Local government: local tasks made easy

Posted on October 7th, 2007 in Government.

The best thing governments can do on the Web is get out of the way. Save the citizen time by making basic government tasks fast and easy.

Salford recently received the UK Local Authority Website of the Year 2007 award. It’s not surprising. Salford is a very practical and functional website. The homepage is full of useful links under the following classifications: Living, Learning, Leisure, Business, Online Services, Your Council.

If you click on the link Births, Deaths & Marriages, the first thing you see is the following text in red: “Salford Register Office at Barton Road in Swinton is currently closed because of building works at adjoining premises.”

Practical, necessary stuff that immediately says: This website is professionally managed and kept up-to-date. The next sentence reads: “The service has now relocated to Salford Civic Centre, Chorley Road, Swinton.” And there is a link to a map and directions.

It’s not surprising that the Salford website is a success. It has an enthusiastic web team ably managed by John Fox. John used to manage Hants Web, who no less than Bill Gates referenced as government best practice.

What makes the Salford website work is that it is citizen-focused, not council-focused. Thankfully, there are no pictures of the mayor on the homepage. If there is one sure sign of an awful government website it’s a picture of a politician on the homepage.

Practically all websites are organization-centric in the beginning. In fact, when I looked at the Salford homepage in 2000 (by using the WayBack Machine) there was a nice picture of the Lord Mayor all decked out in his gown and chain.

It’s hard for politicians and others not to see a website as some sort of traditional publicity tool. But if you want to impress citizens, don’t show them your face. Instead, show them how to quickly and easily do what they came to do.

A website can be a wonderful way to promote a geographical area both to potential tourists, investors and the local citizens themselves. Designed and managed like the Salford website, it says: This is your website. It’s for you. What can we do to help you?

The more you try to directly promote yourself on the Web, the more of a fool you look. But if you help your customer do what they need to do quickly and easily, then they’ll promote you. Word of mouth (customer ratings and reviews) is by far the most powerful promotional tool any website can have.

If the council website is working, then the council is working, and everybody benefits (politicians, businesses, and citizens). The success and satisfaction of the citizen must be the primary goal of every government website.

No politician wants dissatisfied citizens wasting time on government websites. The website is not the place where you publish your press releases and five-year plan in a mega-PDF. It is the place where key elements of your five-year plan come to life.

A council website is about citizens doing things, not about the council saying: “Look at all the great things we’ve done.”

Salford City Council

 

8 responses

  1. John Fox says:

    Added on October 7th, 2007 at 6:50 pm

    What a glowing accolade Gerry - thank you!

    I am immensely proud of our achievements to date, and am the first to recognise that we wouldn’t have achieved the success we have without without the commitment of around 300 web authors around the council, and of course my own staff in the web team, to whom I am indebted. And all this would be worthless without colleagues working behind the scenes in the council’s ICT Services function who support the website in many different ways.

    Apologies if this sounds sickly sweet or psychophantic, but I’m a firm believer in team work. Our website is a team effort, and therefore due recognition must be given.

  2. John says:

    Added on October 8th, 2007 at 4:48 am

    How can you say it’s a great website when on the home page, the guts of the information are “links” that don’t look like links because they don’t following convential link styling!! They are all grey. Interesting to see proper, & professional and independant usability studies show. Sorry Gerry, I definately don’t agree with you on this one. The website is horrible from a usabiltiy perspective.

  3. Paul Biggins says:

    Added on October 8th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    Absolutely right, Gerry, and the Salford site is very easy to use and comprehensive, so how about a link to it in your e-mail text? Easily found in Google, but here it is anyway: http://www.salford.gov.uk/ (I notice there’s a link in the forum text above…but with a spelling mistake! Sorry to be picky!!)

