This smells to me of a team overthinking something so much that they land on something unintuitive. It smells of "over-fitting" — a solution way too specific when something general and flexible is needed.
Pressing shift three times is clever… but way too clever. Even if you stick a giant popup saying "hit shift three times to quickly exit" I'm not sure anyone in a panic will remember—loads of people don't even know which key is shift, especially when there's three buttons on a keyboard that look the same and only two are the same. I've come across people who always use shift-lock and did't realise you could use shift for anything. I'd be interested to know what UX tests they actually did, and who with.
If I was going down the press a key three times, I would have gone with pressing any key three times apart from the number keys (plus an info box when you enter the page—"hit any key 3 times to quickly exit to the weather"). Most people, I'm sure, would mash the spacebar in a panic but if they missed then it would still work.
What I would have preferred to test would be 'mashing'/chording — pressing more than one non-modifier key at the same time, so a user could just smash a load of keys at the same time in a panic.
Going to the Weather page is a great idea, though.
TZubiri 42 days ago [-]
Hard disagree.
First of all. Not using escape key to escape is the standard for almost all applications since the 90s. Do you use escape to close the browser? A tab? your email client? No. All software converged on the idea that a close button was not a good idea, we are left with the actual button as a vestige.
Second of all, this software is designed for people in high stress situations where one of their main goals is to avoid detection, they will not only memorize the escape sequence, but they will likely have their finger on the shift key at all times.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
Using the Escape key to close dialogs is the standard for almost all desktop applications since the 90s, though.
ssalka 41 days ago [-]
^This. Closing an entire application with the possibility of losing important state? No, we don't want a button that does that (though a button combination is OK because that's less likely to be accidentally triggered). Closing an ephemeral popup that is distracting from the main page? Absolutely, `Esc` that.
duxup 42 days ago [-]
I have my doubts about how sure you are that people in high stress situations will memorize the escape sequence for one website.
I think as devs we often think of our site or application as the center of the user's universe, but I don't think users memorize the minutia of our applications like we think / would hope.
Also, I actually worked with folks in abusive relationships at one time, their actions are not as predictable as you might hope.
koala_man 42 days ago [-]
> one website
I'm guessing gov.uk is hoping that this will become some kind of standard, at least for British resources.
TZubiri 42 days ago [-]
Ah, I misunderstood the scope of the tool.
I thought this was a tool that users specifically install in order to browse any content.
But instead it seems this is simply a feature so that users that browse gov.uk websites specifically can exit.
ceuk 42 days ago [-]
> I think as devs we often think of our site or application as the center of the user's universe
Jakob's law is a thing but I actually think in the case of GDS they are in the fairly rare position of perhaps being able to justify the hubris you speak of slightly.
Not only are they directly or indirectly responsible for the UI of a frankly staggering number of online services, they are also one of the most influential bodies - perhaps in the world - when it comes to this sort of thing.
duxup 42 days ago [-]
My only concern about setting a standard (beyond the usual process of setting a standard) it's that a standard for what exactly? All the other government sites that ... you don't need this key sequence on?
For the user I think that still means asking them to memorize something odd for a very limited use case that you won't think of visiting any other government site.
cj 42 days ago [-]
I think the OP's main point is "press shift 3 times" is a very uncommon and unintuitive keyboard shortcut. What do you disagree with?
aftbit 42 days ago [-]
Why not exit the tab with Ctrl-W?
OJFord 41 days ago [-]
Hard disagree. I use it (and it works) so much that the rare occasion it doesn't is jarring.
Not to close a tab or entire application, no, but to unfocus a field, close a modal window or ad pop-up, back in something like a Typeform, etc.
SoftTalker 42 days ago [-]
> Not using escape key to escape is the standard for almost all applications since the 90s.
Really? I always hit "escape" when I get a popover on a website, and it often works.
Many TUI interfaces use it for "go back" or "exit" e.g. BIOS settings.
Alupis 42 days ago [-]
> Second of all, this software is designed for people in high stress situations where one of their main goals is to avoid detection
FTFA: `It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.`
This is the craziest part of this entire article to me. The UK Government needed to invent a whole design system that included an "ejection seat" button in case you're caught looking at UK Government websites?
Or does this button exist because one website in particular needed this feature?
Over design much?
r0uv3n 41 days ago [-]
It is specifically for websites offering help escaping domestic abuse or similar stuff:
> When to use this component
>
> Use the component on pages with sensitive information that could:
> - put someone at risk of abuse or retaliation
> - reveal someone’s plans to avoid or escape from harm
>
> For example, when a potential victim is using a service to help them leave a domestic abuser.
I think it's useful to think about the same way you think about test specificity. Ie, of all the people in the world that hit this page, how many of them are going to need this feature and use it correctly vs. how many don't need this feature and accidentally use it. Using the Escape key is fantastic for "I needed this feature and it worked", which is probably 1 in 100,000 users of the page. It's terrible for "I accidentally used this feature I didn't know about" and that's the other 99,999.
All your other suggestions fail for this reason too - you need a high level of confidence the person really intended to escape. I for example would mash the space bar three times to scroll down.
monkpit 42 days ago [-]
Along these lines, in the GitHub discussion they show a graph of the number of times the button was pressed, bucketed by the platform the user was on, which is all utterly useless info.
It should be normalized as a percentage of page views at the very least.
They’re basically saying “hey we added a big red button and people press it sometimes”. The button could say “fire lasers at my cat” and some amount of people would press it (whether intentional or not).
amelius 42 days ago [-]
Our browsers just need a boss-key.
Suppafly 42 days ago [-]
Hitting shift 3 times happens just by holding the button down too long while typing caps sometimes too. I constantly have sticky keys coming up when inadvertently holding down shift and getting distracted while typing.
jermaustin1 42 days ago [-]
I've definitely triggered sticky-keys with my shift before, but I can't remember a time it was while typing - potentially while shift + arrow to highlight, though.
But it is one of those features that I turn off the second it annoys me 1 too many times.
Suppafly 42 days ago [-]
Yeah anytime I'm on a fresh install of Windows, it seems to happen pretty quickly and then I turn it off.
advisedwang 41 days ago [-]
There's also a giant red button you can click. That's the main route and it's pretty good for a paniced user who needs the solution right in front of them.
They keyboard shortcut is just gravy.
crimsoneer 42 days ago [-]
Yeah, this was my reaction... I wonder if they collect logs of how many people use the triple shift function. I do like GDS' focus on research and service design, but this feels slighly over-engineered from that space.
monkpit 42 days ago [-]
The logs are just noise without a way to prove the users’ intention to use the triple-shift feature for its intended purpose.
Maybe you could normalize it by listening for triple-shift presses on all pages on the site (not just sensitive ones) and calling that a baseline of accidental events.
But, how do we know that events in the baseline are truly accidental? What if users learned the behavior and tried using it on pages where it’s not implemented?
There’s just no good way to get analytics on this feature without interviewing users somehow.
whalesalad 42 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bckygldstn 42 days ago [-]
A similar initiative in NZ is Shielded Site [1].
Many large sites (eg The Warehouse [2]) participate by putting an icon at the bottom of their website. When clicked, a modal pops up with domestic abuse resources.
There’s a prominent exit button that closes the modal faster than a page navigation or finding the close tab button. Closing the popup returns you to a major website rather than a new tab page. And most importantly, your history contains no evidence you viewed the information.
Unfortunately, clicking outside the modal (by far the biggest target to hit) doesn't actually close the modal, you need to click the (relatively small) close button.
fennecfoxy 42 days ago [-]
As a Kiwi I miss the ware whare!
However I am extremely disappointed to see that the questions section of that starts out gender neutral and then basically does the usual "if you're a woman being abused by a man..."
There is still no support for male victims of domestic violence, whether the abuser is male or female. :/ it's not hard to cater to all cases, no wonder men don't bother - particularly when it's reported that male victims who resort to calling the police are most often the one handcuffed/detained when they arrive.
In before someone comments something that we've all heard before - it's not a competition, both women & men can be helped by the same system, regardless of supposed statistical likeliness, etc.
pushupentry1219 42 days ago [-]
This is very fair. I have a close male friend who was the victim of intense domestic violence, physical, emotional and financial manipulation by his ex partner.
He talks about how child support staff (like reception for example) are, are not favouring of him. They see DV in his profile and assume he's the perpetrator instantly. He had to explain himself constantly, no doubt reliving trauma when he does.
He has been struggling with the courts to gain sole custody of his child.
And to top it all off all the posters around these places are, like you say, about women reaching out against their abusive male partners. Which IS an issue and IS statistically more likely. But you make a very good point about these systems being able to help both.
KMag 42 days ago [-]
> .. women reaching out against their abusive male partners. Which IS an issue and IS statistically more likely.
Be careful about your phrasing there. I hope the implied subject on both sides of the "and" is different. Women being victims is an issue, and women reaching out is significantly more likely.
Women reaching out is (obviously) not an issue, but is statistically more likely. Alternately, women being victims is an issue, but the statistical likelihood of women being victims is unknown, and we have good reason to believe there is significant reporting bias.
failingslowly 42 days ago [-]
Thank you, this needs to be repeated whenever this situation arises.
eastbound 41 days ago [-]
It doesn’t matter, because even if men call for help, they won’t be helped.
There was a study in UK that if a man calls the police for domestic violence, there’s 56% chances the police only interviews the woman, and 23% chances he’s threatened of arrest (with, I think, 3% or 10% he’s actually led to the police station, I don’t remember the specifics, but still higher than not calling the police).
In France, a sad sentence of the government hotline “Female violence info” mentions that 10% calls are from men. For a hotline with “female” on it. The report continues that, since it’s only 10%, it’s still generally violence against women.
So yeah. Let’s be honest. Men better not end up in need of help.
Throw38495 42 days ago [-]
UK minister is trying to close All female prisons. They are already only 4% of prisoners, but that is it enough. So much about accountability.
> men can be helped by the same system
That is just a misinformation! Calling police if abuser is a female, and you are a male, is a VERY bad idea.
Without police you only get some bruises. With police you get escorted in handcuffs in front entire neighbourhood, get fired from job, pay very expensive lawyers, get criminal record and possible prison time!
There is no way to fix that, just leave and drop all contact!
44O213244 42 days ago [-]
[flagged]
44O213244 42 days ago [-]
[flagged]
echoangle 42 days ago [-]
window.onload = function(){}
Shouldn’t this be addEventHandler? Otherwise, you can only have a single onload callback, right?
marcosdumay 42 days ago [-]
It should be addEventHandler if you want to have more than one handler, yes.
Otherwise, it's fine.
crote 42 days ago [-]
> There’s a prominent exit button that closes the modal faster than a page navigation or finding the close tab button.
I spent about 30 seconds figuring out how to close it. The icon in the top-right? No, that goes to the start page. Perhaps the icon in the top-left? No, that goes to the main menu. Clicking outside the modal, like most other websites? Nope, doesn't work.
Turns out the close button is the half-circle at the bottom of the modal, which is exactly the same color as the rest of the modal. It's pretty obvious once you see it, but it took me way too long to find. They should've either placed it in the top-right like literally every other close button ever, or made it bright red so it's impossible to miss.
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
This is a great idea. I can't see the icon on the Warehouse site though - can you point me to it? How do people come to know about what the icon does?
ClearAndPresent 42 days ago [-]
The icon is the teal/white circle just in line and to the right of the social media icons at the bottom of the page. I missed it on first glance and would have no idea what it did.
