Ask HN: Looking for a Tech Talk from Gov.uk

1 point

4 years ago

Many years ago, I remember watching a tech talk from Gov.uk about how they design their websites. The general thrust of this talk was that, as a government service they had to be accessible to literally everyone in the UK. This included not just typical accessibility work, but also things like:

- They had to support positively ancient browsers like IE6 far longer than the rest of the internet, because some people had no choice of computing device, and the government had to serve them anyway.

- The people looking for information on Gov.uk usually aren't at their best or sharpest: they're usually stressed because they're in some kind of legal or health issue they're desperately looking to resolve, and the site had to accommodate for that with clear and understandable navigation.

- They ran user studies on usability and found that fancy date pickers tended to confuse people, and that it was far easier to just let people type dates with their keyboard. I think there were some other design notes in this vein throughout the talk.

Basically the whole thing was contrasting their approach with the typical, flashy, "cutting-edge" web development of the time. It ended (naturally) with a call for developers to apply to work there.

Try as I might I haven't been able to find this talk again. Does anyone know what this talk might be or where I might be able to find it?

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