As we’re currently considering designs for our organisation’s new website homepage, I thought it would be interesting to bring together all of the 11 local authority websites which were awarded the full 4 stars by SOCITM’s Better Connected 2010 report.
Posts Tagged ‘usability’
Better Connected 2010 – comparing the 4 star homepages
Monday, April 26th, 2010Better Connected 2010 and the changing web
Thursday, March 4th, 2010Hot on the heels of their (always hotly debated) annual report on the state of local government websites (Better Connected 2010), we were pleased to welcome SOCITM reviewer John Fox to a workshop session this morning to provide what he described as a “web content ra-ra-ra presentation”.
Disclaimer – I haven’t had the chance to read the full #BC10 report yet. I hope to add my own perspectives to this blog once I have. What follows is a summary of John’s presentation on the report and what he thinks it means for local authorities.
More on Better Connected 2010 and John’s presentation
Best approaches towards a mobile Intranet
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Jakob Neilsen has just announced his 10 best-designed Intranets for 2010, and as always it’s a goldmine of information and advice. I haven’t yet forked out for the full report, but the summary alone offers plenty to think about.
One particular point that will raise eyebrows is the continued advocacy of separate sites for mobile devices. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of such an approach, brought to the fore by Neilsen’s post last February comparing Mobile Web 2009 with Desktop Web 1998, and concluding that a separate site is best. Many of us were not convinced, and as Henny Swan argued at the time:
It also hints at repeating the mistakes of desktop web design circa 1998 where we thought the answer was to design for one browser, use proprietary technology, build text only websites for disabled users…the list goes on. So let’s not make that same mistake and instead fast forward to one of the principles of good web design that dug us out of the dark hole of 1998: progressive enhancement.
Henny described how a ‘one site fits all’ approach can be achieved using media queries, and it’s certainly a far more attractive solution than designing and maintaining separate sites.
But this all relates to websites in general, rather than specifically to Intranets, and I was interested to look closer at the suggestion of a separate mobile Intranet.
Intranet on the move?
More about mobile Intranets, and why a separate site may be justified
Google Browser Size and thinking beyond the fold
Thursday, December 17th, 2009Yesterday, the Google Code Blog announced Google Browser Size. It’s a handy little tool which allows you to take a contour visualisation of common browser sizes and overlay it onto your own sites, to easily spot which areas people can see without needing to scroll. So for example, here’s my site with the overlay applied:
Browser sizes as an overlay
More about Google Browser Size, and why scrolling isn’t actually all that bad
Auto-play: a usability and accessibility failure
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009My organisation recently published a number of videos on the public website (EDIT – have removed the link as the videos have been taken off now). Those videos started automatically as soon as the page loaded. The problems with this are:
- Automatically playing audio on a webpage is usually an action which the user will not expect. It is therefore, at the very least, an irritation, especially if the user is in an environment where this is not appropriate.
- At worst, though, the audio may conflict with other audio that the user is already listening to. That might be music, or perhaps another video. But far worse, it could be a blind user’s screen reader software, and the resulting conflict would make it very hard to browse that page to pause the video or mute the sound.
More about why autoplay is bad for usability and accessibility
Event review – Accessibility breakfast @ User Vision Edinburgh, 15th June 2009
Monday, June 15th, 2009I’ve just come back from a very interesting breakfast event at the local office of User Experience consultants User Vision. Led by accessibility consultant Mark Palmer, the session looked at issues around testing with disabled users, and presented some of the surprising results from such testing.
More about the breakfast event
Flat hunting online – a varied user experience
Friday, April 17th, 2009I’ve recently been looking for a new flat, and have been surprised by the wild differences, in terms of basic usability, of the various agency websites I’ve visited. The experience has served as a useful reminder of the need to keep usability at the forefront of the planning stage for any website.
With these kind of websites, you’d think that such functionality would be fairly standard across the board, with most sites taking a similar approach. But far from it. Here are some examples:
(more…)