Designing for browsers but not for devices ?

It’s fairly safe to assume that most people are designing their websites for the popular browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari), however looking around, its still evident that people are not designing for mobile.

The reality is more people probably visit your website on a mobile device than on all but one of these popular browsers (and yes you’ve guessed it that’s Internet Explorer)

For liverpool.gov.uk 21% of site traffic over the last month was from mobile devices, only 16% of traffic was from someone using Chrome.

The third most popular browser version on liverpool.gov.uk – after IE9 and IE8 is the Safari on IOS5.

while your working out if you need a mobile app or site, 1/5 of your potential site visitors are walking away – or worse phoning your call centre.

 

liverpool.gov.uk, Mobile
May 10, 2012Permalink Leave a comment

Sometimes you have to tell people that nothing has changed

I engaged in the well-known and popular bank holiday activity of DIY this week – and it was while I was doing what is part of the normal process for me, and working out what I needed to get from B&Q, that I encountered the problem I am sure many people had at the same time. Just when was the B&Q open on the Monday?

I checked the website – bank holiday? Not a word of it – 20% off everything until the end of the day but you wouldn’t know it was in any other way special.

B&Q Store locator, it's normally open

Hunting of on the store locator, I found my nearest store, and relatively easily located the opening times, all nice and standard, the shop was normally open 8 till 8 all week – which is nice, but what about the bank holiday?

Nothing. And this is the problem – as it turns out (because I had to go), B&Q is open normal hours on the bank holiday, but their site doesn’t tell me that, because nothing has changed so they have ‘nothing’ to tell me.

A simple “we are open as normal on bank holiday Monday” would have answered all my questions

This reminded me of my little election experiment last week, when I looked at a few random councils to see how they had done elections. Once or twice in the process I went to a county council website, and found nothing about elections at all. That’s because counties run elections on a four year cycle, and this year was (for these councils) not one of those years – so no elections. The districts had elections, but the county sites didn’t tell me that (quite a few county sites don’t acknowledge the existence of the districts)

This is another case of nothing happening, but I think we all-too-quickly fall into the assumption that our customers know that. I, for one, struggle with the line between districts and counties, and I’ve read the LGA document on it. The public don’t always know. At least one person in our social circle phoned their county council to ask where their polling card was, to be told there was no election.

A simple “there are no county elections this year, check with your district council” would have answered the question.

So, if there is an external event affecting your customers, and they might reasonably think that it affects you, too, then why not tell them, that nothing is happening?

communications, Content Strategy, User Experience
May 8, 2012Permalink Leave a comment

Elections – “We the council”

If you’re not involved in local government, you probably missed the fact it was local elections this week (after all the turnout was only 30%). It’s one of the few times in the year that a council has a clear idea of what the website’s users probably want. On election day, liverpool.gov.uk got 30% more site visitors. On the Friday, traffic was double a normal day, and 35% of traffic went to the results section of the site.

Site traffic for election week compared to an average week.

On Thursday, I did a non-scientific survey of other council sites, just to see how they were dealing with the day. I wasn’t looking for problems, I was just curious. It was quite interesting so I put it into a presentation

Local Government Websites 3rd May 2012

View more presentations from Kevin Jump

The thing that struck me most about this selection, was the number of sites that were just doing what the council felt it had to do, rather than what the residents of the council might want it to do. I do agree, a notice of election is a vital part of the democratic process, but it’s not really the best way to list the candidates for an election, is it? And, yes, you have a list of polling stations, but again, you can’t just turn up at any polling station, so the information is useless to someone, unless you tell them where their polling station is.

On the train home, I also did a mobile version of the non-sicentifc study. I will let you explore the Google+ images of that one. It really doesn’t tell you anything more than that most councils are neglecting ~20% of their site users by not providing a mobile version of their site.

liverpool.gov.uk, Mobile, User Experience
May 5, 2012Permalink 2 Comments

You’re not the same as amazon.com, you might not even be the same as your competitor

It’s the bane of many a web professional, when talking with your client about their website and they say “well on Amazon…”

We're going to be the next Amazon!

As a very basic line of reasoning there is some logic to this: Amazon are the most successful on-line retailer, so what they do must be right. Right?

Well, if it’s your job to sell books, electronics, kitchenware and computer games (and other stuff) then yes, maybe you can draw a comparison with Amazon. But more often than not, you’re not talking to someone who is selling books, and if its local government you’re probably not selling anything*. So just because Amazon do it doesn’t mean that you should. Read the full article »

Content Strategy, Site Analysis, User Experience, web
March 18, 2012Permalink Leave a comment

Why picking a CMS isn’t a check-list job

I’ve just been in email conversation with someone involved in a CMS development for a city council, and I inadvertently ranted at them about CMS procurement processes ( sorry :) ). Anyway, who am I if I don’t share my rants with the world? Oh, and I am generalising wildly, I know!

