Design State: A weblog about government web design

Hay Net is provided by the Farm Service Agency as a means to assist folks who either have too much or not enough hay. The two main options in the old design: Need Hay and Have Hay are considered an excellent example of User Interface design by Jeff Veen.

One of the things Jeff Veen talked about during his presentation on User Interface design at An Event Apart 2008 was a federal government site called Hay Net. The old version of this site remains one of his favorite examples of good user interface design. Mr. Veen is worth listening to on this topic; he was the project lead for the redesign of Google Analytics, among other things.

It is sort of funny to visit a site that has links titled “Need Hay” and “Have Hay”, but it is important to realize that those two links create an immediate and obvious fork in the road for the kind of person who visits Hay Net out of necessity. The current version of the site has a huge disclaimer page to get past, and significantly more gee-gaws wrapping around the meat, but the core purpose of the site; to facilitate the transfer of hay from folks that have too much, to folks that have too little, is still there. I searched for Have Hay ads in Ohio and received a very readable list of ads with prominently displayed location and contact information for each person. If you need hay or have hay, it isn’t hard at all to get your problem taken care of on Hay Net.

The current Hay Net design is a bit more involved, but the core purpose and interface hasn’t been made needlessly complicated or obscure.

This empathetic focus on providing exactly what the user wants is the first step in creating user-interfaces for more complicated sets of data, like the ones processed by Google Analytics. The key, according to Mr. Veen is to “let the user tell their own story.” The more variables that are available in a data set, the more complicated displaying that information to the user in a meaningful way becomes. Veen’s solution presents the data in a manner defined by the user; instead of getting too much information, or not enough, as dictated by whomever, the user picks which variables they’d like to see and how they’d like to see them displayed.

Hay Net and Google Analytics are (respectively) simple and complex examples of user-empathetic interface design. By reducing barriers-to-entry like disclaimers, non-intuitive interfaces, sign-up forms and extraneous content, designers and developers of government websites can provide something all to rare in their field, useful information without all of the red tape.