Posts
Since the release of the report, The power of information (which I'm planning to blog about next week), the UK government has taken enormous steps towards using the internet in more empowering and collaborative ways to improve service offerings, communication and transparency.
I've blogged previously about the principles for online participation developed for UK civil servants, which was another direct outcome of this report.
Now the UK government has released a host of new government data, previously unavailable, for use in the development of mashups by individuals, companies and government agencies.
This is a virtually (excuse the pun) unheard of step for any government - to release data in a way that makes it easy for anyone to combine it, analyse it, represent it in combination with other data and form conclusions.
Taking the concept even further, the UK government is stimulating innovation by running a competition for the best mash-ups created using the data, with 20,000 pounds in the prize pool.
More news about the competition is available from Yahoo.
Full details are at the Power of Information Taskforce's blog.
The data being released is available at the UK's Show us a better way website.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
UK government drops its pants to encourage online innovation | Tweet |
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
How many options are too many? | Tweet |
Donna Spencer has written a very thoughtful piece on how many items were ‘too many’ to have in a navigation bar on a website.
Entitled, How many items in a navigation bar it's well worth a read.
She argues that the 7+/- 'rule' is more of a myth and offers some suggestions on how to evaluate when a longer navigation bar is appropriate.
Adding my 2c, I think it's also important to consider the importance of each item to your audience to ensure the menu is appropriately arranged.
This doesn't always mean placing the most popular item at the top of a list, or far left of a navigation bar.
If this occurs it is possible that your audience will stop reading at this first item and not go on to look at other menu choices that would better fulfil their needs.
But what's a better option?
Alphabetical?
By order of steps within a process?
Drawn out of a hat?
Have you ever organised or read about an experiment testing which menu ordering approach maximises use by customers?
When good websites turn bad | Tweet |
I've had a keen interest in the Attorney General's Department for a number of years now.
That's not because they may - or may not - be the government department most likely to have James Bond, Triple X or the Men In Black working for them.
It's because they do a lot of important things across a range of areas, but rarely seem to get much credit for it.
For example, while their name suggests a dry, boring legal portfolio - and indeed they do have a large role in the intersection between Australia's legal system and government - they are also responsible for developing emergency management systems and supporting emergency management services, which become pretty important to people when there is an earthquake, flood or other disaster.
They also look after the Family Relationship Centres, which play an enormous role in supporting families around the country and manage Comlaw, THE source for legislative information in Australia and Australian Law Online, equally the source for legal and justice related information.
That's not to mention counter-terrorism, or engagement with the justice systems across the Pacific.
These are all important and useful activities and would make the AG's Department a very interesting place to work.
But what have they done to their website?
The other day I visited the main AG's website for the first time in awhile and was surprised at what I found.
I have my views on attractive and usable web design and they don't match what the AG's Department has done to their site.
The URL icon in the web address bar is cute - a scale of justice, much clearer than using a Commonwealth crest which suffers at a 16x16 pixel size. Unfortunately this was also the high point for me.
The site is coloured a very bright orange, fading through to blue with black highlights. The crest is nicely positioned at a good size at top left, but doesn't blend well with the page - it sits on a solid dark background and has harsh lines separating it from the rest of the design.
The website homepage has more than 70 visible links, organised into topic area throughout the left half two-thirds of the website - basically exposing much of the site navigation, using up most of the visible area to do it rather than neat dropdown menus.
It does have a right-hand column with several news items, Ministerial links and a couple of publications.
However that left hand area with all those links! It doesn't make the site very attractive or usable, it's simply overwhelming!
I did go to the site for a specific purpose, but after one look at the homepage, I fled back to Google and searched for the content instead - finding it within seconds.
I think that many other users similarly overwhelmed with options would react in a similar way.
So what mistake has AG's made - the concept that if links are good, more links are better?
That a home page, being largely a navigation page, should simple be a list of links?
Certainly that was the peak of user design back in the mid-90s, when Yahoo launched with a groundbreaking list of lists, neatly categorised by type. But I do not see any of today's popular sites taking a similar approach - perhaps the world has moved on.
I'm sure the department had good intentions for this design and was aiming to making it easier for the many audiences that visit the AG's site, for many different reasons.
However I do not think the approach selected will maximise the utility of the site - and look out for that 'bounce' rate!
Bounce rate (From Google Analytics' definition)
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren't relevant to your visitors.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Intranet pruning | Tweet |
My team, in association with our web of content editors, recently completed a major review of the content within our intranet.
This has dramatically improved the currency of information throughout the site, with over 90% of the content having been reviewed and updated within the last year, up from slightly over 60% before I took over the intranet.
The oldest content in the site now is less than two years old, and generally these are navigational pages where the links remain current and there's no content to update.
A complaint I've heard regularly in other organisations I've worked for is that the intranet was no use as the content was old and was never updated.
This, along with search issues, appear to the two of the largest complaints about most intranets (and as was pointed out at a recent conference I attended, if you improve them but don't promote the changes staff will not change their perceptions).
The content review, considering our intranet is now around 3,000 pages in size - took around six months in total as a background task for two people alongside other work.
We were helped enormously by the content owners across the agency, who understand the importance of our intranet to the agency's day-to-day functioning. My team has also put considerable effort into building this understanding, which helps underpin the intranet's value.
There were some pages which had lost their owners due to normal organisational attrition, and when we could not identify other owners with the help of business areas we took a 'slash and burn' approach - we gave the agency's business areas a month's notice and then removing unowned pages from the live intranet to see if anyone complained.
This worked fantastically well - where pages were important there were rapid complaints and a content owner stepped forward. Given that it only takes a few seconds to restore a page, there were no long-term impacts and we now know who owns all the content in the intranet for ongoing review.
This approach may not work for all organisations, however given the large changes we're implementing at the moment, it made sense to create a little pain to avoid much greater pain in the future.
Our ongoing reviews will now be substantially smaller and the approach has also been useful in further building the credibility of our intranet as we've promoted the updating widely within the organisation.
I'd be very interested in the experiences of other managers in maintaining information currency in their online properties.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Managing taxonomies | Tweet |
I found this an interesting article on a systemic way to manage taxonomy creep.
Managing taxonomies