We’ve spoken to quite a few councils recently and done work for a few more, and the biggest CMS (Content Management System) problem I’ve seen people struggle with is the lack of access to, and understanding of, their platform – either because they are using a vendor that doesn’t give them low-level access to the CMS config (including templates and the like) or because it doesn’t fit within the skill-sets of the team they have (Java when the team is .Net). Read the full article »

Content Strategy, Tools, web
March 9, 2012Permalink Leave a comment

Navigation on liverpool.gov.uk: Part 2

In the previous post I outlined all the elements of navigation on liverpool.gov.uk. In this post, I am going to ask the question, why is it all there and is it serving any useful purpose?

Evidence, Evidence, Evidence

When we developed liverpool.gov.uk we gathered evidence for everything we do, through web analytics, surveys, call data, user testing and existing research, and since the site was launched we have continued to look at the evidence to see how we can continually improve the site. So, let’s look at some evidence for navigation on the site.

In and out

As I said in the last post, when we looked at the visitor profile of our external site users, people don’t continually come back to the site. They visit no more than once every few months, do a single task and leave. So we built the site to aid the first time visitor to do a single task – up front and centre, the most popular tasks first. Read the full article »

liverpool.gov.uk, Site Analysis
March 7, 2012Permalink 2 Comments

Navigation on liverpool.gov.uk: Part 1

I’ve been trying to find a reason to have navigation on a local government website – specifically, all the navigational elements we put into liverpool.gov.uk.

Now, people (not just us) say they like how we have delivered a clean customer focused website, but have you counted how many navigational elements we have on the site and pages?

Landing Pages and Signposts

When we built liverpool.gov.uk we focused on the core premise that people come to the site to do one thing – then they leave. So we built a website with nice clear landing pages that provided clear signposts to the tasks people want to do. It’s simple and it works well (we think).

Read the full article »

liverpool.gov.uk, Site Analysis
March 7, 2012Permalink Leave a comment

#CSA12 – Wresting a content monster

We’ve (@ConorMoody and I) just come back from an fun couple of days at Content Strategy Applied (#CSA12)- Held in eBay’s London HQ in Richmond on the banks of the Thames (very scenic). Lots of intresting things to talk about – and we got to talk about liverpool.gov.uk to another set of people.

As the the name of the event hints at – it was all about content and strategy so we focused much more on that element of the site development.

as an experiment, I’ve done a storify of the talk and the reactions on twitter – I think it gives a good overview of how it went (I would say that though) Read the full article »

Content Strategy, liverpool.gov.uk
March 2, 2012Permalink 1 Comment

Kevin’s Nerd Box.

now before i start. I’m not Scott Hanselman, so don’t expect a comprehensive list of cool tools to make your life easier, I just wanted to write down the little nerdy tools I have on my PC that make my life easier / nicer (mainly nicer) – what follows is not big, clever or complete.

Nicifying my PC

  • F.lux – adapts the colour temperature of your screen depending on the time of day – reflecting the colours around you, in the day it’s bright and white, at night you pc will have a nice warm glow. this means at night you have a less intense computer screen to look at.
  • Desktop Earth- Make yourself feel like you are

    Desktop Earth - clouds and everything

    in the west wing situation room everyday – desktop earth replaces your desktop background with a picture of the earth, and and ever updating shadow as the sun moves across the sky, for added coolness it also updates the clouds every three hours from a composite satellite picture of the current atmosphere.

 

Daily Stuff

  • Microsoft Security Essentials - It saddens me when people are scared into buying expensive virus checkers when getting a computer. there are enough good free virus checkers out there to protect people. Microsoft Security Essentials is the only virus checker that has survived on any of my computers, because it’s low maintenance, and quick and free.
  • Picasa – we have lots of pictures picasa handles them well (except for the mega non-movable thumbnail db in my profile)

Internets

Developer Stuff

  • Notepad++ – for a long time i held out with Programmers Notepad 2 – and i still think it’s interface is slightly nicer, but notepad++ just edges it on features (but not by much).
  • WAMP - it’s my slightly eccentric Apache, php, mySQL install on windows, I’ve never really liked xammp, it’s clunky and demanding, wamp sits in the my taskbar (when I want it to) and just works.

and more – yes there are lots more, I use office, visual studio, spotify, twitter, facebook, and many more, but I just wanted to put some of the less mainstream stuff down.

Random, Tools
December 27, 2011Permalink Leave a comment

Umbraco – Intranet Authentication

Another little bit of Umbraco packagery. Intranet Authentication in Umbraco by using a custom build active directory role provider.

Umbraco is a great example of  why building a .net application by using and extending the standard providers and tools within .net enables great things. All to often I see applications where the developer has decided to completely right their own way of doing something, like writing their own authentication methods, and it just makes it virtually impossible to integrate anything with the app. Read the full article »

umbraco
November 20, 2011Permalink