Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.

Wibble.

In no particular order:

1. No redirect from sutton.gov.uk to www.sutton.gov.uk

That’s one small step for the DNS admin, one large dollop of timewasting annoyance for dozens of users every day.

Update 1 March 2010: This is still a problem. I thought it had been fixed but it was just a consequence of me using a smarter browser (Chrome) than previously.

2. Enormously bloated top navbar.

So useful that they let you hide it (now). Does that tell you something?

Update 1 March 2010: This bloated, visually heavy, space-invading top nav is still there. It’s grown a few new buttons, too.

3. No distinct visited link colours

Want to know which links you’ve already clicked? Tough. Perhaps the designers were off for Usability 101. So irritating that I wrote a Greasemonkey script to fix it. (Who says users never want to customise their council’s website?)

Update 1 March 2010: We still don’t get distinct colours for visited links. I’m still relying on my Greasemonkey script to provide this absolutely basic usability feature.

4. Abysmal RSS implementation

No autodiscovery. Homepage RSS icons link to a help page rather than the feeds themselves. On the help page even the enormous RSS icon isn’t a feed link either, just a pretty picture. And once you finally manage to subscribe, you have the exquisite pleasure of renaming “Latest press releases RSS feed” to “Sutton Council news” and “Sutton Council” to “Sutton Council jobs” in your feed reader. All of which makes me think that none of this was designed by someone who’s ever used RSS, let alone tested properly. Please fix it before one of us dies.

Update 1 March 2010: Sutton’s RSS feeds have improved but there’s still plenty of work to do. Good news: The feeds have been renamed with sensible names so users won’t have to rename them themselves in their feed readers. There are three RSS icons on the home page, two of which link directly to feeds (good) and one that links to another web page (very bad). There’s still no autodiscovery and the feed for Closed Consultations is completely broken. While I didn’t mention it in the original article, the major missed opportunity here is to provide full text feeds. RSS is a way of delivering your content to other applications so that people can read it conveniently, not a clever way to generate traffic back to your website which pretty much undermines the entire purpose of the exercise.

5. Distracting, patronising, juvenile stock photos

If the current homepage is to be believed, Sutton is the kind of place where people are ecstatic to have TWO ice creams, wear flowers in their hair and grow beards. This isn’t cool, it’s the dad dance of civic web design. How about letting the real content speak for itself without having to compete with this junk?

Update 1 March 2010: As summer passed, so did two-ice-cream girl and the hippy couple. Their places have been taken by different, non-contextual, distracting stock pictures. You do not have to fill every pixel on the page with stuff. Will the summer crew be back this year?

6. The clock/calendar anti-pattern

Put the entirely useless current time and date where the content date should go, then type the content date into the story titles. Is this really a content management system or is someone just bashing it out with FrontPage? (Extra bonus points will be awarded to any designer that can find the time/date on the screen of every user’s computer. Clue: It’s not in the browser.)

Update 1 March 2010: The clock/calendar is still with is and just as damaging to users’ understanding of the true age of the content as ever. Seriously, just delete it.

7. Search form uses POST rather than GET

Want to bookmark or link to a page of search results? No can do. Some basic instruction in the meaning and usage of HTTP methods required. Failing that, just copy every other search form on the entire web.

Update 1 March 2010: No progress here. You still can’t bookmark or link to search results pages. And it only takes changing “POST” to “GET” in a couple of lines of code to fix it, too.

8. No permalinks

1999 called — they want their URLs back. I wonder whether I’ll have time to fix all my inbound deep links and bookmarks to the site before they change them. Again. Permalinks are cool. Two-ice-cream girl take note.

Update 1 March 2010: Still no permalinks. We are still stuck in the link stability dark ages. How the CMS vendor can get away with this I have absolutely no idea, although it’s amusing to note that they don’t have permalinks on their own website either. Perhaps they should buy a decent CMS. :)

9. Don’t Contact Us

It’s there, but can you find it? Enjoy the multi-step form when you do. Wizards are magic!