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
Oh. I thought that was a light mode / dark mode button... Unlikely on a retail site I guess, but discoverability feels pretty bad. It's not like you couldn't just write "suffering from domestic abuse?" on there because the person doesn't have to click it in situations where that would be risky, and could come back later if they spot it at the wrong time.
thecatspaw 42 days ago [-]
I think the idea is that you can tell people "hey, if you're suffering from abuse, you can check a websites footer for this icon to get help"
GenerocUsername 42 days ago [-]
This has probably helped so many people.... In the imaginations of other people
DiggyJohnson 41 days ago [-]
Are there any statistics, or frankly any reason, to expect this to have helped anybody?
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I genuinely can't imagine this helping anyone. I am completely open to being wrong though.
everforward 40 days ago [-]
I don’t know if you’re a kiwi but I assume that what it does is more common knowledge there.
I do think there is real value in being able to report domestic abuse without leaving an obvious paper trail. Call logs can be accessed by the account owner, I imagine a lot of people don’t know how to clear their history or aren’t confident enough they can do it correctly, etc.
It’s some small amount of peace of mind for victims who file reports, and with a cost of “adding a fake social link and a devs salary for a month” I’m pretty okay with it even if it literally only helps a single person. Bandwidth well spent.
teruakohatu 42 days ago [-]
I had to hunt around to find it. Bottom right, aligned with "Corporate" in the footer links. Next to the Facebook icon.
arp242 42 days ago [-]
Ideally this should pre-load the BBC weather page so switching to it is (near-)immediate. Currently it can take a while to load. Replace all DOM and then replace URL should do it.
There is also the matter of history; if I load the demo page, click that button, and press "back" then I'm on the demo page again.
And of course it'll be in the browser history.
I have to question how practically useful this is. Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off. Or open private window and close that, which is a smart thing to do anyway.
Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
Overall this seems like a IE5-era solution that's pretty outdated and useless today. Perhaps even worse than useless because the implementation is so-so and protection it offers low.
Overall, I'd say telling people to use private windows and teaching then Ctrl+W is probably better.
seszett 42 days ago [-]
> Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
I'm just glad you're not in charge of this kind of services because although that might seem like an obvious thing to you, the reality is that the people needing that information the most are the ones who are the least likely to have easy access to a personal device with Internet access.
In particular, children and women in dysfunctional, abusive relationships are not very often provided with a smartphone and a data plan by their abusers.
I agree that the shift shortcut is unlikely to be of much use, but it's just one available method in addition to the rest.
graemep 42 days ago [-]
Abused men have similar problems although we are probably less likely to have no internet access restricting and monitoring communications is a common part of abuse.
My ex wife did not want me to get a smartphone and, in retrospect, it was because it let me keep in closer touch with family abroad (which is the main reason I have one at all). She also got very upset when I changed the password on my desktop some years previously.
yreg 42 days ago [-]
> I'm just glad you're not in charge of this kind of services
Why are you attacking the user instead of just focusing on the argument?
port19 42 days ago [-]
Bad internet habit, just asssume that "you" refers to the hypothetical person made of nothing but that one expressed opinion
everforward 40 days ago [-]
I do this sometimes too. I wonder how hard it would be to make an addon that marks using the second person in forum posts with the spellchecker or something.
Sometimes I intend to do it, but it’s honestly usually just force of habit.
Ntrails 42 days ago [-]
> I agree that the shift shortcut is unlikely to be of much use, but it's just one available method in addition to the rest.
I don't know how the relevant user is informed about the option/feature, but assuming they're aware it is a positive feature both in terms of thoughtfulness and execution.
Be interested to see the stats on how often it gets called
arp242 42 days ago [-]
I think it should be obvious from the full comment that I don't think that doing _something_ for this is useless. Most of my comment is about how this is not actually sufficient to protect people.
And "we need to do something for this" doesn't mean that this particular feature/button is a good idea.
Like I said, telling people to use private windows and teaching them Ctrl+W seems like a better solution to solve the same problem to me. You can have a widget with some basic tips, and you can even show the correct instructions based on the browser the person is using.
xunil2ycom 42 days ago [-]
I want to thank you for this comment. I had read the entire article thinking incorrectly about this. I thought it was for people who didn't want to see the material to navigate away, and kept thinking "just turn your head, close your eyes, hit the back button".
Then I saw your comment and realized I was entirely wrong about how I was thinking about this. I get it now.
tourist2d 42 days ago [-]
> women in dysfunctional, abusive relationships are not very often provided with a smartphone and a data plan
This sounds like something which you have no evidence at all for claiming.
jakkos 42 days ago [-]
I knew a person who was in abusive relationships where the abuser would keep making ridiculous claims that the person was cheating on them, and made them give up having their own phone as "proof" that they wouldn't cheat.
Of course, the abuser was cheating the whole time.
I don't have evidence but I do have experience on this.
I'm not sure why you would be the quickly dismissive of something that would seem obvious to many.
Aeolun 42 days ago [-]
I mean, it’s a ‘water is wet’ kind of statement. Prisoners aren’t provided a mobile phone and data plan either.
Moogs 42 days ago [-]
> Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off
The point of shift x3 is that it's consistent across keyboard layouts including laptops. I have a laptop where the location of the ctrl key is moved inward to make room for the function key. I frequently hit Fn instead of Ctrl and don't realize what's happening until I look at my keyboard. And that's not when I'm in distress.
Same goes for middle click. It's not a consistent interaction. On some laptops you can left click and right click to get a middle click. On my laptop, it's a three finger tap.
> Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
In a normal situation, this is true, but this is UI design for people in extraordinary situations. Their abuser may have taken their cellphone or other devices and may not have a choice in what computer they use or when they have access to it.
Nothing about this prevents private windows or Ctrl+W (assuming they have another window open so it doesn't look suspicious that they're staring at a blank desktop), it just gives victims a quick action they can take to prevent immediate retaliation.
eviks 42 days ago [-]
> I frequently hit Fn instead of Ctrl and don't realize what's happening until I look at my keyboard. And that's not when I'm in distress. Same goes for middle click. It's not a consistent interaction.
Triple Shift that you can only on a single website is worse since you're even less likely to be able to use it in distress
Besides, as a site you can try to add typo-similar combinations for your "hide" action (like alt+w or win+w) instead of creating a totally different one
vladvasiliu 42 days ago [-]
> I have to question how practically useful this is. Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off. Or open private window and close that, which is a smart thing to do anyway.
Users probably don't want to attract attention by using a private window (which they may or may not think about using), and most browsers I've seen have a distinct appearance when in private mode.
Ctrl+W in normal mode has the issue of leaving a trail: Ctrl-Shift-T or similar will bring it back.
arp242 42 days ago [-]
> Ctrl+W in normal mode has the issue of leaving a trail: Ctrl-Shift-T or similar will bring it back.
That also exists with this button: just press "back". Even easier.
erinaceousjones 42 days ago [-]
> Overall, I'd say telling people to use private windows and teaching then Ctrl+W is probably better.
Yes, you should do that as well as understand that, for things like this, where you're providing information for vulnerable people across an entire population, your people are going to span a huge range of technical literacy and you will not be able to reach all of them in time. Give them the big red escape button with the special "dial 999" style memorable key combo as well as teach them everything else. But triage and do the "this solution works for the broadest number of people the quickest" thing first - the big red button.
grujicd 42 days ago [-]
Samsung Magician on Windows uses CTRL+W as a global shortcut and then it doesn't work in browser anymore. That took a while to figure out.
BlueTemplar 40 days ago [-]
In what context ??
I've been using both for years, never had this issue ??
Toutouxc 42 days ago [-]
That's completely idiotic and whoever came up with that (apparently it even blocks crouch + walk in some games) should be tarred and feathered.
rafram 42 days ago [-]
You can only replace the URL with another URL on the same domain. Otherwise a site could make itself look like Google and then replace its URL with Google’s, and you’d have no way of knowing that it isn’t Google.
lupusreal 42 days ago [-]
Believe it or not, a lot of users don't understand the control key and are afraid to touch it because they think it might break their computer. They may not even be able to readily find it on their keyboard since they aren't accustomed to using it, but do tune out and skim over the things on their computer they think they can't understand.
bjoli 42 days ago [-]
I think you are underestimating how much being in an abusive relationship or even just poverty in general (poor people are more likely to be abused, so they're double punished) reduces your options and opportunities.
This goes for everything. Place where you live. The food that is on offer. Work opportunities, and with that the ability to plan life. Even living large enough to have a private space, like offering your kids an undisturbed place to study or - like in the post - somewhere you can safely report abuse.
I have seen it more than once: if someone from a poor family grows up and does really well in school and in college and breaks with the life they had before that is usually not enough. Because when there is time to write a CV the kids from the middle class all had parents that made them do other things. Charity work. Play the trumpet with a youth orchestra that somehow got to play in Carnegie hall. Chemistry camp. Dancing with a youth ballet company at the met. The system is rigged from the start. True meritocracy was never a thing.
A feature like this takes a developer a short time to implement, and if it saves someones life or stops abuse it is worth it.
labster 42 days ago [-]
Your description is exactly meritocracy under the original definition. The second kid has earned all of the merits, and the ones possessing the most documents of merit get ahead.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
It would be meritocracy if both kids had equal opportunity to earn those merits. If the ability to do so is itself gated, it's only meritocratic within the privileged group.
labster 42 days ago [-]
No, equality of opportunity is specifically not needed for a meritocracy. It wasn’t in the original book[1], it didn’t happen in the old Chinese examination system, and it sure doesn’t happen now.
Merits are measurements, and society adapts to make those measurements a target.
Oh, but this is not how meritocracy is ever viewed in a liberal democracy. Equality of opportunity is the defence on an unequal society.
For the inequality of outcome to be fair and just, there has to be at least some kind equality of opportunity in a meritocratic society.
bjoli 42 days ago [-]
Fair point. But: the way the modern meritocracy is motivated is that it is a fair system. It is the whole idea of the American dream. Work hard and you can go anywhere. Except some people have to work a lot harder and be a lot smarter.
dangsux 42 days ago [-]
[dead]
skrebbel 42 days ago [-]
In case the author reads this, I tried the test page on a newish Windows install and at the third shift-press, a "Do you want to enable Sticky Keys?" Windows dialog opened, and the third shift keypress didn't make it to the browser so I didn't exit. Instead of nervously staring at the weather, I was nervously staring at the potentially damning content I was trying to get away from, plus a weird Windows 7 themed dialog window that I'd never seen before nor really understood.
I wouldn't be surprised if this will happen for anyone trying the triple-shift on a vanilla Windows install who doesn't actually use Sticky Keys, nor explicitly turn it off (ie a majority of visitors).
debugnik 40 days ago [-]
That was my first thought, how did they not consider sticky keys?! It even makes a sound! The prompt triggers on the fifth press but it's easy to have had already queued two presses beforehand.
This risk is much worse than whatever layout differences and interactions with VoiceOver they observed for Control.
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
Does anybody have any stats for the use of these kinds of buttons? A few of our clients - victim services and honour-based abuse services - ask us to add these kinds of buttons, but I've always wondered they actually get used instead of e.g. people just closing the browser window. The issue for us with adding tracking is that it would slow the interaction which, even if it was only a few milliseconds, isn't something we want to risk. (Or worse, if the JS it breaks and the link doesn't work). I guess it would have to be some kind of post-hoc survey for victims of domestic abuse who've used a site and are now somewhere safe.
Edit - thanks to @jdietrich below there are some stats on this link, which shows a correlation between events you'd expect to increase the rush of domestic abuse, such as the Covid lockdowns: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/... I do wonder how they got those stats though.
Edit 2 - I'm so glad this got posted! I've been wondering about this for ages and it's really nice to get some evidence for its use. Reading through the comments has also solidified my thinking around "why don't people just close the browser window" - many people who use honour-based abuse services are very computer illiterate, don't have time to learn about incognito windows / (Ctrl | Command) + W, and can only snatch computer time here and there. Abusers can look back at the browser history, but if the choice is between being discovered on an honour-based abuse website or the chance that the abuser won't look at the history, the second is clearly superior.
