I attended Learning from Better Connected 2010 on Tuesday. The day was hosted by Socitm (the Society for IT Managers in the public sector). They publish an annual report called Better Connected which rates all UK local authority websites on usability, accessibility, structure and a range of other factors. I went along to talk to other councils about their websites and to share ideas to feed into the Medway Council website project.
The day focused on you, the users. How can we make it easier for you to find information and carry out tasks online? A major theme of the day was ‘top tasks’ – bringing the most popular tasks to the forefront and allowing you to complete a task in the quickest and easiest way. This has been our main aim throughout the website project as we know that many of you visit the website to ‘do’ and not to browse. Take a look at the wire frame and design to see how we’re planning to structure top tasks in the most user-friendly way.
Another hot topic under scrutiny was the words we choose to signpost people to services or areas of the site. Do the terms ‘do it online’ or ‘quick links’ actually help? Maybe they do and allow you to navigate quickly and easily. Or maybe they frustrate you – ‘do it online’? Well, of course, you are online. And as for ‘quick links’ – every link should be quick so isn’t it a waste of valuable home page space? We’d be interested to hear what you think.
I heard from several councils on how they have turned around their websites. The common theme was that they all ask themselves an important question at every decision-making stage – does this add value for our website users? Only by stepping back from the project, putting yourself in the shoes of the user and asking the user, can you ensure that every decision you make is going to lead to a customer-centric, useful, usable and used website.
The most important message of the day is that re-developing a council website is not an isolated task. Once we launch in November, we will continue our web improvement programme. We’ll continue to analyse traffic, keywords and user satisfaction to improve further. Some of you may like certain features but find others difficult to use – and if so, please tell us about it. There will be a feedback and rating option on every page so please use it!