Update 1 March 2010: The phone number is as small and hidden as ever and the multi-step contact form is just as forbidding. How about just publishing a general contact email address?

10. Subscribe to this page

Except it doesn’t work. Never has. Makes no sense. A small prize is offered to anyone that can explain clearly 1) What it’s supposed to do and 2) How you use it. I’m just a web designer and not a very bright one at that. Goes right over my head. (Tip: There’s already a general subscription mechanism for web content called RSS.)

Update 1 March 2010: The Subscribe to this Page feature is still there and doesn’t seem any different. I’ve still got no idea what it’s supposed to do or how it’s supposed to work. And RSS is still by far the best way to provide a subscription mechanism to just about anything.

11. £200K and rising

I had to help pay for it too. Now that really hurts. Got a spare £200K? You can get a site like this for your council too.

Actually, it’s just a hate relationship really. I hate the way it works, I hate the scrappy, crappy codebase and most of all I hate myself for not finding something better, or in lieu of that, making something better.

Phew.

WordPress 2.7 is currently in development and the wireframes show some improvements in the admin interface. That’s to be welcomed. However, as an encouragement to take usability further here are a few pointers for other improvements.

1. Generally when I log in its because I want to write. I care little for the Dashboard. Take me straight to the new post editor or at the very least give me the option of configuring the admin so that it does it. A cramped “QuickPress” box isn’t a substitute for the real thing.
2. Stop telling me about how much spam you’ve caught. The purpose of a spam catcher is to make it disappear, not to bother me further with reports on how successful the spam catching is.
3. Matt Mullenweg’s thoughts on his breakfast, USian politics, the Amazon Kindle or indeed WordPress itself form no part of my workflow. If I want to subscribe to any WordPress development blogs I’ll do that in my feed reader. This functionality doesn’t belong in WordPress anywhere.
4. You’ve just bought a brand new Moleskine notebook. Unwrapping it and opening it up, you discover that someone has already scrawled on the first page, “This is an example of a handwritten page in your new Moleskine notebook. You can write pages just like this yourself. Try it!” You then have to rip out the example page to actually get started. WordPress should employ effective blank slate techniques, not stuff the database with example content on a new installation that users have to delete before they can use it. Ditto, bookmarks in the links section.
5. The default theme should be as minimal as possible both to encourage users to switch to something else and also to provide the simplest possible starting point for theme development.
6. Uncategorized isn’t a category, it’s information architecture leftovers. Make the app work with no categories and start like that by default.
7. I’m not your pardner. Please don’t address me with “Howdy”.
8. Is it a blog? Is it a CMS? No, it’s a “state-of-the-art publishing platform“. This means nothing whatsoever. WordPress rapidly needs to work out what it is and who it’s for before it goes even further down the route of being jack of all trades and master of none. If this is the state of the art then the art is in a pretty poor state altogether.

1. No distinct link colours, no visited link colours.

I’ve read half of these stories, but which ones?

Two of the web’s strongest conventions are to use different colours for links and body text, and to use different colours for visited and unvisited links. Ignore them at your peril.

Links need to stand out from body text so they’re easily visible at a glance, not just on closer scrutiny. The usual method is to use a contrasting colour for the links and to underline them. The underlining can be dropped in obvious groups of links such as navigation bars and at a push in body text. A different colour is pretty much mandatory. If you’ve got links, why camouflage them?

Using a different colour for visited links is all but essential so that the user can easily see which links they’ve used and which they haven’t. The more links a page has, the more important this becomes. Again, it’s effectively a mandatory usability requirement and so widespread it’s ubiquitous. Not using different colours for visited links is one of Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design.

On Sutton Council’s new site, the body text is black, the links are black and underlined and the visited links are black and underlined. Spot the difference? Clearly, badly-conceived ideas about graphic design have taken precedence over the convenience and sanity of the poor souls that might actually have to plough through some of the site’s several hundred pages. Or maybe the designers have short-term memories that can hold twenty or thirty items. Who knows?

