"This site uses cookies. Cookies are files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website. We use cookies to store information about how you use the GOV.UK blogs website, such as the pages you visit."
They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.
I read a Twitter thread a while back saying they use Google Analytics, but if you reject the cookie prompt it isn't loaded.
They need some sort of analytics if they want to know how the site is used, but as a Brit who uses that site I'd really rather they didn't use GA, it's not appropriate, in my opinion for a government service.
It's never appropriate. It's a lynchpin of Google's surveillance network. The benefit they get from "giving away" the useful-but-awkward tools outweighs the benefit any GA users see from using GA. Google rigged the race before most people knew they were in it. We all should stop using it.
I lead a government digital service and have migrated from GA out of respect for our constituents' privacy.
Umami is a great self-hosted alternative, which you can load under a subdomain to avoid it being blocked by adblockers. Most of the SaaS products end up on uBlock or other adblocker lists, even when they respect privacy, so this has been my go to option.
UserTrack is another great option we use and it continues to add great features. It's more than worth the commercial license fee. I had a conversation with Cristian by email this weekend, for example, about adding a feature. By this morning he had put together an example in their docs on how to add the feature to your site.
The general consensus is "host your own", that way you're not giving more control over the web to Google by providing them the inner workings of your site via your analytics data.
There are several alternatives, you'll tend to find a lot of them advertised in the comments section here for any anti-Google Analytics post.
I’ve heard good things about both plausible [0] and panelbear[1] as alternatives to Google Analytics. Can’t say I have tested them personally yet unfortunately.
We checked the physical instructions and no other option is offered. I wonder if they even considered people might have google blocked when building the system.
You can log into various services in order to do things like manage your tax account. Of course they need cookies (or some other form of session management).
And even not for that, analytics is a useful tool to figure out how people use the website.
> Of course they need cookies (or some other form of session management)
In the UK, cookies used for only that purpose don't require consent. In their cookie policy, you can see they don't ask for permission to set such cookies - they rely on a different legal basis: https://www.blog.gov.uk/cookies/
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)
GA is already approved and installable via a meta tag, so besides the warm feeling of fighting the giant, there is not too much upside and lots of questions to answer.
Upper stakeholders should connect the ideas : "Google data monopoly" and "other option for analytics should be available".
You still have user agent and other per-request hints to help you differentiate, right? Of course 20k behind one proxy is extreme, but this should cover a large fraction of use cases I think.
That’s how GA started and it’s still possible for anyone to set it up that way, although Google kind of hides it. If you use GA without Tag Manager or Doubleclick integration, the data is aggregated for your analytics but not tied to other Google activity.
Anything that is used for tracking requires opt-in, anything that's technically necessary and obvious (e.g. a login session cookie, a setting cookie) does not require any opt-in.
Even if one wasn't strictly necessary, I know a lot of companies throw one in there regardless. The reasoning being that it's better to have it and cover your bases, then not have it and get hit with GDPR.
Since all the clients I maintain these days are smaller, American-facing companies, I've never been asked to add this popup and I've never suggested it because none does business in the EU. No third party tracking cookies are involved, but some of my platforms do quite a bit of fingerprinting and store hashes of those fingerprints in cookies or local storage, and try to match those later with fingerprints polled for device authentication. This is perhaps less "obvious" a need for a site's internal purposes. None of it is shared, but I had assumed if I were to build anything like that EU-facing that the notice would be required.
AFAIK, that's not necessarily GDPR, you still need to have a cookie notice for third-party cookies, even if your third-party cookies don't collect PII.
But as others have said, you don't need a cookie notice of all you're using is necessary cookies.
Plus in the UK the ICO is underfunded, has a low enforcement record and is now sending menacing, misleading, letters demanding £40 from every UK business even though 90% of them don't actually need to pay the fee.
I agree it’s a complete joke, they demand you pay, then you pay £40 annually to basically click yes on 3 questions saying you are holding consumers personal information correctly with zero verification.
The entire GDPR is utter nonsense. At the end providers are using different tricks so user give up and just say "ok + next", as going through list of partners and clicking on each of them is just crazy.
I just hope that at some point someone will calculate amount of time lost by clicking on these banners.
edit: Don't get me wrong idea behind is important, but practical implementation is just terrible. Either enforce it, exercise it or upgrade law to forbid any hint of user tracking, in the way it is implemented right now is just wasting people time and nerves.
> providers are using different tricks so user give up and just say "ok + next", as going through list of partners and clicking on each of them is just crazy.
This is illegal. Unfortunately, enforcement of the GDPR is laughable and everyone knows it, so the practice continues.
I agree. I have seen so many consents where by default everything is on, there is no turn off all button.
And when you go to partners list there is long list of 600 companies. But what grinds my gear the most is "Legitimate interest" ?! which somehow overrides your prior consent do not track me...
And there is far more going on than what you see on a daily basis. It isn't "obvious", yes the banner thing is shit, but GDPR is a complex legislation and has many great benefits for personal privacy that go far beyond annoying banners on web pages.
If they can use an analytics package to analyze the visits of typical people to the site, and use that information to get more people the information they need quicker, everyones lives are made better.
In my mind, thats more important than the potential data leak of someone knowing that someone running Chrome 95 for Windows took 8.6 seconds to click from "Tax info" to "Self Employed Tax Info".
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.
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
The GDS, even today, has an intrinsic beauty to it. It's really a marvel of engineering, though not the prettiest.
