OK, there's a lot of negative comments here, but this is a great idea at a high level. It really is hard to figure out where to do a thing and it's also very easy to get phished. If they can figure out how to help people get all the services they're eligible for that'll be an amazing improvement for the people.
I threw some legitimate questions at it today and got helpful answers in response.
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
>it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.
Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.
afaik <a href="https://ndstudio.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://ndstudio.gov/ (and GSA?) are now the ones responsible for such in-house engineering?
National Design Studio is unproductive and does shoddy work. They have launched a handful of single-page sites. Many of these are full of AI slop, got caught running illegal trackers, failed accessibility audits, ignore established design standards and conventions, contain little useful information, or are heavy on bandwidth and CPU. They are flashy. They are not fit for purpose.
Seriously, just look at this crap. Fonts so large they become hard to read blurring into existence as I scroll, giant autoplaying video chewing up my bandwidth and CPU, giant useless pictures, a "food pyramid" even harder to read than the one from the '90s, low-contrast colors, not a citation in sight, one picture too small to read that can be expanded by clicking on it with no indication of this interaction, and it looks nothing like any other government website in existence. The total page weight is over 30 megs. Worthless at conveying information, but it looks capital-M Modern (and gives me a capital-M Migraine).
(The information is crap, too, but you already knew that.)
GSA's work was mainly done by 18F. Which was also destroyed by Musk and pals at the same time they destroyed USDS.
What made USDS (and 18F) special was not merely having web developers in the executive branch. It was that they were among the best in the world, and drove standardization and improvement across the entire government. Now we've got AI bros with buckets of eye-catching (eye-melting) slop.
Ok if the real experts were the reason we couldn't have what we have today, I'm glad we got rid of the experts. The new design is absolutely brilliant.
The visuals are good, a little too much white space for my taste but flashy eye catching sites are great. It just needs optimization and a proper a11y audit. This is also an information/propaganda site so it doesn't need to show everything at first sight like it's a critical service.
Clarity is important for things like filing your taxes or applying for a visa, and even then you don't need a boring design to do the job. All it takes is serious amounts of UX testing done by someone with real experience.
Hard disagree. I have no desire whatsoever to scroll through five pages of inch-high letters fading in and out to get a paragraph's worth of information. I find it ugly and I think it's not very useful.
But that's kind of irrelevant. This is a government website. A >30 MiB download; poor support for reader mode, custom CSS, or screen readers; excessive animation; and low contrast are all objectively poor for accessibility. This is why the people in 18F and USDS made websites that look different from private industry: the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone, not to make a real impression on the subset of the population that can use the site.
maherbeg · · focus · HN ↗
sippingabonedry · · focus · HN ↗
Someone mentioned a comparison to Obama's healthcare.gov rollout; that site had a 1% success rate during the first week it went live so it's safe to assume there have been some lessons learned since then.
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
The main lesson learned was that it was ineffective to rely entirely on outsourcing. The government needs top-notch engineering talent in-house. This led to the creation of the United States Digital Service (USDS), a fantastic group of people which did some of the best web design and engineering on the planet.
<a href="https://www.usds.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://www.usds.gov/
Trump killed them, of course, and the website is now entitled "United States DOGE Service". I hope that, some day, I will no longer be embarrassed to be an American.
r_lee · · focus · HN ↗
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
Seriously, just look at this crap. Fonts so large they become hard to read blurring into existence as I scroll, giant autoplaying video chewing up my bandwidth and CPU, giant useless pictures, a "food pyramid" even harder to read than the one from the '90s, low-contrast colors, not a citation in sight, one picture too small to read that can be expanded by clicking on it with no indication of this interaction, and it looks nothing like any other government website in existence. The total page weight is over 30 megs. Worthless at conveying information, but it looks capital-M Modern (and gives me a capital-M Migraine).
<a href="https://realfood.gov/" rel="nofollow">https://realfood.gov/
<a href="https://wave.webaim.org/report#/realfood.gov" rel="nofollow">https://wave.webaim.org/report#/realfood.gov
(The information is crap, too, but you already knew that.)
GSA's work was mainly done by 18F. Which was also destroyed by Musk and pals at the same time they destroyed USDS.
What made USDS (and 18F) special was not merely having web developers in the executive branch. It was that they were among the best in the world, and drove standardization and improvement across the entire government. Now we've got AI bros with buckets of eye-catching (eye-melting) slop.
ArizonaJoe · · focus · HN ↗
brettermeier · · focus · HN ↗
tancop · · focus · HN ↗
Clarity is important for things like filing your taxes or applying for a visa, and even then you don't need a boring design to do the job. All it takes is serious amounts of UX testing done by someone with real experience.
adfghiono9i · · focus · HN ↗
But that's kind of irrelevant. This is a government website. A >30 MiB download; poor support for reader mode, custom CSS, or screen readers; excessive animation; and low contrast are all objectively poor for accessibility. This is why the people in 18F and USDS made websites that look different from private industry: the goal is to provide essential services and information to everyone, not to make a real impression on the subset of the population that can use the site.
seemaze · · focus · HN ↗
What on earth gave you that idea? This admin has made it very plain whom they serve and who must serve them.