EBME Forums Forums Free discussion Free discussion MHRA site move to gov.uk

It is now almost exclusively Medicines related, and the once handy telephone directory thing that let you call a real person who KNEW what you were on about has of course disappeared.

The only way to communicate is to email using the contact method that is for reporting new incidents. This triggers an automated email that has a really confusing message seemingly telling you that all communications are confidential and that you therefore cannot even enquire about your own incident report! It is insane... And they don't get back to you either.

at the risk of sounding like I'm defending them, there is still a lot of devices content, it's just VERY well hidden, so the focus is more medicine related as you say, and also income generation related, as per the several sections for manufacturers to pay their fees
I did find they got back to me fairly quickly, but only to refer me to an MHRA contact (that previously you could have contacted directly), as that front page contct form is purely generic for the entire GOV site. And of course it tooks days for the MHRA prson to reply, assuming they even are the right one to answer your question, so there's more layers to stiftle communication

My guess is that the GDS (Government Digital Service) has been swapping notes with folk at Microsoft about their Metro "interface design language" (?) - the implentation of which can be seen, and no doubt admired, across recent MS GUI's.

As I mentioned before, less clutter. MS refer to the concept as "content before chrome", apparently. On which point I can only concur.

See here for more on Good Design (is it just me, or does it seem to be in short supply these days?):-

1) MS Design Principles
2) MS Modern Design

And Saul Bass - clever, no doubt (sparse, even) - but perhaps not to everyone's tastes.

Looking at some of that MS stuff ... I can't help but be reminded of Good Old DOS (aka the text [or character] -based command-line interface). It doesn't (didn't) get much more "clutter free" than that!

I agree up to a point Geoff, the info at those M$ links is nice btw, but GDS seem to have taken it to the ultimate extreme by hiding the chrome, and the content! And what structure there is on the MHRA pages isn't very logical or intuitive, eg the likes of FSNs and MDAs are in two completely different sections, even though you'd expect expet them to be related

One of the most popular sites in the world (or so I understand) has also been "improved" recently:- BBC News.

The reason (excuse) given for this expensive re-vamp was that "more than *65% of our users access the site from phones, tablets, and [or] other mobile devices".

But, less clutter =

* I wonder how they know that.