A big problem is that now a lot of designers, particularly among the contractors, who are several generations removed from the creators, simply don't understand it and don't follow the guidelines.
Shameless plug: I wrote a template pack for Django Crispy Forms so you can get fully GDS compliant, fully accessible pages with zero effort, https://github.com/wildfish/crispy-forms-gds
> 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.
If this is true, then it proves everything that comes around, goes around. My first ever professional web development job was rebuilding the England and Wales Housing website[1], which was around the time that gov.uk was beginning its work to bring all central government online activity into the one site. The resistance from Government Departments - who all greatly value their semi-independence from the clutches of the Cabinet Office (and HM Treasury) - was immense!
I'm glad gov.uk won that fight: allowing each Government Department to have its own online presence, and their individual policies and procedures surrounding that presence, can never lead to a good outcome for people who have to access and use government services online.
> they have increasingly started to become something of a parady of themselves.
I think a huge contribution to that were IR35 changes in public sector that created a brain drain. Talent was replaced by poor quality service from big consultancies.
I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be.
One thing that will always stick with me is one of the team leads telling me "we don't have customers, we have users" -- i.e. in the UK everyone has use Gov.uk for government-related digital information/tools/services. There's no competitor, therefore no customer choice. And they are well aware of this, hence their obsessions for the UX.
I really wish other governmental digital agencies had this same mindset.
>I had the opportunity to work with GDS on a project. These folks have a startup mentality and are the polar opposite of what one imagines a governmental office to be.
They gave a presentation at Webstock in Wellington (almost a decade ago IIRC). That was certainly my impression of them at the time. Great to see how little has changed.
Government website accessibility makes such a difference when in a rush and looking for clear, concise, and easy to follow instructions or forms. I was blown away by the quality of Ontario's websites, they are seriously top-notch, compared with those of Québec's. Québec is a mish-mash of styles and contradictive information and the only occasional use of English only serves to frustrate Anglophones who wouldn't be able to read more than a small part of a topic without passing through a translator. I wouldn't be surprised if Ontario's French support is on par with its English.
As an aside, I am always saddened by how many jerks just let out all of their negativity into comments. I'm for free speech and don't object to its presence, just a little saddened.
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.
I use gov.uk for all kinds of stuff but I've never needed to 'navigate' as such. You get a letter with a url on it, and you type in the url (e.g. vehicle tax). Or you google something, and you generally end up at the right page to do what you need or tell you what you need. Or maybe sometimes you're one click away but its pretty obvious. This was one of their goals back in 2016 and I think its worked.
I dont need to 'navigate', its not wikipedia. I wonder if they are doing this because they're the only people with an overview of the whole site, and it seems like a big mess to them? It may well be a big mess, but to me (and I suspect a lot of people) it doesn't matter. Like, most people dont want to hang around at gov.uk, you go in and do whatever you need to do, and then you leave. You're not browsing.
Generally I think the GDS era has been great, particulaly for covid they've had to throw a lot of things together very quickly (e.g. ordering tests by post) and its all just worked.
I personally, and I hope many other users would benefit from having more data and less words. I would prefer to have my personal and company Tax page more as dashboard with alerts and notification for important approaching dates, than what exist now.
I would like simple lists/tables with numbers own and amounts paid. Currently, you will see final numbers but finding out history will take you on journey of clicking on multiple links.
There is too many links, and searching for simple transaction history sometimes was quite challenging.
There is on other thing I find illogical on HMRC site, why do we need to register for each service online, waiting of some secret code? There is already username/password, and also SMS verification, also GOV knows what type of company/personal taxes we are registered for, why do we need to register separately for each service?
These screenshots and mockups look like a step backwards from an 'ease of navigation' perspective, especially for someone who is only an occasional user.
However, GDS has had good success in the past, so I hope they'll only push ahead with the rollout if the data shows that I'm an outlier.
I have employed tabs and accordions repeatedly during my career to try to simplify pages and have invariably found that they cause confusion among some users when we do real-world user testing. Some folks just don’t recognize them as affordances for uncovering hidden info.
I’ve come to believe that, aside from top navigation, hiding any info on a page is a usability no-no. Users know how to scroll and it’s the easiest way to discover information. Just make the pages taller and use more white space.
Ideally they would use a styled <details> element, which provides exactly the desired behavior without needing JavaScript.
Edit: At least, exactly the desired behavior for accordions within the page, where, once you expand a section, you expect it to close again only if you click the section header a second time. It would be less suited for a dropdown menu, which needs to be dismissed if the user clicks anywhere else on the page - though there might be some way to make it work.
The Gov.uk site, so far, has been head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of providing a site that is both functional and usable for all users. Their proposed improvements seem to carry on this trend except for the mobile optimized pages (mobile-optimized usually meaning: hidden information, too much whitespace, mobile only buttons that don't work on real computers, etc).
You are talking about gov.uk, right? Well, you can't 'continue' until you've started. I'm surprised someone has turned up here, admitting to being responsible for these sites.
But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website?
But while you're here, would you mind please taking a look at the HMRC website?
But I like having to have 3 different accounts to manage my tax affairs. I especially like how I can navigate around and end up back on a ten-year old version of the site with no way back.
They don't need cookies. They're not running ads (one hopes). There's no "conversion". It's just info. If they just need traffic info, they can get that from their server logs. They don't need Google Analytics. Nor should they be giving information to Google.