    For what it’s worth, as a sideline I maintain the website for the village of Stilton in Cambridgeshire (http://www.stilton.org, if anyone is interested) on behalf of the Parish Council and have, from the start, tried to adopt the philosophy that the site is for residents, visitors, and anyone interested in the village, or the cheese. The Parish Council have given me pretty much free rein on design and content (mostly coming from the village magazine), so the Council content is minimal (but still there if anyone wants it).
    Admittedly not on the scale of the Salford site, but following the same design criteria (I’d like to think!) - who’s the visitor (to the site), and what do they want?

  4. Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:

    Added on October 8th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Paul, my apologies. I forgot to put the link in my email. (I’ve corrected the spelling mistake–thanks for pointing it out.) And good work on the Stilton Village website. Looks pretty good to me.

    John, I agree with you on the links. It’s not something I agree with, particularly grey text. But taking that into account, the site still is very customer-focused.

  5. Jermayn Parker says:

    Added on October 9th, 2007 at 6:41 am

    I totally agree, I work on a Government website and i absolutely loved the first line “The best thing governments can do on the Web is get out of the way”…

    Thanks you made my day :)

  6. Cathy Kealey says:

    Added on October 10th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

    I agree with John and would be interested to know if this site has been usability tested for key tasks or card sorted for categorization. The categories… Living, Learning and Online services are somewhat government website cookie cutter standard and not task focussed at all. I dont think ‘Online services’ should be in a standalone area of the site, but would be more effect if integrated with applicable content. You do not go to a banking site looking for a section called ‘online services’- you go after the task content and the ‘online service’ should be there. The entire site should be thought of as an online service, not just one section.

  7. John Fox says:

    Added on October 13th, 2007 at 8:20 am

    In response to the comments above:

    No formal usability testing has been undertaken on the website, but members of the web team have received usability training and our focus for the website are the three Us “useful, usable, used”.

    User satisfaction data enables us to demonstrate our website’s effectiveness and reach, so Nielsen//NetRatings - a market leader in internet usage analysis - conducts an exit survey on our behalf.

    With regard to the colour of links, I can’t entirely disagree with the comments made but my defence is that the colour of the links are aligned to the site design in order to present what we believe to be an attractive and engaging presentation.

    Feedback from website users is very positive on this point: a composite 87% of users who responded to our exit survey in September rated the site design positively, and this benchmarks extremely favourably against other UK local authorities who participate in the same exit survey scheme.

    Our user satisfaction survey results are published monthly on the website and can be found at http://www.salford.gov.uk/usersurvey.

    Cathy, I do agree with you 100% that we shouldn’t have an ‘Online services’ section in the navigation. You and I are at one that the entire site should be thought of as an online service with those services fully integrated into site content. I have absolutely no dispute with you on that score!

    But the reality is that different people use websites in different ways, and at Salford we have tried to take account of that, and one way of highlighting to NEW users of a council website is that there are a myriad of ways in which you might do business online with your council that perhaps you never even realised was possible.

    There was no ‘Online services’ section on the site for three years and feedback from customers indicated that they would like a central resource highlighted somehow. So we responded to demand and created the information collection.

    For your additional information, the citaton from the Good Communications Awards when we won “Local Authority Website of the Year” last May reads:

    “An excellent all-rounder with clear, consistent navigation and proactive approach to both usability and accessibility.

    “There is evidence of take-up with increases in the site statistics, online payments and exit surveys. Innovation is demonstrated with their use of multiple languages, cross-selling of services, interactive maps and searches, and all services are online with payment enabled.

    “A strong ‘duty of care’ approach is demonstrated with accessibility efforts. There is evidence that they have carefully considered the user and designed the site well, armed with this knowledge; their use of cross-selling of relevant pages in strategic places is impressive; the site is clear, consistent and has all the relevant information available online.

    “Cost effectiveness is demonstrated through the volume of services online and the high volume of payments that they receive online.”

  8. Local Government Pontificator says:

    Added on October 17th, 2007 at 7:41 pm

    Great advice! I sent it to my city officials. Our website is horrible.

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