Edit 3 - I really wonder about the three-press shift keyboard shortcut. Real lack of discoverability, and my worry would be that the lack of consistency across sites would lead to situations where people are on non-gov.uk websites and think that keyboard shortcut would work there too. Although I suppose the fact that the first shift press activates the button in some way does tie it to the presence of the button on screen.
Edit 4 - It doesn't seem to be in use on any relevant gov.uk pages. The pilot on the "check for legal aid" pages seems to have ended and it's not on the pages about domestic abuse.
closewith 42 days ago [-]
Most probably they're using the sendBeacon method triggered by the visibilitychange event. sendBeacon doesn't delay the unload and asynchronously makes the network request simultaneously.
Thanks, that's really useful to know - I might try and implement something like that on the sites that we run.
davedx 42 days ago [-]
Yeah the fact that there's no concrete demo beyond the basic JavaScript snippet/demo makes me wonder how well this actually works. I wanted to know how users are informed to press shift repeatedly to use the button? It's weird UX.
It does remind me of "boss keys" that old DOS games used to have.
> An honor killing (American English), honour killing (Commonwealth English), or shame killing is a traditional form of murder in which a person is killed by or at the behest of members of their family or their partner, due to culturally sanctioned beliefs that such homicides are necessary as retribution for the perceived dishonoring of the family by the victim.
> Methods of murdering include stoning, stabbing, beating, burning, beheading, hanging, throat slashing, lethal acid attacks, shooting, and strangulation. Sometimes, communities perform murders in public to warn others in the community of the possible consequences of engaging in what is seen as illicit behavior
> Often, minor girls and boys are selected by the family to act as the murderers, so that the murderer may benefit from the most favorable legal outcome. Boys and sometimes women in the family are often asked to closely control and monitor the behavior of their siblings or other members of the family, to ensure that they do not do anything to tarnish the 'honor' and 'reputation' of the family
> Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, says that honor killing is: "A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Islamic society. .. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. Honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility or reproductive power."
> Nighat Taufeeq of the women's resource center Shirkatgah in Lahore, Pakistan says: "It is an unholy alliance that works against women: the killers take pride in what they have done, the tribal leaders condone the act and protect the killers and the police connive the cover-up." The lawyer and human rights activist Hina Jilani says, "The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."
> Fareena Alam, editor of a Muslim magazine, writes that honor killings which arise in Western cultures such as Britain are a tactic for immigrant families to cope with the alienating consequences of urbanization. Alam argues that immigrants remain close to the home culture and their relatives because it provides a safety net. She writes that 'In villages "back home", a man's sphere of control was broader, with a large support system. In our cities full of strangers, there is virtually no control over who one's family members sit, talk or work with.'
Hopefully that expands on it. A rotten culture of "family values" that sees women as nothing more than baby factories and keeps them under control at all times, through intimidation, persecution, monitoring, and straight up state-sanctioned killing and blaming of the victim if they try to assert themselves.
kortilla 42 days ago [-]
I’m curious about this history of this. What page are people on that might lead to domestic abuse?
What do they use frequently enough that they would learn about this exit functionality rather than just clicking a bookmark bar, closing the tab, or just switching the tab?
This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
kelnos 42 days ago [-]
> What page are people on that might lead to domestic abuse?
I assume there's a .gov.uk page somewhere that lists resources for people who are in abusive relationships. I imagine if an abusive partner walked in to find you reading that, that might set them off.
kortilla 42 days ago [-]
Sure, but are they going to spend a bunch of time to learn how to use the magic exit button or just press ctrl-w to close the tab?
youainti 42 days ago [-]
I am highly technical (multiple linux machines at home) and I don't use ctrl-w. I didn't know it was a thing.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
I'm mildly surprised because it's been adopted fairly universally for multi-document / multi-tab apps. E.g. most editors with tabs will also use it to close the current document.
TeMPOraL 42 days ago [-]
I do, but only because it's a stupid-ass shortcut I keep triggering on accident.
thaumasiotes 42 days ago [-]
I don't really mind triggering ctrl-W by accident because ctrl-shift-T will undo the mistake.
An accidental ctrl-Q is much worse, because closed incognito windows can't be recovered.
umanwizard 42 days ago [-]
I think all the major browsers can be configured to prompt before quitting.
derkades 41 days ago [-]
Firefox prompts by default
TeMPOraL 39 days ago [-]
Sorta, kinda, maybe? Even the one shipped with Debian/Ubuntu?
Firefox gave me plenty of scars over the years. CTRL-Q and CTRL-W are just two; another's the fear of the browser randomly going "updates have been installed, you're not allowed to do anything until you restart; shame about that unsaved work you had on the page we just blanked" shit that used to fly on Ubuntu.
(Maybe still does? I browse from Windows nowadays.)
thaumasiotes 41 days ago [-]
While true, that's a very recent change.
scott_w 42 days ago [-]
If it’s the only tab you have open, it’ll look very suspicious that you’re just staring at the desktop…
PaulRobinson 42 days ago [-]
Imagine your abuser “lets you” use the computer for one hour a day. They monitor your browser history. They read your texts, your social media DMs, and browse your search history. They often watch you browsing, save going to the fridge to get a beer or to go to the bathroom. These are the moment where you think about trying to find help. It’s all you think about really: how to get out.
How likely are you to know keyboard shortcuts?
As a UX designer, would you not want to make a big safe UX button that you need no prior training or experience of, that you can trust to help you get out of a difficult situation.
Footsteps. Oh shit. They’re coming back. Is it Ctrl-W? Or Ctrl-V? Oh fuck, he’s nearly in the room. Quick, where’s the tiny little cross to close the window… oh, wait, click that exit page button, or just quickly hit shift a bunch of times. “Oh yes, I was just looking at the weather for tomorrow. I was thinking about whether to put some washing out on the line…”
eviks 42 days ago [-]
This scenario is contrived
> just quickly hit shift a bunch of times
How would you even know about this shortcut you never use anywhere, let alone remember it in a time of stress?
In principle, information about this could be propagated, if it's reliably available on UK govt sites at this point (I'm not sure if it is).
eviks 42 days ago [-]
This discussion is about the current practice where a more widely used Ctrl+W is hard to remember, but somehow a niche 3xShift isn't, not a potential future info campaign
closewith 42 days ago [-]
> This scenario is contrived
This is a much more realistic user story than 99% you will ever read.
robertlagrant 42 days ago [-]
The main question is: how do you know to hit shift a load of times? Is that a standard thing being taught to people?
easton 42 days ago [-]
Another example: There’s a page in the iOS settings where you can remove people from your family group and change your password (or do other things you might do if someone was after you). It has a “quick exit” button that kicks you back to the Home Screen, but also completely kills the Settings app so said person wouldn’t know you were on that page if they yoinked your phone.
If I'm looking at this right it's around 413 uses in a month in this particular web page. I don't know if they somehow distinguish actual use versus "trying it out". I think it's great these things are considered but I'm a bit skeptical they actually increase physical safety of people at risk. Maybe these buttons increase perceived safety, which is a good thing?
jdietrich 42 days ago [-]
The MVP for this component was on the form to start an application for a restraining order. The design team fully explain their rationale and research on the project Github.
> This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
+1. "Close tab" is more robust, well-supported and well-known.
It seems more likely a user will load an inoccuous page as a decoy, than learn triple-shift is a quick exit.
Still, interesting read, to hear the reasoning. Would like to see empirical evidence/user testing.
TheRealPomax 42 days ago [-]
<partner walks in> <they see a tab getting closed> <they muscle their way in and restore it> <someone gets a black eye>
vs
<partner walks in> <nothing really special about a tab loading the weather> <you still live in fear but you're not getting physically abused>
froggerexpert 42 days ago [-]
I understand the happy case. When it works, great.
My critiques were on the sad cases:
* Presses <Ctrl><Ctrl><Ctrl>. Wait why isnt this working? Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on another sensitive site that doesn't implement this. Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on a poorly supported browser, or after the functionality is removed, or after it conflicts with OS-level (it might not today, but who knows about future OS updates)
PaulRobinson 42 days ago [-]
We should probably bake it into browser standards then.
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
Absolutely. This would solve the above problems, plus any problems involving JavaScript bugs that would render the whole thing inactive. Just a shortcut to go to the root of the site seems appropriate. Or maybe sites could configure themselves for a "safe site" equivalent if their whole content is a risk.
kortilla 42 days ago [-]
The timing of those two scenarios is different.
Either the abuser walked in while the person was still on the page with the big red button or not. It is not faster to press the big red button or shift 3 times than it is to close a tab.
logifail 42 days ago [-]
> It is not faster to press the big red button
Indeed.
Surely Ctrl+W (with a 2nd decoy tab already there and at BBC Weather) is 10x faster than finding and clicking a button on the page you're reading?
EDIT: another issue with the Exit This Page as implemented on eg https://www.camden.gov.uk/planning-to-leave-an-abuser - if you open it in a private browsing session, and click it, it sends you to Google, but of course there the first thing you get is the massive cookies pop-up. So wouldn't that be a bit of a red flag to whoever just walked in? :/
eviks 42 days ago [-]
Partner walks in
They see a page changing
Black eye
yakshaving_jgt 42 days ago [-]
Or, perhaps even more likely, abuser stealthily enters the room and silently observes the victim to try to extract more damning information before admonishing (or rather, attacking) them.
scott_w 42 days ago [-]
If it’s the only tab open, you’ll raise suspicion if your partner walks in to you staring at the desktop
robertlagrant 42 days ago [-]
I think the point is learning to have two tabs open, one incognito, will work everywhere for all resources, whereas this bespoke interaction needs to be memorised just for this websites.
scott_w 41 days ago [-]
I wouldn’t presume to lecture women whose husbands beat them on how they should behave…
froggerexpert 41 days ago [-]
I understand this is a sensitive topic, but I don't think it's fair to characterize robertlagrant's comment in the way you did.
Their comment looks similar to any other comment on technical/UX matters, including yours and mine.
scott_w 41 days ago [-]
> I think the point is learning to have two tabs open, one incognito, will work everywhere for all resources, whereas this bespoke interaction needs to be memorised just for this websites.
No, it’s telling people how they should behave, as you can see. It makes no attempt to step into the shoes of the user.
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
It wouldn't be the desktop, would it? Wouldn't it be an 'empty' browser window? Still just as suspicious, of course, but I wonder if some/all browsers do something special in that case—e.g. default to the home page. They certainly could, as could a plugin.
scott_w 42 days ago [-]
Chrome closes the window on the last tab. It's splitting hairs, however. As you said, it's still raises suspicion which, to a person in a domestic violence situation, is not what they want.
londons_explore 42 days ago [-]
> This seems like such a contrived scenario
Agreed. I suspect the number of people assisted by this button is vanishingly small, and outweighed by the number of people who don't get the information they're looking for because they accidentally click the button and can't find their way back.
Or the number of people harmed because the "exit this page" UI is on some pages only (for example, it isn't here on HN), and that is even more confusing for users who aren't tech savvy enough to realise its part of the site not the browser and who could come to rely on it.
Overall, I think this button is poor UX and shouldn't be used, even on pages with sensitive content that it is intended for.
rjknight 42 days ago [-]
I would really like to know whether this feature gets any (non-accidental) use. It's certainly an important problem to solve, and I can see the technical merit in the solution proposed. What I'm left wondering is how this solution is most effectively communicated to the people who need to know about it, such that they're able to make use of it correctly in the critical moments when they need to use it. For obvious reasons there are probably no good statistics on this, but I wonder what the user research was like.
elevatedastalt 42 days ago [-]
Many possibilities. Something seeking legal help, or an info page about domestic abuse itself, or something around financial literacy.