2. The Clock/Calendar anti-pattern

Perhaps I’m not really in the target audience, but when I want to know the time or the date my first instinct isn’t to visit Sutton Council’s website. Right now I can see the time in three different places (watch, wall clock, taskbar) and finding the date requires no more effort than hovering my mouse over the clock in the corner of my screen.

Putting the current date and time in a web page is rarely necessary and often confuses. Aside from the obvious cost of cluttering the page with something that just doesn’t belong there, it can lull the user into a false sense of contemporaneity. Hey, this site is bang up to date! Just like the clock on my wall!

Sadly, the current date on a web page is often mistaken for the publication date of the web page itself. This is a problem as I hazard to suggest that very little of Sutton Council’s web content has been published within the last minute. It would be all too easy to see that date as being relevant to an otherwise undated news article or press release.

Dumping the current date and time into a web page is a shoddy anti-pattern that needs to stop. It’s a bad habit picked up by lousy designers (or lousy clients) who presumably feel that it’ll liven up an otherwise pedestrian site. If it’s not contextual it’s clutter, so leave it out.

Incidentally, given that the council’s PR department ploughs through nearly £600,000 a year, it’s worth asking whether we can get dated press releases and news articles for that money or will we have to stump up a bit more. What’s it worth?

3. Teeny text

Is it just me getting old or is the text just a tad too small? Yes, there are gratuitous “accessibility” widgets at the top of every page to adjust it, but a better approach might well have been to make it a bit bigger by default. Not everyone on the web is a 20-something 1337 h4x0rz.

Help is at hand!

Better Sutton Council is a Greasemonkey script I’ve written to fix these problems and enable colourful, legible and bad-date-free browsing.

How to get it:

1. You must be using the Firefox browser. No Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome or what have you.

2. Install the Greasemonkey add-on if you don’t already have it. You’ll probably know about it if you do.

3. Install Better Sutton Council as a user script and if necessary, activate Greasemonkey by clicking on the greyed-out sad monkey face on the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. Once the monkey face is smiling happy and colourful, you should be ready to go.

4. Just refresh/reload/visit Sutton Council and enjoy a whole new way of browsing.

A couple of important points:

• I haven’t been bothered to track down the exceptions to the default link colours I’ve defined for darker backgrounds. My aim is to make the site more legible and usable, not to improve its overall prettiness. If you’re expecting a comprehensive redesign you’ll be disappointed.
• This “hack” operates purely in the user’s browser within a well-managed script framework for modifying downloaded web pages before they’re displayed. At no point have I compromised Sutton Council’s security or created any vulnerability on anyone’s computers. Don’t embarrass yourself by trying to McKinnon me: I haven’t done anything worse than the web equivalent of colouring my daily newspaper with crayons.

The software’s in the public domain. Modify to taste if you know how. If not, just enjoy it as it is or uninstall through Manage User Scripts on the Greasemonkey menu (right-click on the monkey face).

That’s better.

Sutton Council launched their long-awaited new website this week and it’s disappointingly dreadful in many ways. Possibly worse than anything in the design or content of the site is the sad fact that the new design has broken all the inbound links to the site, just like it did the last time and the time before that.

What does this mean, why does it matter and what can be done about it?

Links are the lifeblood of the web. Most of the time, we take for granted that we can click on links and arrive at the pages we were expecting. Nothing is more fundamental to the good operation of the web overall and individual sites than links working and continuing to work.

Now imagine a large organisation with several thousand workers. The organisation has a switchboard system and each worker has their own extension number which is available internally and externally. You are tasked with upgrading the switchboard system to a newer model or a different model from another supplier. You can imagine the chaos and costs that would be caused if the new switchboard system required that all the internal extension numbers had to be changed, so your first concern is to ensure that the handover from the old system to the new is seamless and transparent. The old numbers continue to work in the new system as everyone would properly expect. No-one would be so stupid as to expect to have to change all the staff’s phone numbers just because you’re upgrading the switchboard.

The web is no different. Instead of phone extensions, a website has pages and each page has its own address (which we call URLs). We get to a page by knowing its address or clicking on a link that encodes that address, in just the same way that we reach a person via their phone number.

