21 Dec
2011
The City of Edmond, where I live, just launched a new web site and mobile app. On NewsOK and Twitter, folks are complaining about the cost (almost $80k) and the fact that the city sent the work out of state. I understand that a web site with serious functionality and a mobile app cost money - lots of money. And I'm guessing that procurement rules won't allow the city to favor a local vendor who might bid higher.
It is a shame, however, that the city spent almost $80,000 on
this web site, because it is a usability and information design disaster. Here are the significant problems from an cursory assessment. Each of these is a
showstopper that should have prevented the site from going live.
- The top level menu appears to link to every page on the site. Drop-down menus can be tricky for users, and they get increasingly difficult as the users drill down. There is no reason to make every page on the site accessible from every other page on the site. The multi-level drop-down gives the false impression of navigability. The opposite is true - this kind of fiddly menu makes navigation much harder. This is a disastrous choice:
How did I get to pollutants, five levels down? If I slip off and the four sub-levels disappear, will I remember how to get back there? I don't need access to "General Construction Drawings" or 99% of the contents of this menu, and most Edmond residents don't either. These menus only serve to obscure what I'm actually looking for. Now, there is one pretty common excuse for this kind of disastrous design choice. That is, "The client made us do it." So it may indeed be true that the City of Edmond forced the vendor to produce this convoluted menu structure. But that's really no excuse. When a client is paying you $80,000, it is even more important that you advocate for best practices with a client who clearly doesn't know better.
- Notice how the city services are listed "A-G" and "H-Z" above? This pattern is repeated throughout the site. It's particularly problematic under services and commissions. Users don't know what the city calls its services. In fact, users don't even know what "services" are. And they certainly don't know what commission they're looking for. An alphabetical listing, especially in a hard-to-navigate menu is a double whammy of poor usability. The city has fallen into the trap of designing their website along the organization lines of city government rather than by user needs. Say, for example, I'm looking for the planning commission. (No, it's not under "P" because the commission is called the "Edmond Planning Commission." Look under "E.") Nowhere on the site are boards and commissions listed by topic or interest. They are only available alphabetically, and nowhere are they all available on one page.
- Most of the pages have numeric URLs rather than human-readable (and repeatable URLs.) So, let's say you call the city and they say, "Sure, just visit our site to apply to be on X board/commission" The address is "edmondok dot com slash index dot aspx question mark n-i-d equals one zero two." Every url should be human readable. This is easily accomplished in software and there is no excuse for this kind of structure on such a relatively small web site. Related to this problem: all of the old site URLs are broken without redirects. All existing pages should have been redirected to their new locations. This would have preserved Edmond's sitelinks on Google. (Site links are the sub-pages that appear below the main page on Google searches) Now these site links will likely disappear, at least for a while.
Note that I have not logged in to the site and I have only given the site a quick once-over. The problems I outline above are very serious.
How could this have been prevented? I wish the city had asked some residents for feedback. There are so many brilliant Edmondites who could have advised on this project and seen these significant, glaring usability errors. Second - of course the city should have done some usability testing. Even the most cursory of testing would have uncovered the serious UI and information architecture problems I've outlined here.
If I were in charge of this project, I would take down the site and revert to Edmond's old web site until these serious problems could be addressed.