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
That information is out there, but people in these kinds of circumstances don't always have unrestricted internet time to research it. They might just be able to snatch a few minutes here and here and therefore not know much about how to use browsers etc.
This is particularly the case for an honour-based abuse service (forced marriage, honour killings etc) that we work with for example.
rsynnott 42 days ago [-]
> What page are people on that might lead to domestic abuse?
The police, the divorce services, health services pages about contraception, abortion, sexual assault, LGBT youth services, etc etc etc. Think people who are already being abused, mostly.
scott_w 42 days ago [-]
If it’s the only tab open, switching isn’t an option. Women living under the threat of violence will be very stressed, so won’t be well placed to setup their browser ahead of time.
zerovox 42 days ago [-]
I understand that they couldn't use the Escape key, and so having an alternative makes sense, but I'm not sure as a user how I would ever discover the behavior of pressing "shift" three times.
jdiff 42 days ago [-]
Escape might be more intuitive but it's not more discoverable. Shift is used often when inputting information, and the mentioned visual feedback give this behavior an opportunity to be discovered.
Having said that, regardless of the key the guidelines on using this pattern say that you should explicitly inform the user of the feature before they first encounter it.
1. This kind of browsing is more likely to be done on a phone, in private. I find the scenario a bit contrived in 2024.
2. It seems a bit weird to be concerned about UI patterns if you earnestly want this component to do its job.
3. If it's that important, the Escape key event can be added after DOMContentLoaded. Warn content authors to not overuse the component, and it would be fine. You can still have the triple-Shift key event for those cases that they specifically call out.
FridgeSeal 42 days ago [-]
Its entirely plausible that someone in an abusive relationship is a number of mitigating circumstances:
- they don’t have a smartphone, or it’s been taken off them
- they’re forced to use a desktop because their abuser doesn’t want them to do things in private easily
- plausibly mobile has something different entirely, given that this appears to be desktop focused.
- They mention escape is intercepted by most browsers to stop loading, if someone is interrupted midway and panics and starts hitting escape, they could plausibly end up _stuck_ on the page they were trying to hide from their abuser.
thecatspaw 42 days ago [-]
to fix the interrupt issue they could initially load a page with begnign information, and then load the help text afterwards
2. I don't understand this comment. Surely this is a perfect example of when you want a component to work as well as possible, including UI research?
3. The mAjor point here is that the functionality of the escape key is ambiguous. It can do various things in various contexts, so you can't rely on people to use it for that, and visitors can't rely on it because it might just e.g. minimise a maximised window on MacOS, leaving the website on-screen.
jandrese 42 days ago [-]
It seems like the shift key is still problematic, especially if it is conflicting with stickykeys. Why not use for example the letter 'q'? You could set it up as a mnemonic that you need to quit quit quit as fast as possible.
But for the most part I agree that this is silly and unnecessary. Ctrl-W is a better solution and this would really only make sense if it also scrubbed the site from the browser's history at the same time. In fact this solution is worse because the abuser can just hit the "back" button when they see BBC Weather loaded.
airpoint 42 days ago [-]
> BBC Weather’s homepage is a content-rich page. Users have a reason to be looking at it and to be looking for an extended period of time.
Most of that rich content is obstructed by them bloody cookie warnings, on first visit.
That’s not a very convincing simulation of “I’ve been looking at this page for the last 5 mins!”
colanderman 42 days ago [-]
I often leave cookie popovers unclicked. Sometimes they take an annoying amount of work to decline cookies, and they can be used to cover video ads anyway.
cwillu 42 days ago [-]
Hmm, I don't get a cookie banner on my browser, even in an incognito window with uBlock turned off.
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
I get one here in the UK, in incognito. It's actually one of the nicest cookie banners you'll ever see—just 75px tall at the top of the page, and it doesn't float so it disappears when you scroll. I recommend at least trying to see it, to appreciate its superiority over all the other cookie banners.
robertlagrant 42 days ago [-]
I'd rather they just didn't track me.
JacketPotato 42 days ago [-]
They're also used for stuff like storing which locations you search for, a pretty important feature. They probably also use them for analytics though.
razakel 42 days ago [-]
They don't if you're in the UK.
robertlagrant 42 days ago [-]
I'm in the UK and I get the analytics cookies notice.
razakel 41 days ago [-]
Performance analytics isn't quite the same thing as "hoover up all your personal information" analytics.
BlueTemplar 40 days ago [-]
But does it even require a cookie banner ?
YoumuChan 42 days ago [-]
Shift key is widely used in Eastern Asian input methods to switch between English and Asian scripts. Pressing Shift while holding Alt is the way to cycle through different input methods on windows systems.
Using shift key is a decent idea for Latin script users, but is terrible for Asian script users.
robin_reala 42 days ago [-]
That’s a less likely setup for a GOV.UK user though.
I don't think gov.uk would admit that they want to exclude those users.
nottorp 42 days ago [-]
Which Latin script? :)
Everyone on the nearby continent has some accented characters and possibly both English and their national keyboard installed.
Incidentally, this is a major complaint with smartphone OS designers that only speak English and don't realize there are places where people mix languages daily. That predictive spell checker should be configurable to accept more than one language at a time...
tuetuopay 42 days ago [-]
And there's no need to be to speak some "obscure" language (from the point of view of the US-centric designers) to hit this issue. iOS got better at mixed french / english, but it still cannot prevent itself from correcting "the" (the english the) to "thé" (french for tea). Oh well.
hamdouni 42 days ago [-]
This makes me laugh
"As a result of advertising people being bastards, more and more of what the web platform can do is ..."
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
It was refreshingly candid - then I remembered we're reading a government blog where they can say that kind of thing with impunity.
switch007 42 days ago [-]
It's a personal blog btw. And there is absolutely no way a UK Gov blog would call Google bastards.
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
I didn't read it as a dig at Google specifically, but I accept your general point is totally correct.
hbrav 42 days ago [-]
The individual has impunity of the department has impunity?
Not sure if you know this, but it might be of interest: in the UK speech, within the House of Commons (maybe the Lords too? I'm unsure) is specifically protected from defamation actions. An MP could stand up and say "Mr Smith murders kittens in his spare time" and Mr Smith would have no ability to sue. However, this does not apply to MPs outside of parliament.
globular-toast 42 days ago [-]
What makes you think it's a government blog? Looks like a personal blog to me.
oneeyedpigeon 42 days ago [-]
Sorry, I'm not totally sure why I made that assumption. I thought I'd spotted a '.gov' domain, but clearly it's not. I guess some of the writing also implies it (e.g. "Last year [...], we launched the GOV.UK Design System’s Exit this Page component") but, of course, this could just be a contractor.
rsynnott 42 days ago [-]
I _think_ they're an employee of the gov.uk design service?
A while ago we did a site for a nonprofit focused on domestic violence.
We preloaded Kohl’s (a department store sort of retailer in America) and fiddled with the safety exit button to make sure Kohl’s came up really quickly. If we would have worked on the site longer, I would have a done a rotation of a couple of different stereotypical shopping websites. (Kohl’s was picked by the organisations’s executive director who, unfortunately, had plenty of first hand experience with domestic violence.)
kayson 42 days ago [-]
How are people expected to know about the Shift key functionality?
kypro 42 days ago [-]
That's what I wondered. Presumably services implementing it will add info about using the button before starting the journey, but I'm surprised there's no design system guidance about this. Without that information the button is far less useful.
kelnos 42 days ago [-]
Yeah, it seems a little obscure. Here's a test page with the functionality:
One cool thing is when you first hit the shift key once, the "Exit this page" button expands vertically, and shows three small circles, one now filled in. So it makes it obvious that hitting the shift key did something related to that button. So if you hit the shift key for any other reason, you'll see something happen.
But still, I agree it seems a little hard to discover.
petepete 42 days ago [-]
The guidance does cover this in some detail and suggests using an interruption page that explains the behaviour before the risky journey starts.
Out of curiosity I edited the page to put a textarea on it, so I could see what happens when you're typing a sentence and happen to use Shift 3 times: It breaks the button.
If the cursor is in the textarea, tapping Shift without any other keys will add 1 circle, but if that wasn't the 3rd one, any additional Shift will remove all the circles and they don't come back. You have to click outside the textarea and hit Shift 4 times to trigger it (the first one doesn't register any circles).
It seems like they tried to prevent accidental triggers (if you have 1 or 2 circles and hit anything except Shift they all disappear, and if you hold Shift while hitting another key you don't get any in the first place), but got something slightly wrong.
duxup 42 days ago [-]
I enjoyed reading their thought process. That was a good read.
But I agree the end result feels like an over thought process that comes up with something completely counter intuitive that someone would seem to need to trigger at a moments notice.
To some extent this seems to be one of those "well they did something" solutions that for a lot of work, provides near zero value.
eviks 42 days ago [-]
The explanation doesn't make sense without addressing the elephant in the room - why not teach users to use the universal "tab close" action via a common shortcut? That one is immediate unlike loading another page
inejge 42 days ago [-]
If yours is the only tab, "close tab" will usually close the whole window, potentially leaving you with an empty desktop. Being caught staring at nothing would be suspicious in the situations where "exit page" is supposed to be used. The weather page is comparatively innocuous. (Until the word gets around...)
eviks 42 days ago [-]
> staring at nothing would be suspicious in the situations where "exit page" is supposed to be used.
This is actually not true. Having a browser opened leads to the thought of "let's check the previous page/browser history" easier (since the browser is right there to remind you) than a situation of "oh, I've just logged in" or the activity of doing anything else leads to the thought of having to check a browser
_qua 42 days ago [-]
Anyone who is smart enough to use this weird triple shift key shortcut is intelligent enough to preload a different site in another tab and use the close tab shortcut. I would guess there is almost complete venn diagram overlap between people who can learn this weird shortcut and people who can deal with this threat in any other way using normal browser functions.
eviks 42 days ago [-]
First, you wouldn't be staring at nothing, you'd be reopening the browser / opening Solitaire or something
But also a better way would be to ask the user to open a second tab (or another app) so that it's not the only tab/app.
Still beats remembering a unique shortcut.
jdiff 42 days ago [-]
Time is of the essence when you're hitting an escape shortcut. That's why this component blanks the page immediately, then loads the decoy, there can be no delay even for the browser to tear down the page as it fetches the next. If you have enough time to just go and open Solitaire, you have no need for an escape button.
If you are with someone who cannot know what you are doing, who has appeared suddenly, you are quickly closing what you're doing and, yes, you will be looking at a blank page without some sort of escape mechanism like this. And if it's sudden and unexpected, you might not have been anticipating needing to pop open some decoys.
This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
eviks 42 days ago [-]
If time is of the essence, why are you wasting it requiring 3 key presses and a site load? It take longer to do that vs a single shortcut, and is more visible (pages don't load immediately)
> If you have enough time to just go and open Solitaire, you have no need for an escape button.
You don't have enough time to complete that, you do that not to appear just staring at a blank screen. Activity of opening Solitaire is enough in itself.
> who cannot know what you are doing,
which is easier achieved when the browser is closed vs. when a browser is opened, since in the latter case it's easier to think about checking "previous" browser history
> This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
Indeed, so much so that this overengineered-but-underthought solution has none of the supposed benefits under the conditions people come up with to defend it
jdiff 42 days ago [-]
At this point I have to assume that this is willful. You are continuing to ignore things that have been addressed by both myself in my last comment and the article. I invite you to read the article more deeply and look into the actual research backing these UI patterns if you are genuinely struggling to understand.
eviks 41 days ago [-]
Likewise I assume you have no arguments left, so "have to" resort to the meta "read more" and imaginary research
jdiff 41 days ago [-]
And I'd advise against thinking that you that you have thought of things within 5 minutes that, inexplicably, researched, data-backed experts have missed so easily. That's a mindset that does not lend itself to intellectual growth.
