Posts tagged with 'Local council'

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.

For the past 3 years we’ve been publishing an annual report into the usability of the best local council websites. We take the top 20 councils from the Socitm Better Connected annual survey and subject them to our usability criteria to see how they measure up.

The last 3 years has seen a steady incremental improvement in the scores achieved by each crop. In this year’s report the average score (out of 100) went up to 59.9%. This is very good in my view and I see no reason why this trend shouldn’t continue.

However, this year the findings from our report have highlighted that many of the great and the good are still falling short when it comes to bread and butter usability.

For example, high quality form design and processing is a fundamental part of offering transactional capabilities and an area where many local council websites offer a poor user experience. When filling in forms users can become easily frustrated when they make mistakes and can’t get the job done. It’s a real shame because there’s a mind-boggling amount of best practice out there on form design.

The commercial rationale behind getting your local citizens to transact or self-serve online is obvious so I won’t bore you with that. But I do worry that the benefits of online won’t be realised on the balance sheet if end-users are turned off by a negative online experience.