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.

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.

Our browsers just need a boss-key.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

  window.onload = function(){}

> 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s...

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.

can you expand on what honour based abuse means?

> 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.

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.

https://support.apple.com/guide/personal-safety/how-safety-c...

There's some examples (and a pretty sad graph on _when_ users are looking at these resources) on the user research summary: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/...

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.

https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system/discussions/...

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Many possibilities. Something seeking legal help, or an info page about domestic abuse itself, or something around financial literacy.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/exit-a-page-qu...

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.

1. A large number of people who need this service are likely to be victims of various forms of coercive control. This is a decent, quick summary of what that means in practice (PDF): https://www.leeds.gov.uk/docs/One%20minute%20guides/One%20Mi...

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.

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.

Hmm, I don't get a cookie banner on my browser, even in an incognito window with uBlock turned off.

That’s a less likely setup for a GOV.UK user though.

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...

It was refreshingly candid - then I remembered we're reading a government blog where they can say that kind of thing with impunity.

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.

Yeah, it seems a little obscure. Here's a test page with the functionality:

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.

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...)

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.

It's how people read the New York times.

It's five times, not three.

The post covers that

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.

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

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.

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.

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

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...

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.

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.

Read the blog's "about" page.

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.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-digit...

https://18f.gsa.gov/

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2015/01/20/gds-usds/

> 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!)

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

[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

> 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.

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.

That's exactly what it does do — check out [this demo](https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/exit-this-pa...). Presumably, that requires the [JavaScript History API](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API), but the whole thing requires JS anyway, so that's no more of a problem.

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.

Now that is a real use case!

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.

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.

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.

Gov Uk UX team I believe is doing some of the finest work in the world.