In almost all cases, it's not just so obvious that the experts in a field are so misguided. It's that there is complexity and depth that is not perceivable at a glance.
eviks 41 days ago [-]
The army of "researched, data-backed experts" behind you is imaginary. So instead of repeating the same appeal to an imaginary authority I'd advise you cite a single good UI research study where a slower site-specific shortcut is better that a more common faster one when "time is of the essence" (and whatever else you think is based on "expert research")
41 days ago [-]
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
Many people in abusive situations have very limited opportunity to use computers, and may well not have time to learn about things like "tab close" actions. This doesn't stop people who do know about those shortcuts from using them.
eviks 42 days ago [-]
So how do you imagine they'll learn about Shift-Shift-Shift???
JacketPotato 42 days ago [-]
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
Government sites that use this component will include a page that explains this feature and how to use it, they have considered this. This is generally used on flows/pages, where the site is walking you through a proccess or a guide.
In virtually all browsers, pressing Escape while a webpage is loading stops the loading process.
Whoa, never knew about this or noticed it
jonathanstrange 42 days ago [-]
It's how people read the New York times.
YPPH 42 days ago [-]
Shift is not ideal either. On Microsoft Windows, pressed thrice in quick succession will prompt to activate sticky keys, and divert focus from the web browser.
Aaron2222 42 days ago [-]
It's five times, not three.
ascorbic 42 days ago [-]
The post covers that
layer8 42 days ago [-]
> And Esc is the only keyboard key that doesn’t count as user interaction for the purposes of transient activation.
It’s pretty weird that pressing the Shift key is considered more of a user interaction than pressing Escape.
jstummbillig 42 days ago [-]
This is perfect. Whenever the idea pops up that design/code/system is done because of AI I am mostly confused.
Everything is so bad and requires so much though to even get to "decent"! Our current standards are so low, because we can not afford higher standards — but when paying attention to the world, anywhere, it does not even take effort to find an instance of a (systemic) design problem that could be fixed.
Granted, reconfiguring our system to pay for that is an outstanding issue, but I don't think that's because it requires much fantasy to find things that could be done and that would be appreciated by us and the people around us.
RockRobotRock 42 days ago [-]
This is a great idea! How come when I google "gov uk domestic violence" none of the govt pages have this button on them?
andrei-akopian 42 days ago [-]
My first search result was thehotline.org, and it does have a button that redirects to google.com. (But that's a US site)
> You can quickly leave this website by clicking the “X” in the top right or by pressing the Escape key twice.
And it does have some kind of Escape key functionality.
My only criticism of this approach is that it asks highly sensitive users to learn a critical keyboard shortcut that will not work anywhere else. What will happen if users attempt to triple press "shift" on any other surface that doesn't support this? Because that's highly likely.
Instead of introducing a new (hidden) shortcut, I would rely on clear visual cues and intuitive (meaning, already common) interactions. E.g. opening the form in a modal; clicking anywhere outside of this modal closes the modal and loads the weather page. The clickable background should be clearly identified as a special feature, e.g. tiled text "exit page" all over it.
tanbog45 42 days ago [-]
I make sites for non-profits regularly and have been asked to add exit/escape buttons a few times. There more time Ive spent thinking about the problem and researching solutions the more I think they are a bad idea.
1. Lots - if not most - traffic is from mobile these days. Most people already know the fastest way to exit a page on mobile - the home button/action. Adding anything else is just adding confusion.
2. Unless you are going to great lengths - ie pre loading a page and maybe dropping parts of the dom and dealing with evidence in the history - are you actually doing anything much to help the user exit your site? How motivated/skilled a person are you defending against?
3. If your exit button is just a glorified link or redirect what is the point? It will still be in the history and if they have slow internet they could end up just staring at your site while the redirect loads.
4. For some organisations having such buttons is more about "showing" they have it than how useful it actually is to the user.
5. I have tried to push for a page/link to basic internet safety information. Educating visitors would be much better than trying to engineer their personal security day.
6. I've struggled to find good academic/research work on such features. Seems like it would be a good area for a UX researcher but I've not found much actual work.
hengistbury 42 days ago [-]
I see these points as reasons why it might not be a good idea, but they don't explain why it is a bad idea.
Other methods for leaving the site still work. Even if the button isn't the best way to leave the site, if it helps in more cases than it hurts then it's a net benefit.
These buttons are essentially panic buttons, and when a person is panicking the big red exit button might end up being the only exit they can find.
tanbog45 41 days ago [-]
This is way outside my area of knowledge, but when under stress do humans actually use things like panic buttons? Or do they fall back on week known patterns of behaviour?
My gut tells me that the big red button might not even get noticed.
hengistbury 40 days ago [-]
I can't claim any expertise here either...
But I can imagine that people accessing information about domestic abuse might not necessarily have regular access to internet connected devices, they might not know the best ways to act under stress.
Maybe they won't notice the big red button, but maybe there is some chance that they will notice it, and therefore some chance it will be beneficial to them in that moment.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
Pressing the home button on mobile in this scenario leaves the app open in the background with the page still opened. Worse yet, both Android and iOS show thumbnails of apps in the switcher, and it's an MRU so the last used app will be the first one you see if you bring up the switcher. And bringing up the app switcher is very likely to be the first action the attacker would do to see what the victim was doing just now.
thih9 42 days ago [-]
While a weather page sounds good, perhaps something that loads fast would be also a good pick? Then again, the html code shows the button itself as an anchor tag, so it seems easy to customize the target url.
matteason 42 days ago [-]
The component has some JavaScript which blanks out the page immediately after the button being pressed, so if it takes a while for the browser to load the weather page it shouldn't matter as much
"Content warning: This blog post references domestic abuse and violence but doesn’t go into specific detail.
I’m not an expert in that topic at all, so I may not use the preferred terminology in all instances. Sorry."
What the hell is this?
frereubu 42 days ago [-]
I guess this is probably a rhetorical question. But if you've been a victim of domestic abuse you may not want to read about it when you think you're just reading about a gov.uk web component, particularly if the abuse was recent and you're still traumatised by it. The author is just trying to be sensitive to that.
The language apology-in-advance does feel a bit like overkill though. I'd suggest a generous interpretation is that, given how things often work these days, they don't want people to get caught up in discussions about terminology and just want to focus on the tech.
rsynnott 42 days ago [-]
Ever watched TV? "The following programme contains depictions of [whatever]"
Some people, particularly people who've suffered domestic abuse, may not wish to be blindsided by a discussion of it when they think they're reading a technical blog.
BostonFern 42 days ago [-]
Read the blog's "about" page.
thaumasiotes 42 days ago [-]
For reference:
> I'm an agender (I use it/its pronouns), asexual, alterhuman robot. I'm also a shapeshifting critter on the internet.
This person has absorbed the idea that it's a sin to use natural language to talk about normal phenomena, and the idea that it isn't possible to know what kind of language wouldn't be sinful, but not the idea that maybe that isn't a desirable state of affairs.
DrBazza 42 days ago [-]
Ideally Jira would have something similar so that when you create a new issue and accidentally click somewhere or press escape, it doesn't delete the ticket you've just spent 5 minutes creating.
wdb 40 days ago [-]
> The JAWS screen reader in Chromium would register the first Shift keypress twice,
Sounds like they are relying that a screen reader user is using a specific version of JAWS? Do they really expect people to upgrade JAWS to the latest version when it costs $1200? I understand it's important software for the audience still a lot of money.
tetris11 42 days ago [-]
They're pretty forthcoming for what I assume to be an government agency.
I wonder why the gov.uk team are getting so much publicity(?) In the last few years.
As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
Irrational fear, I know, but I cant shake off the startup-vibes I'm getting when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
ascorbic 42 days ago [-]
This is all thanks to the GDS, which was formed in 2011 specifically to bring that kind of startup vibe to government. It's even based in Shoreditch, with the startups. A lot of alumni from GDS have gone on to consult with other governments, many of which have launched similar departments. The US equivalent is 18F, which involved collaboration with GDS.
> As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
gov.uk got started, in part, because the 2009 financial meltdown left a lot of good startup designers and engineers with not enough to do (and made civil service jobs more attractive for a bit!)
scott_w 42 days ago [-]
They’ve done this since the head of the Cabinet Office around 2010 set up a team to improve digital government services. There’s a lot of information published as to their methodologies and their teams present technical topics at conferences.
It’s likely part of their efforts to be more transparent, work with other governments and better support departments without having to be in 50 places at once. It’ll also help with recruitment.
fallingsquirrel 42 days ago [-]
fwiw this isn't an official gov.uk blog post. I mistook it for one at first too... I only double checked once I stumbled over the "advertising people being bastards" line.
nyanpasu64 42 days ago [-]
I got to the furry art at the bottom of the page before realizing this was a frontend developer's blog and not the government agency itself.
hollerith 42 days ago [-]
Ah, so you detected differences from the official British governmental furry art. Smart
tsimionescu 42 days ago [-]
> when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
Doesn't it make a lot of sense to be open about how a public service is built and delivered, maybe much more so than any for-pay service in fact?
caseyy 42 days ago [-]
Compared to many other countries, UK has a computer science culture that's very open about how technology is used in every day lives, and it invites public participation in new tech. This shows a lot in the government as well as its services like BBC and NHS, and the academia.
It's a very broad topic to cover so I'll be terse with evidence/examples only. UK government provides a lot of open data and APIs for the country [0], [1]. They are free and pretty much not throttled. They have a license [2] for a lot of this data which is formal but nearly as free as John Carmack's legendary hacker-friendly "have fun" license [3]. There is also a lot of historical Ordnance Survey data and historical legislation data from the National Archives. And of course, you can see the openness in how they have built gov.uk, as blog articles appear on HN about it quite often.
There is also a lot of government infrastructure provided to local governments, such as gov.uk Notify [4] or a freely available NHS website CMS (which is why many NHS websites work the same). There is a guide [5] mostly intended for government services but free for others to use on building accessible, secure and quite good-looking websites.
Most other governments I lived under are either technically behind UK or they have very advanced tech capabilities in certain branches of the government only (such as the armed forces) but keep it out of the public eye. Ultimately, I think it is the culture of welcoming everyone's participation in technology that makes UK gov so forthcoming and open with their tech and data. Doing this is seen as kind and civilised, which is how governments want to be seen. Of course, there are still areas of improvement in how UK gov provides data, as there always are in everything.
Finally, I should mention you can find many BBC technology outreach programmes from the early days of home computing. They are all over YouTube if you search for "BCC home computing". There was and continues to be a lot of techno-optimism in the country. It is one of the admittedly not many things that persist from the pre-austerity times.
> This shows a lot in the government as well as its services like BBC and NHS, and the academia
Salaries play a significant role.
Unlike a lot of other countries, private sector salaries for SWEs suck in much of the UK, and gov.uk (in reality part of the Civil Service), GCHQ+MoD, and BBC can pay fairly competitively and give a fairly decent pension compared to private sector gigs.