Many bad things happen when a page that used to be at:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/news/latest/Lottery-winning+library+set+for+rebuild.htm

suddenly moves to:

http://www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=3531.

The most obvious effect is that clicking on the first link no longer works. You end up on an error page.

These links could be in several different places:

• within your own website
• on other people’s websites, including search engines like Google
• in your own staff’s bookmarks/favourites
• in other people’s bookmarks/favourites
• in RSS feeds
• in emails
• in Word, Excel and PDF documents
• in databases
• in calendar systems
• printed on paper on reports, posters, leaflets and other documents

Changing all the URLs of all the web pages on your site means imposing considerable direct and indirect costs on your organisation and on every individual and organisation that deals with you.

People who run websites incur the direct costs of having to change all their links to your site so that they still work. I run Sutton Active and Suttonboro which between them include dozens of links to various pages within the council website. Or at least, they did. It will be several hours work to fix them all so that, say, the link on this page about Ridge Road Library back to Sutton Council’s site works again. (Depending on when you’re reading this, this may now be fixed.) That’s time that would be far better spent improving my own site than covering up for the deficiencies in others’, and until I do it, my own site is both less useful and appears broken, reflecting badly on me. So, find the direct costs by multiplying the number of inbound links to the council’s site by the time spent to fix them. There could be hundreds or even thousands of these and most of them will have to be fixed manually.

The indirect costs are harder to calculate but are most probably far greater. These are the cost incurred when someone clicks on a link to a page within the council’s site and it doesn’t work. They just get an error page. They will then either have to search or browse for the correct page within the council’s site or they’ll go away without being able to read what they were expecting and gaining the benefits from doing so. The cost in terms of time, frustration and missed opportunities could be huge.

This is particularly serious because it affects Google and other search engines. Try searching for sutton council recycling and clicking on the link provided by Google. It’s broken, as are all the other links from search engines. It could be several weeks before the search engines rebuild their links correctly. At least for them it’s an automated process, but it’s little help to web users in the meantime.

The worst thing about the whole sorry mess is that this problem is well understood among web designers and the tools and techniques for avoiding or fixing it are widely and cheaply available. Designers call the problem linkrot and the solution, permalinks — that is, permanent links. Web usability expert Jakob Neilsen wrote about linkrot (and coined the term) in 1998 — a decade ago! — and the term has its own Wikipedia page and an estimated 60,000+ references online. Yet here is Sutton Council repeatedly breaking its connections to the rest of the web with every new website redesign as if it were blithely unaware that it’s even an issue.

I even wrote to the council about this on 15 August:

The last time the council redesigned its website (two years ago?) it cost me about three hours’ work as I had to fix all the links to various council pages on my various sites. I assume that the new design will break all these links again and that I and everyone else who links to your site will have to bear similar costs. Techniques for “permalinking” (creating web page addresses that are effectively permanent) are now well understood and widely used. I hope that your new website will use them and that the council won’t keep breaking everyone else’s outbound links with every new redesign after the one currently in progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permalink

and volunteered my time for nothing as a tester for the new site but have as yet had no substantial reply. Bit late now, really.

So how do we break out of this cycle of broken links every time we upgrade the website or move to a new content management system? Let’s look at permalinks.

Just in aesthetic terms, which of these looks better?

www.sutton.gov.uk/environment/recycling

or

www.sutton.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=691

The second link is actually the one that currently works.

I hope most people would prefer the first. And that’s handy, because not only does it read better for humans but because the link itself is meaningful and independent of any system or technology, it can always serve as the address of the recycling page for as long as it exists (and implicitly, lives within the environment section of the website).

Being “independent of any system or technology” is also important. Web technology changes all the time. Every year there are new content management systems (the specialised databases that run large websites) and even whole new underlying server systems. If we know one thing for certain it’s that we won’t necessarily be using today’s technology in a year’s time, let alone five years or ten years. To tie our web addresses tightly to the underlying technology is a mistake. In the link structure above, the address is specific both to the particulary content management system and to the web server system on which it runs. (In detail, the server is running ASP.NET which is where the aspx comes from. While making no criticism of ASP.NET, do you really want to be tied to it forever? Will it even be around in a few years?)

