Design State: A weblog about government web design

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.

The Change.gov website is a first shot at including and encouraging a broad cast of citizen input and involvement with the federal government.

First Impressions

It is some kind of excellent that I started The Design State on the same day that Change.gov website went live. It looks good, although obviously the offspring of the presidential campaign website of President-Elect Obama. Obama’s campaign was notable for its graphic and web design production values although these certainly changed over time [e.g. The Evolution of Barack Obama's Campaign Website, The Brand Called Obama], and it is nice to see that care extended to this first official site of the Obama Administration.

Audience

The audience for this site is clearly the American people. That might seem a bit too broad, since I think the folks most likely to know about it so soon are the same folks who supported Obama’s campaign for President; but in the same way that Obama made his campaign about inclusiveness and the power of individual impacts, this site is encouraging citizens to become involved in civil service. My Greatest Generation grandparents would be happy to see this if they were still around.

Content

Although the content is very sparse at this time, and much of it is cribbed from the Obama campaign website, it appears that Change.gov plans to offer employment and involvement opportunities on the various listed issues and also pass the time as a sort of giant suggestion box for the American people. A bunch of the pages seems to have no content at all on them, so I wonder if there was more of a push to get the site out quickly than wait until it was ready to go. Earlier today there was still some designer spoor trash latin on a few of the pages that is looks like someone cleaned up.

Bells & Whistles

Well, its got a blog and at least three different RSS feeds [e.g. Blog, News, Press]. There’s a YouTube Channel, and an eNewsletter sign-up that encourages you to get your friends involved and will even load your address book into the fields for you. None of which are much use at the moment since there’s no content to look at.

Graphic Design & Markup

The design is great, but not perfect. There is a rich color depth and it looks like there is a bit of Golden Ratio at work as well. The images have some artifacts in them due to image compression. This is most noticeable with images that contain text, and has been present on official Obama-related sites for quite some time. The text is also a bit too small here and there. I have a nice monitor at a high resolution, but the small text size hurts my eyes, especially when it couples with the image compression artifacts.

The markup is XHTML Transitional and is close enough to validating to not really pick on. The markup does seem to have a preponderance of the <div> element, but they seem to be there mostly to force the graphic design elements to behave. The CSS appears to be using a customized reset stylesheet for its foundation. The site also uses jQuery, a very nice CSS-friendly JavaScript library that I hope to learn how to use someday.

Usability & Accessibility

The accessibility statement sounds nice, but is terrible. While the Change.gov website gives every indication of being accessible to my eye, the statement does nothing to explain to a user just how the site has been made accessible to them. Are there access keys or navigation aids? It would be much nicer to see something like what Mark Pilgrim has been known to put together.

The site is quite usable; it is easy to find the sections you’re interested in, even if there is no content in them. The forms are intuitive and simple to fill out, and it is obvious that someone spent time thinking about how they could improve the user’s experience.

What I’d Change

1. More content: There’s no point in having a beautifully designed site if there’s not equally good content on it. People come for the content, stay for the content and return for the content;
2. Fix the image artifacting: It’ll make the site look nicer, and the image text will be easier to read;
3. Increase the text size;
4. Add more accessibility features and make the accessibility statement meaningful;
5. Make what content is there seem less about Obama and more about how anyone can get involved in improving the government and the nation; and
6. Put all of the RSS feeds in one spot, so that I can subscribe to as many as I want instead of having to hunt them down piecemeal.

Final Impressions

Although the site is very pretty and has some nice shiny Web 2.0 points of access, right now it looks more like a public relations hit than anything else. There’s not much to see once you get past the good design except for the employment sign-up and the suggestion box. It is a good start, but I still feel like I need to wait and see what happens to the site as it matures before I pass an unambivalent verdict.