That said, I'd disagree with NHS IT - it's almost entirely outsourced to regional MSPs who suck (and I say this as a former vendor who's helped sell products those guys use in NHS environments)
ascorbic 42 days ago [-]
This isn't really an example of UK culture. 15 years ago, UK gov sites were as bad as everywhere else. Some of the small number of good things that I can credit the Cameron government were a few of these changes, including the establishment of the Government Digital Service and changing "IT" education from learning how to use Word, to actually teaching all kids coding, starting in primary school.
caseyy 42 days ago [-]
It is culture. The government doesn’t just provide these APIs, people use them. End even if you compare Harvard’s CS50 vs CS courses in the UK, you will see that it’s a lot more oriented around computing in every day life. The BBC home computing shows and their success itself is a bit of a unique phenomenon in the UK. Many other countries had these shows but they never went mainstream, most only attracted viewership of enthusiasts. There is a strong cultural element.
rsynnott 42 days ago [-]
> As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model
I mean, unless the next PM is Zombie Thatcher, this seems like an excessive level of privatisation.
mooktakim 42 days ago [-]
How would anyone know that you can use the shift key? Closing the tab/page is just more natural as its something you do all the time.
jdiff 42 days ago [-]
It's advised in the implementation documentation to add a page explaining it. Shift is also used naturally when inputting information, with the visual feedback inside the button giving an opportunity for discoverability.
ata_aman 42 days ago [-]
Would be pretty cool if it also changed the page navigation history to obscure where the user was before visiting bbc weather. If users taking the triple click action are presumed to be in distress, you'd want to remove the ability of the other party to simply click "back" and see where they were.
I found a live example here, on the page where you can check if you are eligible for legal aid: https://www.gov.uk/check-legal-aid then click "Start now" then "Domestic abuse"
42 days ago [-]
imdsm 42 days ago [-]
I had a situation where I needed to speak to Police some time ago. An sms about the weather was sent, which allowed me to speak to someone, and then after the call, it took me to bbc weather. It was brilliant and I really commend it.
adamrezich 42 days ago [-]
> In virtually all browsers, pressing Escape while a webpage is loading stops the loading process.
Wow, you learn something new every day!
Kinda weird that we got “Backspace to go back” out of web browsers some time ago yet this still exists, though.
int_19h 42 days ago [-]
Backspace was overloaded whenever text input fields on the page were involved, so accidentally pressing that to mean something else entirely and losing data as the result was too common to not address. Escape OTOH was never used for anything else in browsers, as far as I remember.
Thanks. Interesting to note the "interruption page" and "safety content page" parts, which I think deals with quite a few queries in the comments about how people will know what to do.
Also just a note that the first two GOV.UK links under "Research on this pattern" don't include live examples any more.
mooktakim 42 days ago [-]
It reminds me of the old lastminute.com (I think) button that would turn the whole front page into an Excel spreadsheet so when the manager walks by, they only see spreadsheets on your screen lol
globalise83 42 days ago [-]
Now that is a real use case!
gjsman-1000 42 days ago [-]
I don’t understand why this is an either/or. It could be Shift x3 or Esc x1. Tell the user to Shift x3 times, but if they forget or use habit, Esc will still be an option.
TonyTrapp 42 days ago [-]
Someone might be panicking and press ESC twice "just to be sure". Your average user won't know that the second press will cancel the redirection process, inducing further stress and potentially completely closing the opportunity to move away from the page before the abuser sees it.
tgv 42 days ago [-]
If you tell people they can use escape, they might press it too soon or repeatedly, preventing the very action they require. Nobody intuitively uses Esc to go to another page, so it's something you really need to be instructed to do. It makes sense to me.
42 days ago [-]
VoidWhisperer 42 days ago [-]
This site is flagged by malwarebytes as being compromised for some reason - I'm assuming this is a false positive given that no one else has been having issues
kqr 42 days ago [-]
Hypothetically, wouldn't an abuser start to find it suspicious when a blank page loads BBC Weather as they enter the room?
construct0 42 days ago [-]
Tried example. No redirect occurred after 3 SHIFT presses, had to use both ESC and SHIFT to trigger it somehow. The irony.
mcculley 42 days ago [-]
Being unable to use the escape key is another reason why web apps will never be as consistent as desktop apps.
mrinterweb 42 days ago [-]
On a UK keyboard, you use the Brexit key
ReverseCold 42 days ago [-]
Wait why not have both esc x3 and shift x3 work? Any of these are "weird" keypresses right?
Moogs 42 days ago [-]
The concern with Esc is that if you hit more than 3 times the user will be stuck on the page. The first 3 presses would trigger the redirect, the 4th press would be intercepted by the browser and stop the page load.
amiantos 42 days ago [-]
It's fun to read so many people who can't see past their own nose, who declare the scenario contrived and the solution over-engineered, despite having no frame of reference for the need of this button and thus having no ability to properly dogfood the feature, speaking so confidently from their ignorance. Great HN thread.
42 days ago [-]
djtango 42 days ago [-]
Should have thought like a vimmer and used caps lock instead
ykonstant 42 days ago [-]
You can exit the UK Government, but you can never escape.
appendix-rock 42 days ago [-]
> It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.
An upsetting but nonetheless incredibly interesting abnormal UX problem to solve. I appreciate seeing this much thought being put into things like this.
kranke155 42 days ago [-]
Gov Uk UX team I believe is doing some of the finest work in the world.
Pressing shift three times is clever… but way too clever. Even if you stick a giant popup saying "hit shift three times to quickly exit" I'm not sure anyone in a panic will remember—loads of people don't even know which key is shift, especially when there's three buttons on a keyboard that look the same and only two are the same. I've come across people who always use shift-lock and did't realise you could use shift for anything. I'd be interested to know what UX tests they actually did, and who with.
If I was going down the press a key three times, I would have gone with pressing any key three times apart from the number keys (plus an info box when you enter the page—"hit any key 3 times to quickly exit to the weather"). Most people, I'm sure, would mash the spacebar in a panic but if they missed then it would still work.
What I would have preferred to test would be 'mashing'/chording — pressing more than one non-modifier key at the same time, so a user could just smash a load of keys at the same time in a panic.
Going to the Weather page is a great idea, though.
First of all. Not using escape key to escape is the standard for almost all applications since the 90s. Do you use escape to close the browser? A tab? your email client? No. All software converged on the idea that a close button was not a good idea, we are left with the actual button as a vestige.
Second of all, this software is designed for people in high stress situations where one of their main goals is to avoid detection, they will not only memorize the escape sequence, but they will likely have their finger on the shift key at all times.
I think as devs we often think of our site or application as the center of the user's universe, but I don't think users memorize the minutia of our applications like we think / would hope.
Also, I actually worked with folks in abusive relationships at one time, their actions are not as predictable as you might hope.
I'm guessing gov.uk is hoping that this will become some kind of standard, at least for British resources.
I thought this was a tool that users specifically install in order to browse any content.
But instead it seems this is simply a feature so that users that browse gov.uk websites specifically can exit.
Jakob's law is a thing but I actually think in the case of GDS they are in the fairly rare position of perhaps being able to justify the hubris you speak of slightly.
Not only are they directly or indirectly responsible for the UI of a frankly staggering number of online services, they are also one of the most influential bodies - perhaps in the world - when it comes to this sort of thing.
For the user I think that still means asking them to memorize something odd for a very limited use case that you won't think of visiting any other government site.
Not to close a tab or entire application, no, but to unfocus a field, close a modal window or ad pop-up, back in something like a Typeform, etc.
Really? I always hit "escape" when I get a popover on a website, and it often works.
Many TUI interfaces use it for "go back" or "exit" e.g. BIOS settings.
FTFA: `It’s intended to be a safety tool. A way for people in unstable, potentially violent, domestic situations to quickly leave the page.`
This is the craziest part of this entire article to me. The UK Government needed to invent a whole design system that included an "ejection seat" button in case you're caught looking at UK Government websites?
Or does this button exist because one website in particular needed this feature?
Over design much?
> When to use this component > > Use the component on pages with sensitive information that could: > - put someone at risk of abuse or retaliation > - reveal someone’s plans to avoid or escape from harm > > For example, when a potential victim is using a service to help them leave a domestic abuser.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
IMO this seems quite well designed.
All your other suggestions fail for this reason too - you need a high level of confidence the person really intended to escape. I for example would mash the space bar three times to scroll down.
It should be normalized as a percentage of page views at the very least.
They’re basically saying “hey we added a big red button and people press it sometimes”. The button could say “fire lasers at my cat” and some amount of people would press it (whether intentional or not).
But it is one of those features that I turn off the second it annoys me 1 too many times.
They keyboard shortcut is just gravy.
Maybe you could normalize it by listening for triple-shift presses on all pages on the site (not just sensitive ones) and calling that a baseline of accidental events.
But, how do we know that events in the baseline are truly accidental? What if users learned the behavior and tried using it on pages where it’s not implemented?
There’s just no good way to get analytics on this feature without interviewing users somehow.
Many large sites (eg The Warehouse [2]) participate by putting an icon at the bottom of their website. When clicked, a modal pops up with domestic abuse resources.
There’s a prominent exit button that closes the modal faster than a page navigation or finding the close tab button. Closing the popup returns you to a major website rather than a new tab page. And most importantly, your history contains no evidence you viewed the information.
[1] https://shielded.co.nz
[2] https://www.thewarehouse.co.nz
However I am extremely disappointed to see that the questions section of that starts out gender neutral and then basically does the usual "if you're a woman being abused by a man..."
There is still no support for male victims of domestic violence, whether the abuser is male or female. :/ it's not hard to cater to all cases, no wonder men don't bother - particularly when it's reported that male victims who resort to calling the police are most often the one handcuffed/detained when they arrive.
In before someone comments something that we've all heard before - it's not a competition, both women & men can be helped by the same system, regardless of supposed statistical likeliness, etc.
He talks about how child support staff (like reception for example) are, are not favouring of him. They see DV in his profile and assume he's the perpetrator instantly. He had to explain himself constantly, no doubt reliving trauma when he does.
He has been struggling with the courts to gain sole custody of his child.
And to top it all off all the posters around these places are, like you say, about women reaching out against their abusive male partners. Which IS an issue and IS statistically more likely. But you make a very good point about these systems being able to help both.
Be careful about your phrasing there. I hope the implied subject on both sides of the "and" is different. Women being victims is an issue, and women reaching out is significantly more likely.
Women reaching out is (obviously) not an issue, but is statistically more likely. Alternately, women being victims is an issue, but the statistical likelihood of women being victims is unknown, and we have good reason to believe there is significant reporting bias.
There was a study in UK that if a man calls the police for domestic violence, there’s 56% chances the police only interviews the woman, and 23% chances he’s threatened of arrest (with, I think, 3% or 10% he’s actually led to the police station, I don’t remember the specifics, but still higher than not calling the police).
In France, a sad sentence of the government hotline “Female violence info” mentions that 10% calls are from men. For a hotline with “female” on it. The report continues that, since it’s only 10%, it’s still generally violence against women.
So yeah. Let’s be honest. Men better not end up in need of help.
> men can be helped by the same system
That is just a misinformation! Calling police if abuser is a female, and you are a male, is a VERY bad idea.
Without police you only get some bruises. With police you get escorted in handcuffs in front entire neighbourhood, get fired from job, pay very expensive lawyers, get criminal record and possible prison time!
There is no way to fix that, just leave and drop all contact!
Otherwise, it's fine.
I spent about 30 seconds figuring out how to close it. The icon in the top-right? No, that goes to the start page. Perhaps the icon in the top-left? No, that goes to the main menu. Clicking outside the modal, like most other websites? Nope, doesn't work.
Turns out the close button is the half-circle at the bottom of the modal, which is exactly the same color as the rest of the modal. It's pretty obvious once you see it, but it took me way too long to find. They should've either placed it in the top-right like literally every other close button ever, or made it bright red so it's impossible to miss.
I'm not trying to be dismissive, but I genuinely can't imagine this helping anyone. I am completely open to being wrong though.
I do think there is real value in being able to report domestic abuse without leaving an obvious paper trail. Call logs can be accessed by the account owner, I imagine a lot of people don’t know how to clear their history or aren’t confident enough they can do it correctly, etc.
