Jefferson County’s transparency website has good intentions, but is hampered by a few design and implementation obstacles.

Well, it has certainly been awhile. I’ve been working hard at my day job, working toward my Master’s degree, working on my house, playing with my kid, working on a website for a local newspaper, writing about local government reform issues on another blog I run, and pretty much doing anything and everything other than writing here.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t been thinking about government web design. I’ve just been spending more time thinking about open government data, its possibilities, and implementing those possibilities. And thankfully, Jefferson County in Colorado has a site where transparency-by-OGD allows me to talk about both OGD and design in the same post. The county has over half a million residents and is the 4th most populous county in Colorado.

What’s Good

1. Open Government Data! JeffCo has provided itemized, searchable information regarding the County’s finances. You can even download it if you need to. This is cutting-edge, especially for a local government entity. Jefferson County is basically working on provided their own version of data.gov to their citizens.
2. The copy is written in a friendly, inviting manner. The tone isn’t emotionless or businesslike. The right tone can do more to build trust than any amount of promises or guarantees.
3. Clear goals! If you want to see what their timeline for improving the site looks like, it isn’t hard to find.
4. Citizen input is encouraged through public meetings a feedback form, and a blog.
5. There is an interface which allows you to search through their procurement data and some tools that allow you to manipulate the data.

What Needs Work

1. Most importantly, the content needs to be better weighted. (cf. Weighting Content on Your Website). Most of the text is in the same (too small) font size, so important links or sections get lost in the wash. Without clear cues to what is important or should be read, a visitor to the site remains slightly confused throughout, and is even more likely to miss something that is important later on.
2. The site is not very accessible. No HTML heading tags are used, not even an H1 at the top of each page. Using headings is one of the fundamental rules of good web design. It will also help solve problem #1.
3. PDFs.  PDFs are not open government data, and all of the checkbook warrants on the Jefferson County site are in PDF. They’re easy, but they aren’t transparent. (cf. the Sunlight Labs post on why Adobe is Bad for Government).
4. The data manipulation tools are buried under a seemingly random icon, and the documentation isn’t very useful. At least there is some, though.

The Jefferson County Transparency site is off to an admirable start, and the commissioners’ commitment to continue to improve its offerings illustrates the need for progressive, high-level executive buy-in to implement something of this magnitude. Though the layout and organization of the site needs significant refinement, this is still the most interesting thing I’ve seen a local government do in some time.

The government’s http://www.Recovery.gov/ is supposed to be the place where everyday citizens can go and see exactly who’s getting the $787 billion in taxpayer funds designed to boost the economy.

“This is your money,” reads a statement on the Web site’s homepage. “You have a right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.”

Yet the first thing one sees on the homepage is a big pie chart saying 60% of the money is going to states and 40% to local governments, hardly the detailed breakdown the government has promised.

Recovery.gov’s citizen accounting effort, Steve Hargreaves, 19 March 2009.

The general consensus seems to be that the site could be much better, but it’s a step in the right direction. Only time will tell. Some of the things I’d like to see on Recovery.gov include:

• Front page notifications of updated content, not just news items which mainly seem to be PR blurbs;
• Get rid of the annoying pop-ups that appear when you click on an external link. This is the web equivalent of Microsoft Vista’s abominable User Account Control, a “feature” deliberately designed to annoy users. When you close the pop-up you aren’t taken to the external link. Apparently what you have to do is click on the link inside of the pop-up to actually leave the site. If I click on a link, I want to be taken to the referenced file, not receive a confusing pop-up that makes me click on the link within the window to get where I was trying to go in the first place. Designing for the lowest common denominator is a sure way to destroy the user experience;
• Granular RSS feeds for each specific category of reporting. WordPress does this natively, and it very useful for sites with broad topical range where only certain types of information are going to be of interest for folks; and
• Make finding information more intuitive. I thought clicking on the Accountability and Transparency link made sense for finding the information I was looking for, instead it just goes to a page of memorandum boilerplate. You end up having to click through all over the place, and sometimes leave the site altogether for a State’s stimulus site to find any meaty information.

A clean, simple home page design like Ohio.gov is an exception, rather than a rule among State government websites.

One of my favorite government sites is the main page for the State of Ohio. Each time I visit the page, I’m struck by how clean and well organized the content is, and how the minimal use of graphic elements serves to add just the right amount of texture to the content’s presentation. Most importantly, however, the site is designed with the Ohio resident in mind. There isn’t a list of useless facts, or a mission statement, or some banal welcome text from the governor; instead, if you’re worried about the incoming winter and interested in HEAP it is front and center. If you want to know what the latest lottery numbers are, update your vehicle’s registration, or contact your elected officials you’re only one click away.

Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, this economy of design doesn’t extend itself to the rest of the State’s websites. This is not unexpected because most State agencies are responsible for their own content and website. Since the State government is such a large operation and funding varies from agency to agency, the means and manpower to keep a site updated are sometimes not there. That doesn’t mean that a consistent design standard across all Ohio.gov sites is a bad idea, just that it will take some concerted effort.

In contrast, Indiana’s website isn’t as easy to navigate as Ohio’s (both of them are better than Illinois, however) but the design is quite consistent throughout. Indiana’s CIO, Gerry Weaver, has managed to save the state $14 million per year in operating costs according to a nice write-up in Government Technology. There’s not a lot of talk about whether or not the web site standardization was one of the pieces in this savings (I sent an email to Mr. Weaver, but haven’t heard back); but I know that using a standard template for our sites saves my group a lot of time in design and implementation, and that savings is passed on to all of the agencies and departments we work for. We create a few graphics, change the colors in the CSS, and don’t really have to worry about much else. Needless to say, I think the State of Ohio could really benefit from design consistency throughout Agency websites; and getting someone like Gerry Weaver behind the project seems like a good first step.

Leave Your Print‘s straightforward and minimal interface is an excellent way to engage the citizens of Utah in the election process.

Leave Your Print is a site that was put together in order to encourage the citizens of Utah to participate in the State’s election process. It uses the Tweak Content Management System from Agency Fusion which I’d never heard about until I looked at the source code for this site, but from a glance at the site, looks like a pretty impressive solution for use by a government entity.

The site’s main strength comes from the elegance and concision of the content. Many government sites dump too much content on their pages, or put content out there that citizens have no desire to see. Leave Your Print only offers the main things you need to know about voting in Utah. A few of the areas don’t have any content in them, which is a personal peeve of mine. If there is no content for the “In The News” portion, then “In The News” shouldn’t be live on the page.

The privacy policy might be a bit too laconic. It mentions some various Utah Code references that apply to voter privacy, but don’t reproduce the text or link to it for interested parties to peruse. My favorite portion of the site is the voter search form. The Polling Location Search at Cuyahoga County’s BOE has produced some consistent usability issues that can probably be addressed by taking a cue from Leave Your Print.

Leave Your Print is an excellent site for a specific tactical target. It doesn’t suffer from most government design woes, such as poor design and implementation, content bloat or scope creep. It doesn’t look like it was made to stroke someone’s ego or to increase bureaucracy. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say that the State of Utah hired Agency Fusion to put the site together instead of having it done in-house. More on that guess later.