But in terms of branding, this error page is for when the entire prototype fails. It is not part of the prototype, and therefore doesn't adhere to Gov branding. It's more branded with the team's informal whimsy, and it obviously wouldn't appear in a live site.

This, for the US, now. USA.gov works okay. It could really be better.

('long' address, but http://gov.il is in Hebrew)

Obviously it needs work, and a few design elements/features need tweaking - but it's a massive step in the right direction. Hopefully someone internally will see and understand how great this is and help it move forward.

I would love to know how they did this. Are these contractors? Is it a seperate team? Is the redesign rolling out across all government departments? What is their CMS?

Oh man, I need details. If you were involved with this at all, please contact me...

This is also interesting read: http://puffbox.com/2011/05/11/ten-things-alphagov-gets-right...

@alphagov is us, @nicepaul is me. Read the blog, leave the feedback.

Again, I must say, this govt seems to actually be moving its ass and doing things (even if they're not always perfect). Impressive and completely unexpected.

This is so much more efficient than any other government site I've ever interacted with, by many orders of magnitude.

(also check out their very cool error page: http://www.alpha.gov.uk/fail)

[NB I am a Scot]

My settings are: Zoom Text Only, do not allow pages to choose their own fonts, Comic Sans MS for all fonts, minimum font size 20pt.

... I don't know what to say. At 20pt, too?

I also like to use proportional fonts when writing code (Python, C++, PHP, SQL), which has raised many eyebrows too.

As for my preference for Comic Sans: I find it a very nicely rounded font, easy on the eyes, and very readable letter forms. There's absolutely no trolling involved here: I just like it for my own use, I'm not forcing anyone else to use it, I'm perfectly fine with other people using Consolas or Monaco in their code editors.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/jystewart

See also the Open Government License[1] - it might not seem much to Americans, but compared to Crown Copyright it is a revelation.

[1] http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen...

It seems like such a fantasy of ever happening in the US.

Something feels strange about the govement asking me on twitter to give feedback on getsatisfaction

However, the blog's an interesting read on what they're trying accomplish. The point is to make the user's journey much better for common tasks (their example is a lost passport):

http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/

Check out http://blog.alpha.gov.uk/blog/alpha-gov-uk-design-rules for example. They're openly ignoring IE6 and accessibility while they iterate interactivity, fairly brave for a government site.

In the photo, on one of those mission-statement postit notes, next to "no need to understant govt" and "task focus" there's one that says "spin is trust."

This rather sours the milk for me.

I think 'understand govt' is in the details of how it works. Government, at the bureaucracy level, is a large collection of paid workers. These groups of workers don't talk to each other, many don't give a damn so long as they don't get fired and most don't even understand their own rules and policies.

Each group has different procedures to accomplish a task and many of those procedures seem bizarre and obtuse when you try and navigate them to accomplish the task you are trying to actually do.

There is a huge difference between understanding the high level of how your government works and navigating the quagmire many of the departments have become.

Although from a government that seriously thought they could sell off all the forests without anyone getting annoyed, I am unwilling to assume anything.

(@alphagov turned round an answer to my question in less than a minute!)

My guess, and obviously I could be wrong, is that it was an internal joke, but not meant to be for public consumption for fear that people wouldn't get it and would criticise them for it.