DirectGov - Top of the Benchmarking pile

— Published December 15th, 2004  |  by David Moore

The UK's Directgov site scored highest of 40 UK and Irish public sector sites in our forthcoming benchmarking survey. While topping the table is necessarily slightly subjective, it's worth highlighting the areas in which the site performs well, especially to offer pointers for web teams struggling with some of the more common problems.

Directgov faces real challenges on the structuring and navigation side, simply because of its remit. If you're supposed to be 'the place to turn to for the latest and widest range of public service information', then you're going to have a large amount of content to arrange.

Most visitors (at least at first) won't be regular visitors - they'll have a particular question in mind, or will be looking for specific information. The site offers these visitors a number of ways into the content (the Irish public information site Oasis works in a similar fashion) - the main navigation doesn't try to categorise the material beyond the very simple 'Info for . . . ' (what sort of person are you? student, parent, expat), 'Info about . . .' (what sort of topic are you looking for - employment, health, motoring), 'Quickfind' (directories and guides), and 'Newsroom'.

The homepage also displays the most popular news, topics and directories, and it also has a clear section labelled 'Do it online', which pulls together the transactional capabilities from across the site.

All this means that it should be relatively easy for visitors to identify themselves or their issues quickly. But once you've found the content you were looking for, it still has to be clear and easy to read.

Here the Directgov site also does well. Pages contain simple headings, good subheadings to provide direction, and the main content uses clear jargon-free vocabulary. Related links at the side, and often links for further information at the bottom of pages allow people explore topics to the depth that they require.

Any links used are also well-described, so it's clear what sort of information you'll be taken to.

On the design side, the site uses white space well, while navigation, related content and all the main content options are very clear.

A clear breadcrumb trail helps orientation, as does the shading in the navigation while highlights which section the user is currently in.

A couple of things the site does not do also add to its efficacy. There are almost no Adobe Acrobat files (PDFs) visible. All too often the first resort of public sector content providers, PDFs present frustrations to visitors, and their absence here (in favour of putting all the information in the main body of pages) makes the site much easier to use.

A second absence is any sense in which the site structure reflects the organisation structures of the bodies providing the information. The arrangement of information and options is user-centred, not organisation-centred.

There are some areas in which the Directgov site performs less well (the About us and Contact us sections are very thin, and the design breaks in the Safari browser for Macs), but overall it does a lot more things right than wrong, and shows how information-heavy public sector sites can work well.

The Scores

Criteria:	Score:
Content:	66%
Functionality:	67%
Design:	77%
Weighted Total:	69%

Order your copy:

The iQ Content eGovernment Benchmarking Report (approx 150 pages, including league table, best-practice examples, individual site analysis, and detailed recommendations) will be available to download from iqcontent.com from January 31st. For more information contact annmarie@iqcontent.com