Even if a system isn’t going to provide meaningful names for the URLs of its pages, it can still construct simple permalinks that are independent of the content management system and the server technology:

www.sutton.gov.uk/page/691

works, as indeed does the date-based system on my own blog site here. It’s less pretty, but at least we can be reasonably sure that we could transparently move the site from one system to another without it forcing us to change the address style and break all the inbound links in the process.

In 2008, almost the only excuse for breaking all one’s links is to move from a legacy non-permalinked system to a permalinked one. You (and others) will go through the pain and expense of breaking those links but at least it will be the last time you’ll (forseeably) have to do it. Had Sutton Council moved to permalinks in this new redesign, I still wouldn’t relish the task of updating all their links but at least I’d be happy that this would be the last time I’d have to do it. (It’s 99% likely I wouldn’t have written this blog post either.) As it is, I’m asking, how many more times is this going to happen before someone at the council understands the issue and actually does something about it?

Sutton Council has externalised the cost of its poor web design onto the rest of the community. Thanks a bunch, not least because we’re paying for the site in the first place. Here’s looking forward to 2010′s redesign, when there’s just a glimmer of hope that we won’t have to go through this whole sorry farce for about the fourth time.

Stop breaking the web every time you upgrade your website.

Some questions for whoever commissioned the website:

• Were you aware that linkrot is a serious issue?
• Did you look for a content management system that supports permalinks to address that issue?
• Does your content management system support permalinks?
• If so, why aren’t you using them?
• If not, why didn’t you get one that does?
• How many 404 Not Found errors did you get in the week before launching the new site and in the week after?
• Do you have any plans to address this issue now or in the future?
• Will the next redesign perpetuate this problem or fix it?

Recently I sold my Asus Eee PC 701 netbook and it took me longer to get it back into its complex cardboard home than it did to work out how to restore the operating system and run it. In fact, I never did work out the various flaps and folds of that box properly — I just packed the power brick and battery in a separate box and gave up.

So here’s to a practical application of unboxing videos beyond conspicuous consumption. Play them backwards and work out how to get the spaghetti back in the box when its end comes.

Bring on the reboxing videos.

You want to collect the dates of birth of a group of people so that you can analyse and segment the group by age, but asking for a date of birth isn’t necessary for any specific reason and many people in the group may balk at giving you this private information.

Discussion

It’s a common conceit among people designing forms and surveys that if you ask a question, you’ll get a useful answer, but when it comes to personal information the wise designer treads very carefully.

A general rule for form design is that every extra question reduces your response rate and diminishes the chances of the form being completed accurately. Every time you add something you take something away.

As people become more conscious of the real or imagined incidence of identity theft and the predations of overzealous marketers, they are increasingly reluctant to part with personal information even where they might otherwise be happy to provide information for a purpose with which they agree.

As consumers, we understand that there are times when our date of birth will be required for official purposes. We don’t expect to be able to open a bank account or obtain a passport without it. But when we’re completing a marketing survey or simply registering with an online shop it can often feel like too much information. I don’t get asked my date of birth when I shop on the high street — why would I need to disclose it just to use the online equivalent?

Having age information about a group of people is often useful or even necessary for researchers and marketers. They might want to produce an age breakdown of a group of people using their service or participating in their research, or validate that people in a group qualify to be there where there is an age restriction.

One solution to the problem is to ask respondents for their age group rather than their date of birth:

How old are you?

• under 18
• 18-25
• 26-39
• 40-49
• 50-64
• 65 and over

This is less intrusive for respondents and more likely to gain a response than asking for a date of birth. It allows a report to be produced grouping the respondents by frequency under these headings.

Unfortunately, this approach is very inflexible. Once the respondents are placed into these groups you cannot produce a different age segmentation. In the above example, if there were a subsequent requirement to count all the people aged under 30, you couldn’t.

