back to article Cabinet Office: Forget about Verify – look at our 3,000 designers (and 56 meetups)

You may not have many functional digital government services to use here in the UK – but if you did, they would be the prettiest in the world. The Cabinet Office has defended the UK's recent record in digital government by pointing to thousands of new jobs for "user researchers and content designers" it has created. The …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Doug Adams was right

    Sadly (for normal people), the B Ark is much bigger than we ever imagined.

    1. Warm Braw

      Re: Doug Adams was right

      the B Ark is much bigger than we ever imagined

      Almost exactly the size of the United Kingdom...

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Doug Adams was right

        Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?

        1. Steve Crook

          Re: Doug Adams was right

          > Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?

          "Stand On Zanzibar" John Brunner 1968

        2. Warm Braw

          Re: Doug Adams was right

          Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?

          It would take around 20 million ferry journeys to get them there, or about 2500 years. By which time the IoW may well have reached the 20th century...

        3. macjules

          Re: Doug Adams was right

          Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?

          Yes. So long as you EITHER have good vertical stacking abilities OR decide upon Global Thermonuclear War as your game of choice ("Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?"). Post GTW you could probably fit most of the population of planet Earth on the Isle of Wight, with room to spare.

          1. Peter2 Silver badge

            Re: Doug Adams was right

            Aren't you supposed too be able to fit the entire population of the Earth onto the Isle of Wight?

            Yes. However, that assumes that every one of them is going to be standing upright, with zero movement and zero space to move.

            It assumes that those ~7 billion people would need to eat or drink etc. So yes, theoretically it's possible. Practically, not so much.

            1. Teiwaz

              Re: Doug Adams was right

              Yes. However, that assumes that every one of them is going to be standing upright, with zero movement and zero space to move.

              Keep 'em frozen like fish fingers (it's not like most of B-Ark people are likely to be any less productive than at normal operating temperature)

              Oh, and Couple of corridors to jog round occasionally for some strange reason.

      2. Robert Forsyth

        Re: Doug Adams was right

        Cheap shot

        1. Glen 1

          Re: Doug Adams was right

          Tequila or vodka?

          1. Teiwaz

            Re: Doug Adams was right

            Re: Doug Adams was right

            Tequila or vodka?

            G&T (or jinnantonix)

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Doug Adams was right

        worse than its B ITe

    2. hplasm
      Holmes

      Re: Doug Adams was right

      "the B Ark is much bigger than we ever imagined."

      Planet earth sized, it seems sometimes...

  2. Aladdin Sane

    Bullshit bingo

    House!

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Alien

    What a load of Cobblers

    When do they get time to do any real work?

    It is any surprise that every Government IT project is horribly late, over budget and bears little resemblance to what was agreed in the first place.

    It is almost if the whole thing was coded by committee.

    OR

    Is the new Software Designer supposed to be like the one in the Picture? Or is a Beard, a bow-tie and full sleeve tat's de-rigeur for developers working in the black hole of Shoreditch these days? What good ever came out of there?

    Cynical? Yeah and it is Monday and I have had my Coffee (not from any chain outlet of coloured warm water I might add)

    1. DaveEdi

      Re: What a load of Cobblers

      Did they say Software Designers or just Designers?

      Sounds to me that they'll have a really pretty UI where the underlying infrastructure goes TITSUP every 5 minutes.

      But at least the error messages will look nice!

  4. Robert Forsyth

    Cargo Culting Apple?

    Disclaimer, I didn't read the cited document.

  5. joeW

    "which now has over 3,000 designers"

    Sounds a lot like bragging that one's kitchen has over 3000 cooks.

    1. BebopWeBop
      Facepalm

      Re: "which now has over 3,000 designers"

      maybe 3000 'imagineers' who 'conceptualise' the recipes before they go off to the people who do the work?

  6. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

    3000 designers?

    Sounds like the proud boast that our fair city has 50 town planners..

    The drawback being not one of them knows the other 49 exist and all of them live in a different city....

  7. Korev Silver badge
    Childcatcher

    Leaving the EU is prompting a large number of changes to government business, and this scale of change creates significant opportunity to transform government's digital services even further,

    I note they didn't use the word "improvement"... That's a bit ominous!

    1. Teiwaz

      Leaving the EU is prompting a large number of changes to government business, and this scale of change creates significant opportunity to transform government's digital services even further,

      'Opportunity' for whom, to do what.

      I have to suspect a whole new gravy train, closer to home and with an even tighter circle.

      A lot of prancing digital fluffers to hide Gov has little substance and even less direction.

  8. StuntMisanthrope

    You've lost me at B Ark.

    Our recruitment policy, used to consist of about three questions. Along the lines of: What's the answer? Daemon; extrapolate? It's your round? Wearing a dress was an automatic hire, as we could teach the rest and its good for team balance plus turning up showed remarkable intuition and radar. #youcancodeinmeetings

    1. StuntMisanthrope

      Re: You've lost me at B Ark.

      Since it's a Monday and erectile dysfunction/perfomance anxiety is on the radio. What's your coffee of choice? #maxwellhouse

    2. katrinab Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: You've lost me at B Ark.

      "Wearing a dress was an automatic hire"

      So that's what I'm doing wrong?

    3. WolfFan Silver badge

      Re: You've lost me at B Ark.

      StuntMisanthrope, your real name is Lola and you have a dark brown voice and drink champagne which tastes like cherry cola.

  9. SImon Hobson Bronze badge
    WTF?

    With all those designers ...

    Isn't it a pity that between them they can't come up with a decent UI. One that doesn't waste acres (or hectares for the youngsters) of screen for "pretty" white space. One that doesn't have huge text, which combined with the aforementioned white space means that SFA fits on the screen. One that doesn't do in eight screens/forms what a sensible site could do in one or two.

    Yup, you can spot the sites that GDS has "improved" !

    1. StuntMisanthrope

      Re: With all those designers ...

      No that's needed for the all the beacons and trackers for your mates start-up. #solyentdata #blackaddercapital

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Designers?

    Are these like the Design Engineers that come up with, say, Solar Freakin' Roadways? Or the plane with a parachute for the whole passenger compartment? Those nice looking but utterly impossible submarines in movies?

    As a rule of thumb that's served me well, if you have X designers you need at least 2x Engineers. More than that if you're doing anything that crosses domains (e.g. Mechanical to Electrical to Electronic to software to network design). Then you need 2x + [number of domains] Engineers. Again, minimum.

    How many Engineering jobs were created? All this design surely doesn't hinge upon the designers doing, say, database work or cable runs?

  11. Pen-y-gors

    Any actual system architects?

    ...or security specialists? or systems designers (not just pretty UI)? or coders? or testers?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Huh?

    "Earlier this week the government declined to make further taxpayer investments in Verify, throwing it over to the public sector."

    They've discontinued it by handing it over to themselves? Yes, that sounds about the usual level of government competence.

  13. D Moss Esq

    The service IS the design

    Louise Downe says – and she should know – that good services are verbs.

  14. Reaps

    they are absolute genius look at this

    https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2018/05/23/how-i-used-wget-to-make-a-copy-of-the-service-manual-for-user-research/

    and they handily dropped in a user and password.....genius

    not forgetting they copied UK gov documents (probably copyrighted) onto a third party US service

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