Between September and December 2009 we ran a poll on the Webcredible website asking the question of which industry sector has the most difficult to use websites? This may be a pretty generalised survey, which didn’t focus on specific sites, but the results (which we released yesterday) were interesting nonetheless. This is how they turned out:
- Retail / ecommerce - 133 votes (13%)
- Financial services - 164 votes (16%)
- Local authority / government - 342 votes (34%)
- Travel - 91 votes (9%)
- Utilities - 116 votes (12%)
- News / media companies - 69 votes (7%)
- Other - 91 votes (9%)
Some of the results may not come as a particular surprise to many. The content focused sites of news and media companies do not tend to need to use the complex checkout processes that other sites use, and given the high levels of competition, travel and retail websites need to be pretty easy to use.
However, I would like to focus on the local authority and government sites which caught the brunt of over one third of the vote.
It’s true that local authority and government websites often have to offer a vast amount more information and functionality than their counterparts in other industries, which can make it more difficult to provide a great user experience, but there are some other reasons why they may have faired badly in this survey.
It could be a lack of investment in comparison to say online retail and travel companies, and it also could be put down to the fact that when using local authority and government websites, dropping off and using another site is often not an option (something which is common when poor usability is encountered in ecommerce and travel) so users will have to just grin and bear a poor user experience.
There’s no doubt that the usability of local council websites is improving, as shown by our most recent local council usability report and although there’s still much room for improvement, it’s certainly not the only industry sector where this is the case. So, do you agree with the findings? Let us know which what type of websites you find most difficult to use.
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Trenton commented on 21 January 2010 at 1:16 pm
It’s also much harder for government websites to measure good usability and optimise their sites, compared to say travel and retail. Travel and retail sites are continually making tweaks and through analytics can very easily see what does and doesn’t improve conversion rates.
But what represents a conversion for a government site? It’s much more difficult to measure success on an information-based site so is therefore harder for government web managers to know what’s working well. Not only this, but they have such a diverse audience that pleasing everyone is incredibly challenging…
UI Designer commented on 22 January 2010 at 12:46 pm
I hate hate HATE the hrmc.gov.uk website for sorting out my tax! The user interface is about as intuitive as programming a VCR (or worse) and most of the time I just give up and give them a call (hopefully not in too much of a bad mood for the poor person at the other end!).
john Freeman commented on 1 February 2010 at 2:12 pm
What is ‘other’ in the context of the question? and how do you account for the anti government bias you automatically get when you ask people to rate something they would rather choose not to do. Retail, travel and news, can’t be compared to paying your tax bill. Paying tax is painful regardless of how well the journey has been managed therefore your perception is always an anecdotal negative. Its like comparing going out to dinner with going to the dentist.
I like your intent here but I would like to see meaningful research.
Someone at Government commented on 1 February 2010 at 4:11 pm
Having worked on a Government service now for almost a year I understand how varied the users are how many different needs must be satisfied by a particular service.
When this is coupled by incredibly complex back end business processes (bare in mind that tax return is not something that naturally maps onto people’s mental models like buying a laptop or booking a holiday does) engineering usability for these things becomes *much* harder than for an average e-commerce site which there are million and one ‘best practice documents’ written for.
Hope this helps to slightly demystify the result set from my point of view.
johnc commented on 1 February 2010 at 4:27 pm
The IT-activity of many government/public sector organisatoins is caught up in long-term contracts with provate providers - often this makes redevelopment a lot harder and more expensive. So you get slower uptake of new functionality, and clunkier content-management.
In my public-sector experience, a lot of transaction-based services are ‘designed’ not by the web team, but by the area responsible for the service, working with an external supplier. They appear bolted-on, incongruous, and poorly aligned with the rest of the site, and this actually reflects the internal organistional divides involved in the development.
I think there’s a different dynamic at play in the public sector. A private company governs itself, structures itself in an efficient way, and always has it’s eye on the bottom line, so everyone in the company knows what the website is for, and this makes it easier to optimise it around those tasks.
Organisations in the public sector are rarely as cohesive or efficient - their dependence on the national political and financial environment means they’re inherently less stable. Consequently, the job of the external website means different things to different parts of the public sector organisation. Some areas will see it as an environment for transactions, some will see it as a way of achieving transparency with the public, others see it as a way of engaging other organisations, and there’s also the need to make everything a public sector body does visible and accountable. It’s much harder to structure a website which has so many competing priorities, especially when the organisation that owns it is itself likely to be unwieldy in structure too.
Jon White commented on 1 February 2010 at 4:45 pm
Thanks for the comments so far, some very interesting insights.
John, regarding your question on the options, I can confirm that the ‘other’ option was provided for people who felt that another sector, other than those listed among the answer options, was responsible for the most difficult to use websites.
Regarding, the comparison of sectors, the research was designed to compare the ease of completion of the tasks necessary on websites in different sectors, rather than the perception of the tasks themselves.