It’s some small amount of peace of mind for victims who file reports, and with a cost of “adding a fake social link and a devs salary for a month” I’m pretty okay with it even if it literally only helps a single person. Bandwidth well spent.
There is also the matter of history; if I load the demo page, click that button, and press "back" then I'm on the demo page again.
And of course it'll be in the browser history.
I have to question how practically useful this is. Ctrl+W or middle click on tab isn't that far off. Or open private window and close that, which is a smart thing to do anyway.
Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place.
Overall this seems like a IE5-era solution that's pretty outdated and useless today. Perhaps even worse than useless because the implementation is so-so and protection it offers low.
Overall, I'd say telling people to use private windows and teaching then Ctrl+W is probably better.
I'm just glad you're not in charge of this kind of services because although that might seem like an obvious thing to you, the reality is that the people needing that information the most are the ones who are the least likely to have easy access to a personal device with Internet access.
In particular, children and women in dysfunctional, abusive relationships are not very often provided with a smartphone and a data plan by their abusers.
I agree that the shift shortcut is unlikely to be of much use, but it's just one available method in addition to the rest.
My ex wife did not want me to get a smartphone and, in retrospect, it was because it let me keep in closer touch with family abroad (which is the main reason I have one at all). She also got very upset when I changed the password on my desktop some years previously.
Why are you attacking the user instead of just focusing on the argument?
Sometimes I intend to do it, but it’s honestly usually just force of habit.
I don't know how the relevant user is informed about the option/feature, but assuming they're aware it is a positive feature both in terms of thoughtfulness and execution.
Be interested to see the stats on how often it gets called
And "we need to do something for this" doesn't mean that this particular feature/button is a good idea.
Like I said, telling people to use private windows and teaching them Ctrl+W seems like a better solution to solve the same problem to me. You can have a widget with some basic tips, and you can even show the correct instructions based on the browser the person is using.
Then I saw your comment and realized I was entirely wrong about how I was thinking about this. I get it now.
This sounds like something which you have no evidence at all for claiming.
Of course, the abuser was cheating the whole time.
So it does happen, contrary to what you claim.
I'm not sure why you would be the quickly dismissive of something that would seem obvious to many.
> Never mind that computers and internet access is ubiquitous enough these days that "using the family computer" for this sort of thing isn't really needed in the first place. In a normal situation, this is true, but this is UI design for people in extraordinary situations. Their abuser may have taken their cellphone or other devices and may not have a choice in what computer they use or when they have access to it.
Nothing about this prevents private windows or Ctrl+W (assuming they have another window open so it doesn't look suspicious that they're staring at a blank desktop), it just gives victims a quick action they can take to prevent immediate retaliation.
Triple Shift that you can only on a single website is worse since you're even less likely to be able to use it in distress
Besides, as a site you can try to add typo-similar combinations for your "hide" action (like alt+w or win+w) instead of creating a totally different one
Users probably don't want to attract attention by using a private window (which they may or may not think about using), and most browsers I've seen have a distinct appearance when in private mode.
Ctrl+W in normal mode has the issue of leaving a trail: Ctrl-Shift-T or similar will bring it back.
That also exists with this button: just press "back". Even easier.
Yes, you should do that as well as understand that, for things like this, where you're providing information for vulnerable people across an entire population, your people are going to span a huge range of technical literacy and you will not be able to reach all of them in time. Give them the big red escape button with the special "dial 999" style memorable key combo as well as teach them everything else. But triage and do the "this solution works for the broadest number of people the quickest" thing first - the big red button.
I've been using both for years, never had this issue ??
This goes for everything. Place where you live. The food that is on offer. Work opportunities, and with that the ability to plan life. Even living large enough to have a private space, like offering your kids an undisturbed place to study or - like in the post - somewhere you can safely report abuse.
I have seen it more than once: if someone from a poor family grows up and does really well in school and in college and breaks with the life they had before that is usually not enough. Because when there is time to write a CV the kids from the middle class all had parents that made them do other things. Charity work. Play the trumpet with a youth orchestra that somehow got to play in Carnegie hall. Chemistry camp. Dancing with a youth ballet company at the met. The system is rigged from the start. True meritocracy was never a thing.
A feature like this takes a developer a short time to implement, and if it saves someones life or stops abuse it is worth it.
Merits are measurements, and society adapts to make those measurements a target.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
For the inequality of outcome to be fair and just, there has to be at least some kind equality of opportunity in a meritocratic society.
I wouldn't be surprised if this will happen for anyone trying the triple-shift on a vanilla Windows install who doesn't actually use Sticky Keys, nor explicitly turn it off (ie a majority of visitors).
This risk is much worse than whatever layout differences and interactions with VoiceOver they observed for Control.
Edit - thanks to @jdietrich below there are some stats on this link, which shows a correlation between events you'd expect to increase the rush of domestic abuse, such as the Covid lockdowns: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/... I do wonder how they got those stats though.
Edit 2 - I'm so glad this got posted! I've been wondering about this for ages and it's really nice to get some evidence for its use. Reading through the comments has also solidified my thinking around "why don't people just close the browser window" - many people who use honour-based abuse services are very computer illiterate, don't have time to learn about incognito windows / (Ctrl | Command) + W, and can only snatch computer time here and there. Abusers can look back at the browser history, but if the choice is between being discovered on an honour-based abuse website or the chance that the abuser won't look at the history, the second is clearly superior.
Edit 3 - I really wonder about the three-press shift keyboard shortcut. Real lack of discoverability, and my worry would be that the lack of consistency across sites would lead to situations where people are on non-gov.uk websites and think that keyboard shortcut would work there too. Although I suppose the fact that the first shift press activates the button in some way does tie it to the presence of the button on screen.
Edit 4 - It doesn't seem to be in use on any relevant gov.uk pages. The pilot on the "check for legal aid" pages seems to have ended and it's not on the pages about domestic abuse.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...
It does remind me of "boss keys" that old DOS games used to have.
> An honor killing (American English), honour killing (Commonwealth English), or shame killing is a traditional form of murder in which a person is killed by or at the behest of members of their family or their partner, due to culturally sanctioned beliefs that such homicides are necessary as retribution for the perceived dishonoring of the family by the victim.
> Methods of murdering include stoning, stabbing, beating, burning, beheading, hanging, throat slashing, lethal acid attacks, shooting, and strangulation. Sometimes, communities perform murders in public to warn others in the community of the possible consequences of engaging in what is seen as illicit behavior
> Often, minor girls and boys are selected by the family to act as the murderers, so that the murderer may benefit from the most favorable legal outcome. Boys and sometimes women in the family are often asked to closely control and monitor the behavior of their siblings or other members of the family, to ensure that they do not do anything to tarnish the 'honor' and 'reputation' of the family
> Sharif Kanaana, professor of anthropology at Birzeit University, says that honor killing is: "A complicated issue that cuts deep into the history of Islamic society. .. What the men of the family, clan, or tribe seek control of in a patrilineal society is reproductive power. Women for the tribe were considered a factory for making men. Honor killing is not a means to control sexual power or behavior. What's behind it is the issue of fertility or reproductive power."
> Nighat Taufeeq of the women's resource center Shirkatgah in Lahore, Pakistan says: "It is an unholy alliance that works against women: the killers take pride in what they have done, the tribal leaders condone the act and protect the killers and the police connive the cover-up." The lawyer and human rights activist Hina Jilani says, "The right to life of women in Pakistan is conditional on their obeying social norms and traditions."
> Fareena Alam, editor of a Muslim magazine, writes that honor killings which arise in Western cultures such as Britain are a tactic for immigrant families to cope with the alienating consequences of urbanization. Alam argues that immigrants remain close to the home culture and their relatives because it provides a safety net. She writes that 'In villages "back home", a man's sphere of control was broader, with a large support system. In our cities full of strangers, there is virtually no control over who one's family members sit, talk or work with.'
Hopefully that expands on it. A rotten culture of "family values" that sees women as nothing more than baby factories and keeps them under control at all times, through intimidation, persecution, monitoring, and straight up state-sanctioned killing and blaming of the victim if they try to assert themselves.
What do they use frequently enough that they would learn about this exit functionality rather than just clicking a bookmark bar, closing the tab, or just switching the tab?
This seems like such a contrived scenario with a solution that only works for gov uk sites. Why not teach users how to switch or close tabs with keyboard shortcuts?
I assume there's a .gov.uk page somewhere that lists resources for people who are in abusive relationships. I imagine if an abusive partner walked in to find you reading that, that might set them off.
An accidental ctrl-Q is much worse, because closed incognito windows can't be recovered.
Firefox gave me plenty of scars over the years. CTRL-Q and CTRL-W are just two; another's the fear of the browser randomly going "updates have been installed, you're not allowed to do anything until you restart; shame about that unsaved work you had on the page we just blanked" shit that used to fly on Ubuntu.
(Maybe still does? I browse from Windows nowadays.)
How likely are you to know keyboard shortcuts?
As a UX designer, would you not want to make a big safe UX button that you need no prior training or experience of, that you can trust to help you get out of a difficult situation.
Footsteps. Oh shit. They’re coming back. Is it Ctrl-W? Or Ctrl-V? Oh fuck, he’s nearly in the room. Quick, where’s the tiny little cross to close the window… oh, wait, click that exit page button, or just quickly hit shift a bunch of times. “Oh yes, I was just looking at the weather for tomorrow. I was thinking about whether to put some washing out on the line…”
> just quickly hit shift a bunch of times
How would you even know about this shortcut you never use anywhere, let alone remember it in a time of stress?
In principle, information about this could be propagated, if it's reliably available on UK govt sites at this point (I'm not sure if it is).
This is a much more realistic user story than 99% you will ever read.
https://support.apple.com/guide/personal-safety/how-safety-c...
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/...
+1. "Close tab" is more robust, well-supported and well-known.
It seems more likely a user will load an inoccuous page as a decoy, than learn triple-shift is a quick exit.
Still, interesting read, to hear the reasoning. Would like to see empirical evidence/user testing.
vs
<partner walks in> <nothing really special about a tab loading the weather> <you still live in fear but you're not getting physically abused>
My critiques were on the sad cases:
* Presses <Ctrl><Ctrl><Ctrl>. Wait why isnt this working? Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on another sensitive site that doesn't implement this. Too late.
* Presses <Shift><Shift><Shift> on a poorly supported browser, or after the functionality is removed, or after it conflicts with OS-level (it might not today, but who knows about future OS updates)
Either the abuser walked in while the person was still on the page with the big red button or not. It is not faster to press the big red button or shift 3 times than it is to close a tab.
Indeed.
Surely Ctrl+W (with a 2nd decoy tab already there and at BBC Weather) is 10x faster than finding and clicking a button on the page you're reading?
EDIT: another issue with the Exit This Page as implemented on eg https://www.camden.gov.uk/planning-to-leave-an-abuser - if you open it in a private browsing session, and click it, it sends you to Google, but of course there the first thing you get is the massive cookies pop-up. So wouldn't that be a bit of a red flag to whoever just walked in? :/
They see a page changing
Black eye
Their comment looks similar to any other comment on technical/UX matters, including yours and mine.
No, it’s telling people how they should behave, as you can see. It makes no attempt to step into the shoes of the user.
Agreed. I suspect the number of people assisted by this button is vanishingly small, and outweighed by the number of people who don't get the information they're looking for because they accidentally click the button and can't find their way back.
Or the number of people harmed because the "exit this page" UI is on some pages only (for example, it isn't here on HN), and that is even more confusing for users who aren't tech savvy enough to realise its part of the site not the browser and who could come to rely on it.
Overall, I think this button is poor UX and shouldn't be used, even on pages with sensitive content that it is intended for.
