New Parliament Website Reviewed
British Web Design & Marketing Association
30 July, 2002.
"When our review team looked at the new version of the parliament
website (http://www.parliament.uk/)
they found an effective combination of form and functionality.
Obviously the scale of the task is significant. Whilst the primary
site serves c. 9000 pages (including video and audio facilities)
integration with supporting sites escalates the page availability
closer to half a million.
Look and Feel
The design, layout and colour is simple, elegant and businesslike
which supports the principle function of an information portal,
rather than distracting the user attention from seeking particular
information.
General Usability and Accessibility
The visitor frustration of the old site has been addressed well.
The site has clear, concise and intuitive navigation. We set three
document search tasks for our team each of which found the required
results without difficulty. We viewed the sites with both a 33.6
modem and ADSL without reports of frustration from speed delays.
Navigation Clarity
For the designers, Epic, clarifying data, planning the architecture
and devising a better navigation system must have been a serious
challenge. We applaud the results of their work. We set our reviewers
specific search tasks all of which resulted in finding the correct
information quickly. Whilst some pages were ‘deep’ (more than four
clicks to find), this is inevitable on a resource of such a scale.
Conclusion
We compared the site with government sites from other countries.
We think the new site represents the best example of ‘open government’
adoption of Internet technologies that we have seen.
Footnote
We produced a webmaster's technical analysis with a list of suggestions.
From a conversation with the Webmaster, it appears that most the
items mentioned are ‘known issues’ that are being reviewed. It was
reassuring to learn that the Webmaster correctly viewed ‘going live’
not as an end result – just a stage in a continuum of finessing
a site during its life cycle.
This review was unsolicited, conducted independently and without
seeking the co-operation of the site's Webmaster."
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