Why does the OK button say OK?
Words are critical to task completion on websites and in applications. Yet they are still chosen carelessly.
“Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button?” Jakob Nielsen asked in his excellent Alertbox in May 2008. I have two questions here: Why do we need a Cancel button in most situations? Why is the […]
What is the role of government on the Web? Part 3 of 3
Get politicians off government websites
Shouldn’t there be a law against having politicians’ pictures on websites, particularly on homepages? Taxpayer money pays for these websites. So what gives politicians the right to take taxpayer money and hijack government websites and turn them into campaign websites?
If you look at the homepage of North Korean websites then you […]
What is the role of government on the Web? Part 2 of 3
E-government is not about technology. It is about saving time and making life easier and more efficient for citizens and business.
Get away from a technology obsession
Letting the IT department manage the website is like letting a printer manage a publishing house. This might have been okay in 1998, but in 2008 a government web […]
What is the role of government on the Web? Part 1 of 3
Web government is about helping citizens and businesses make easier, faster, better-informed decisions.
More and more government websites are unmanageable. The sheer size and number of websites are vastly greater than the human resources available to manage them. Recently, I spoke to a government agency that has a total of 600 employees. It has 100 […]
Don’t design ‘what if’ navigation
Every time you add navigation options you add confusion and complexity. Too much choice is the bane of web navigation.
I just got a new satellite navigation system for my car. Last weekend I was driving from Dublin to Galway.
“Hi, I’m Navvy your friendly new navigation assistant.”
“Hello Navvy”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Galway.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
Sometime later […]