This is particularly the case for an honour-based abuse service (forced marriage, honour killings etc) that we work with for example.
The police, the divorce services, health services pages about contraception, abortion, sexual assault, LGBT youth services, etc etc etc. Think people who are already being abused, mostly.
Having said that, regardless of the key the guidelines on using this pattern say that you should explicitly inform the user of the feature before they first encounter it.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
2. It seems a bit weird to be concerned about UI patterns if you earnestly want this component to do its job.
3. If it's that important, the Escape key event can be added after DOMContentLoaded. Warn content authors to not overuse the component, and it would be fine. You can still have the triple-Shift key event for those cases that they specifically call out.
- they don’t have a smartphone, or it’s been taken off them
- they’re forced to use a desktop because their abuser doesn’t want them to do things in private easily
- plausibly mobile has something different entirely, given that this appears to be desktop focused.
- They mention escape is intercepted by most browsers to stop loading, if someone is interrupted midway and panics and starts hitting escape, they could plausibly end up _stuck_ on the page they were trying to hide from their abuser.
2. I don't understand this comment. Surely this is a perfect example of when you want a component to work as well as possible, including UI research?
3. The mAjor point here is that the functionality of the escape key is ambiguous. It can do various things in various contexts, so you can't rely on people to use it for that, and visitors can't rely on it because it might just e.g. minimise a maximised window on MacOS, leaving the website on-screen.
But for the most part I agree that this is silly and unnecessary. Ctrl-W is a better solution and this would really only make sense if it also scrubbed the site from the browser's history at the same time. In fact this solution is worse because the abuser can just hit the "back" button when they see BBC Weather loaded.
Most of that rich content is obstructed by them bloody cookie warnings, on first visit. That’s not a very convincing simulation of “I’ve been looking at this page for the last 5 mins!”
I don't think gov.uk would admit that they want to exclude those users.
Everyone on the nearby continent has some accented characters and possibly both English and their national keyboard installed.
Incidentally, this is a major complaint with smartphone OS designers that only speak English and don't realize there are places where people mix languages daily. That predictive spell checker should be configurable to accept more than one language at a time...
"As a result of advertising people being bastards, more and more of what the web platform can do is ..."
Not sure if you know this, but it might be of interest: in the UK speech, within the House of Commons (maybe the Lords too? I'm unsure) is specifically protected from defamation actions. An MP could stand up and say "Mr Smith murders kittens in his spare time" and Mr Smith would have no ability to sue. However, this does not apply to MPs outside of parliament.
We preloaded Kohl’s (a department store sort of retailer in America) and fiddled with the safety exit button to make sure Kohl’s came up really quickly. If we would have worked on the site longer, I would have a done a rotation of a couple of different stereotypical shopping websites. (Kohl’s was picked by the organisations’s executive director who, unfortunately, had plenty of first hand experience with domestic violence.)
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
One cool thing is when you first hit the shift key once, the "Exit this page" button expands vertically, and shows three small circles, one now filled in. So it makes it obvious that hitting the shift key did something related to that button. So if you hit the shift key for any other reason, you'll see something happen.
But still, I agree it seems a little hard to discover.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
If the cursor is in the textarea, tapping Shift without any other keys will add 1 circle, but if that wasn't the 3rd one, any additional Shift will remove all the circles and they don't come back. You have to click outside the textarea and hit Shift 4 times to trigger it (the first one doesn't register any circles).
It seems like they tried to prevent accidental triggers (if you have 1 or 2 circles and hit anything except Shift they all disappear, and if you hold Shift while hitting another key you don't get any in the first place), but got something slightly wrong.
But I agree the end result feels like an over thought process that comes up with something completely counter intuitive that someone would seem to need to trigger at a moments notice.
To some extent this seems to be one of those "well they did something" solutions that for a lot of work, provides near zero value.
This is actually not true. Having a browser opened leads to the thought of "let's check the previous page/browser history" easier (since the browser is right there to remind you) than a situation of "oh, I've just logged in" or the activity of doing anything else leads to the thought of having to check a browser
But also a better way would be to ask the user to open a second tab (or another app) so that it's not the only tab/app.
Still beats remembering a unique shortcut.
If you are with someone who cannot know what you are doing, who has appeared suddenly, you are quickly closing what you're doing and, yes, you will be looking at a blank page without some sort of escape mechanism like this. And if it's sudden and unexpected, you might not have been anticipating needing to pop open some decoys.
This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
> If you have enough time to just go and open Solitaire, you have no need for an escape button.
You don't have enough time to complete that, you do that not to appear just staring at a blank screen. Activity of opening Solitaire is enough in itself.
> who cannot know what you are doing,
which is easier achieved when the browser is closed vs. when a browser is opened, since in the latter case it's easier to think about checking "previous" browser history
> This seems like a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
Indeed, so much so that this overengineered-but-underthought solution has none of the supposed benefits under the conditions people come up with to defend it
In almost all cases, it's not just so obvious that the experts in a field are so misguided. It's that there is complexity and depth that is not perceivable at a glance.
It’s pretty weird that pressing the Shift key is considered more of a user interaction than pressing Escape.
Everything is so bad and requires so much though to even get to "decent"! Our current standards are so low, because we can not afford higher standards — but when paying attention to the world, anywhere, it does not even take effort to find an instance of a (systemic) design problem that could be fixed.
Granted, reconfiguring our system to pay for that is an outstanding issue, but I don't think that's because it requires much fantasy to find things that could be done and that would be appreciated by us and the people around us.
> You can quickly leave this website by clicking the “X” in the top right or by pressing the Escape key twice.
And it does have some kind of Escape key functionality.
The gov.uk page has some listed hotlines by nation (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help#g...), but none of them are actually using that exact red button:
- https://www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk/ uses green bookmark in bottom right and redirects to google.co.uk
- https://dsahelpline.org/ has a green area at the bottom right
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
Instead of introducing a new (hidden) shortcut, I would rely on clear visual cues and intuitive (meaning, already common) interactions. E.g. opening the form in a modal; clicking anywhere outside of this modal closes the modal and loads the weather page. The clickable background should be clearly identified as a special feature, e.g. tiled text "exit page" all over it.
1. Lots - if not most - traffic is from mobile these days. Most people already know the fastest way to exit a page on mobile - the home button/action. Adding anything else is just adding confusion. 2. Unless you are going to great lengths - ie pre loading a page and maybe dropping parts of the dom and dealing with evidence in the history - are you actually doing anything much to help the user exit your site? How motivated/skilled a person are you defending against? 3. If your exit button is just a glorified link or redirect what is the point? It will still be in the history and if they have slow internet they could end up just staring at your site while the redirect loads. 4. For some organisations having such buttons is more about "showing" they have it than how useful it actually is to the user. 5. I have tried to push for a page/link to basic internet safety information. Educating visitors would be much better than trying to engineer their personal security day. 6. I've struggled to find good academic/research work on such features. Seems like it would be a good area for a UX researcher but I've not found much actual work.
Other methods for leaving the site still work. Even if the button isn't the best way to leave the site, if it helps in more cases than it hurts then it's a net benefit.
These buttons are essentially panic buttons, and when a person is panicking the big red exit button might end up being the only exit they can find.
My gut tells me that the big red button might not even get noticed.
But I can imagine that people accessing information about domestic abuse might not necessarily have regular access to internet connected devices, they might not know the best ways to act under stress. Maybe they won't notice the big red button, but maybe there is some chance that they will notice it, and therefore some chance it will be beneficial to them in that moment.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...
I’m not an expert in that topic at all, so I may not use the preferred terminology in all instances. Sorry."
What the hell is this?
The language apology-in-advance does feel a bit like overkill though. I'd suggest a generous interpretation is that, given how things often work these days, they don't want people to get caught up in discussions about terminology and just want to focus on the tech.
Some people, particularly people who've suffered domestic abuse, may not wish to be blindsided by a discussion of it when they think they're reading a technical blog.
> I'm an agender (I use it/its pronouns), asexual, alterhuman robot. I'm also a shapeshifting critter on the internet.
This person has absorbed the idea that it's a sin to use natural language to talk about normal phenomena, and the idea that it isn't possible to know what kind of language wouldn't be sinful, but not the idea that maybe that isn't a desirable state of affairs.
Sounds like they are relying that a screen reader user is using a specific version of JAWS? Do they really expect people to upgrade JAWS to the latest version when it costs $1200? I understand it's important software for the audience still a lot of money.
I wonder why the gov.uk team are getting so much publicity(?) In the last few years.
As much as I love the aesthetic, I'm developing a fear that they'll soon spin off into a startup with some kind of paid model, and that government websites will regress.
Irrational fear, I know, but I cant shake off the startup-vibes I'm getting when I read such posts about what is essentially a public service.
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...
https://18f.gsa.gov/
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/01/20/gds-usds/
gov.uk got started, in part, because the 2009 financial meltdown left a lot of good startup designers and engineers with not enough to do (and made civil service jobs more attractive for a bit!)
It’s likely part of their efforts to be more transparent, work with other governments and better support departments without having to be in 50 places at once. It’ll also help with recruitment.
Doesn't it make a lot of sense to be open about how a public service is built and delivered, maybe much more so than any for-pay service in fact?
It's a very broad topic to cover so I'll be terse with evidence/examples only. UK government provides a lot of open data and APIs for the country [0], [1]. They are free and pretty much not throttled. They have a license [2] for a lot of this data which is formal but nearly as free as John Carmack's legendary hacker-friendly "have fun" license [3]. There is also a lot of historical Ordnance Survey data and historical legislation data from the National Archives. And of course, you can see the openness in how they have built gov.uk, as blog articles appear on HN about it quite often.
There is also a lot of government infrastructure provided to local governments, such as gov.uk Notify [4] or a freely available NHS website CMS (which is why many NHS websites work the same). There is a guide [5] mostly intended for government services but free for others to use on building accessible, secure and quite good-looking websites.
Most other governments I lived under are either technically behind UK or they have very advanced tech capabilities in certain branches of the government only (such as the armed forces) but keep it out of the public eye. Ultimately, I think it is the culture of welcoming everyone's participation in technology that makes UK gov so forthcoming and open with their tech and data. Doing this is seen as kind and civilised, which is how governments want to be seen. Of course, there are still areas of improvement in how UK gov provides data, as there always are in everything.
Finally, I should mention you can find many BBC technology outreach programmes from the early days of home computing. They are all over YouTube if you search for "BCC home computing". There was and continues to be a lot of techno-optimism in the country. It is one of the admittedly not many things that persist from the pre-austerity times.
[0] https://www.data.gov.uk
[1] https://www.api.gov.uk/index/#index
[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...
[3] https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/README.TXT (before GPL became popular, id software code was distributed with this readme that said "Have fun")
[4] https://www.notifications.service.gov.uk
[5] https://frontend.design-system.service.gov.uk
Salaries play a significant role.
Unlike a lot of other countries, private sector salaries for SWEs suck in much of the UK, and gov.uk (in reality part of the Civil Service), GCHQ+MoD, and BBC can pay fairly competitively and give a fairly decent pension compared to private sector gigs.
That said, I'd disagree with NHS IT - it's almost entirely outsourced to regional MSPs who suck (and I say this as a former vendor who's helped sell products those guys use in NHS environments)
I mean, unless the next PM is Zombie Thatcher, this seems like an excessive level of privatisation.
Wow, you learn something new every day!
Kinda weird that we got “Backspace to go back” out of web browsers some time ago yet this still exists, though.
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...
Also just a note that the first two GOV.UK links under "Research on this pattern" don't include live examples any more.
An upsetting but nonetheless incredibly interesting abnormal UX problem to solve. I appreciate seeing this much thought being put into things like this.