs” Style Form Increased Conversion by 25-40%
I was chatting with Rachel at work the other day about conversational forms, and I mentioned that I kicked that whole thing off with the mad libs style form on Huffduffer. Here’s the research that Luke later did on whether this style of form could increase conversion.
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.
How To Kill Your Tech Industry
I’m currently making my way through Programmed Inequality by Marie Hicks. In that book and in this article, she describes how Britain squandered its lead in the field of computing through indemic sexism. There’s also the remarkable story of Dame Stephanie Shirley.
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!
The Loyal Opposition by Adrian Hon & more
A weekly list of short, concrete actions to defend the weak, rebuild civic institutions, and fight right-wing extremism. For UK people.
Subscribed.
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