UK government website design

Introduction: Usability issues for government websites

1. This document answers the question: “What is a good government website from a usability perspective?”
2. It assumes that most of the technical problems (including issues around website functionality) of getting online and making sure the website is quickly available have been solved. If you are providing online transactions, these should already be reliable and easily used. The website should already fit within your communicationstrategy and take its place among other channels, both digital and traditional. The website must, by law, be accessible to the disabled and must meet all other legal obligations. It should join up and work with the rest of the UK Online websites and initiatives. You will have considered how to make use of central infrastructure projects such as the Government Gateway.
3. The Office of the e-Envoy provides guidelines and frameworks to help achieve these aims. However, it is quite possible to have an accessible, legal and reliable website that meets government guidelines but that is still not a good website from a usability perspective. Underpinning this is an increasing focus on human centred design issues, supported by the standards ISO12407 and ISO TR 18529.
4. This Framework pulls together advice from a wide range of web publishers, usability experts, web designers, government web managers and academics to clarify what relevant usability and design criteria should be used when planning a government website or judging how good it is. This advice also draws on the current standards for human centred design.
5. This document is concerned exclusively with websites. It does not cover best practice for DiTV, WAP or SMS, though a good website will work within a strategy that includes these channels. The Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design is not concerned with special tasks associated with running database-driven or
content-managed sites. The document focuses on users and what they see.
6. "Government websites…must raise citizen confidence by enabling a good user experience. Therefore usability must be ensured."

Source: Usability Guidelines, Catriona Campbell and Brian Shackel

7. What is a good government website from a usability perspective? It is a website that meets the goals of stakeholders while meeting the needs of users in the performance of their tasks. It goes beyond minimum adherence to best practice and policy. In this case, ‘stakeholders’ is taken to mean those people who have control over the website’s budget and purpose.
8. “Many poorly designed and unusable systems exist which users find difficult to learn and complicated to operate. These systems are likely to be under-used, misused or fall into disuse with frustrated users maintaining their current working methods. The outcome is costly for the organisation using the system.”

Source: Methods to Support Human-Centred Design, Martin Maguire

9. The aim of this document is to provide Government web managers with awareness of issues that need to be addressed in incorporating users’ needs into the design process without government web managers having to be usability experts or having to interpret the ISO standard for web use.
10. Further, the Framework will provide web managers with:
A process for briefing and working with web designers.
Research-based recommendations for processes that are likely to result in more effective content and increased user satisfaction. A process for applying Human Centred Design (HCD) to online transactions.

Human Centred Design (HCD)

11. Human-Centred Design is an approach that will ensure the aims of the site can be fulfilled for real users. There is no one kind of user and most websites will have more than one target audience. Web managers and stakeholders such as Ministers will need to decide what audiences they most need to attract and which will serve to meet their aims on the site.
12. A good government website can be defined by compliance with the following points:

It has clear input from stakeholders about what the site’s aims and audience are.
In order to establish this, preliminary research should be carried out into what users need.
It will conduct tests frequently to determine if:
- the site is meeting users’ needs (especially for usability and accessibility) on an ongoing basis; and
- the aims of the stakeholders have been achieved.
The site will then be continually adapted to meet users’ needs.
The site will be accessible and usable.
The website will effectively achieve its aims.
13. Although each government website will have its own individual goals, this Framework will be relevant to all but to varying degrees of application - depending on the objective and complexity of the website. In addition, sites designed specifically to add value to campaigns (hereafter referred to as ’campaign sites’) will differ slightly in the application of human centred design. Where this is the case, attention has been drawn to the differences.
14. Campaign sites have clearly defined audiences that are driven to the site by offline media. Thus, tighter design specifications might be more effective, eg, designs aiming specifically to attract a youth audience may call for the use of animations. Furthermore, they are likely to use slogans and logos and adhere to brand qualities which designs for mainstream government sites may not.

Quality as a process

15. When quality is viewed as a process, two key points are ensured. First is that stakeholders’ aims are clear. Second is that users’ needs are met and their use of the site fulfils their aims.
16. Quality as process results in the continual improvement of government websites.
17. The main body of this Framework draws on the current standards for human centred design: ISO 13407 - Human-centred design processes for interactive systems and ISO TR 18529 – Ergonomics of human system interaction (see Appendix C for details). In particular it outlines the relevance of these standards in their application to public sector websites.
18. Section 2 of this document, Human Centred Design, contains a step-by-step guide to HCD for web managers to follow in order to achieve their goals.