Replacing the scroll tracker on GOV.UK

https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2022/03/17/replacing-the-scroll-tracker-on-gov-uk/

45 39 4 years ago

insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk

mxz30002• 4 years ago

I'm consistently really impressed with the UK gov's websites. They're fast, usable and mostly quite intuitive, something that is helped by the fact that they all share a common theme. They support pretty much everything you'd want to do from an admin perspective.

This contrasts greatly with US and French government websites I've had the displeasure of using in the past.

samwillis• 4 years ago

While I agree, venture outside central government to local authority and you still get a shit show of bad websites and services.

The other day I paid out yearly fee for our garden waste bin collection. The page takes you to an completely un-styled credit card form with no branding and just the price, no details, then the “confirmation” screen is just white page with a single line “payment received”, nothing else not even a redirect. Oh and no confirmation email.

Our local planning site had a bug for six months where when you typed in the search box, focus was lost if you typed to slowly due to the results appearing automatically and steeling focus…

diordiderot2• 4 years ago

It really confuses me. All of "Her Majesty's government's" designs and software are exceptionally well made and freely available.

Why can't counties, boroughs, and councils just copy it and add a dash of styling

silasdavis• 4 years ago

Interacting with gob.es has given my a vast amount of respect for gov.uk.

zurgax• 4 years ago

Depends which bit you look at in my experience, some of the home office stuff (especially around visas and immigration) still manages to be obscure and is sometimes defective. Perhaps a sufficiently misanthropic department can always get its institutional culture to bleed through the standardised stylesheets.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

I don't know about your specific example, but there's some stuff GDS hasn't touched (yet?) and it shows. The 'modern' stuff that has that consistent design across departments, awesome accessibility etc. is all great IME.

Devil's advocate though: I know someone who works in tax (for a private firm of accountants) and hates it. Too dumbed down, and the bar at which they need to reach out to HMRC for guidance or some other resource is just too low.

I find it often ends up linking through to actual legislature, so perhaps it's just something in the middle that's missing, the 'technical reference' level.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

They also work well in very obscure browsers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313

t3rabytes• 4 years ago

usa.gov has gotten quite good thanks to work that USDS has done to standardize design language across the government (and help support agencies that want to adopt it), but getting other agencies to use it has been a slowwwwwwwwwwww process.

tails4e• 4 years ago

It's nice to see pride in a civil service tech job. For the most part it's absolutely crazy how poor tech is handled in most governments, and nothing is done about it. Source: my sister waited 4 weeks for her civil service work laptop to be fixed. They have contract repair companies, but couldn't be bothered organising it. She ended up driving to the contractor herself after 4 weeks and waited for thr repair. Shocking.

hdjjhhvvhga3• 4 years ago

That would mean adding almost 2,260 URLs to the JavaScript. This might sound reasonable

This is one of the many things in today's web I have a problem with.

hdjjhhvvhga3• 4 years ago

To all downvoters: please consider that 2260 URLs with 100 characters each make 226 KB. That's 1/4th of a megabyte... On a news site! And for what?! As if infinite scroll wasn't bad enough, you now have the solution you wouldn't have in the first place if you hadn't decided that it's an excellent idea to play with the user's brain by displaying new articles masquerading as the continuation of the previous one. Yes, I know, the ship has sailed, but the whole issue still bothers me.

JoelEinbinder• 4 years ago

2260 * 100 bytes = 226kb not 226mb.

zimpenfish3• 4 years ago

I've scraped the country pages, and then the internal links, removed all the URLs they won't be scroll-tracking (like '/email-signup'), and turned them into a JS file for a total size of 153742 bytes uncompressed. If you take advantage of the fact that all those country pages share a prefix, you can get the array down to 84423[1] (whilst still knowing the prefix.) Convert it to plain text (because you don't always need it immediatelyas an array) and it comes down to 81399. Then use `lz-string` to compress it and you end up with 26656 bytes.

Also since there's only 226 unique prefixes for the links, you could use another level of prefix removal and get it down even further - the JS array is now 38659 bytes, which `lz-string` gets down to 9372 bytes.

I'm pretty sure someone smarter than me can get it down even further.

[edit: discovered some blank URLs that could be stripped]

dbbk• 4 years ago

It actually doesn't sound reasonable, I have no idea what they're talking about.

u2077• 4 years ago

but we couldn’t use them because we need to support old browsers like Internet Explorer.

Isn’t IE dead?

chippiewill• 4 years ago

IE11 is still supported until June of this year in various Windows SKUs. Longer for certain enterprise customers with extended support.

Government websites tend to have very broad support requirements.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

Even after official support ends, it will continue to be in use for a long time.

PoignardAzur• 4 years ago

Yeah, but this is just tracking what parts of pages are read. Given how small a share of their traffic IE must be, they could probably skip scroll-tracking on IE.

adamckay• 4 years ago

The GOV.UK website will no doubt continue to support IE for a good while yet based on this information [1] from one of the developers of the Government Digital Service, as it's required to be as accessible as possible.

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiven...

spiffytech• 4 years ago

GOV.UK likes to make sure that people at the margins can still access their material. See this post from last year about someone using a PlayStation Portable to access their housing benefits:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313

drawfloat• 4 years ago

I find it hard to believe the devs behind Gov.uk were genuinely considering hard coding all URLs and headings in to FE JS. Surely their mind went to the “window.location” + throttle scroll function solution/“better but not suitable Intersection Observer” options first?

Glad they settled on those either way, because adding 200kb of uncompressed URLs and heading text for tracking is madness.

Replacing the scroll tracker on GOV.UK

Related Stories