This approach also fails if the data are to be used over time. The age segmentations will be correct at the time of data collection but will rapidly obsolesce after that. It works for a one-time snapshot such as a survey but doesn’t work for a group who will be participating over time such as members of an organisation or customers of a business.

Resolution

These issues can often be better resolved by asking respondents for their ages and then calculating an estimated date of birth for them which is then stored. Ages are less specific than precise dates of birth and asking for them is more likely to gain an accurate response.

How old are you? _____________ (write in your age; leave it blank if you’d rather not say)

If a person responds that they are 30 today, we cannot possibly know their birthday. It could be any day between today (they’ve just turned 30) up to a year’s time less a day.

So calulate the estimated date of birth to be:

today – respondent’s age in years – six months

While there is only a 1 in 365 (ish) chance of estimating the date of birth correctly for each individual, by assuming that each person is half way towards their next birthday you prevent skewing the overall age breakdown for the group either too low or too high.

Ensure that your database or spreadsheet column is called estimated date of birth to prevent subsequent users assuming that these DOBs are accurate.

Using these estimated dates of birth you can produce sufficiently accurate age segmentations at any time in the future regardless of how you define the segment boundaries.

As a caveat, be aware that while this technique allows you to estimate the number of people in the group, say, under 30, if there’s an absolutely specific reason to find the actual members that are under 30, you can’t. You’ll get a few false positives that you’re estimating to be under 30 even though they’ve already reached their 30th birthdays.

Sometimes this happens through laziness, sometimes with careful thought and intent but mostly through ignorance and fallacy.

So why isn’t everyone serving up full-text feeds? The argument tends to go like this:

We’ve got a great website and we want people that are interested in what we do to visit it. Letting people subscribe to our RSS feed is a good way of generating more traffic as readers will click through to read the full text of articles that interest them.

There are two main problems with this line of thinking:

The assumption that a summary-only feed will generate a lot of click-through traffic is a poor one. Most people are only subscribing to RSS in the first place because it gives them a quicker and easier way to follow lots of sites. Force those people to click through to read the full articles and those people will either rarely bother clicking through or they’ll even just unsubscribe. Sadly, the people that decide website policy are often not heavy RSS users themselves and can’t see things from the perspective of those that are.

The bigger and more fundamental mistake here is to put the requirement that people visit your website above all other considerations. If you’ve got a message to get out there, put as few barriers in the way of potential readers as you can. Getting read is the only thing that matters — how and where shouldn’t be issues.

People visiting your website has its benefits for you. They will get a better “branding” experience. They may be able to find other interesting things your organisation is doing. You will be able to track these visits in your web stats.

But all these considerations are of limited interest and value to the user. They want to read your article right now. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s a good thing, right? So don’t get in their way and let them read it the way they want to. By subscribing to your RSS feed, the user has said, “I don’t want to read this on your website. I want to read it in my RSS reader.” Frustrate that good intention at your peril.

Don’t think of RSS as a teaser for the main event that happens on your website. If what you’re saying has value and importance to your readers, they’ll come back to you in other ways anyway. They’ll recommend you to others. They’ll buy your products and services. They’ll join your organisation. They’ll write about you. Most of all, they’ll feel good that you’ve chosen to put their convenience first. A little thought and generosity goes a long way.

It’s more important that your material gets read than it gets read in the way that you dictate. It’s more important that your material gets read than your ability to track that reading in your web stats — though using sites like FeedBurner you can keep stats on your feed subscribers too. If your logo and palette are more important to your branding than your words and your message, you’ve got a problem that no amount of web visits can solve.

We’re moving towards a world where information is read in a multitude of ways, many of which haven’t been provided by, designed by or even sanctioned by the original publisher. The ability of third parties to find your information, share it, combine it with others’ in mashups, convert it to different formats, translate it and redistribute it hinges on them being able to find useful, comprehensive feeds in the first place.

Other people now have a massive ability to add value to the information you produce by transforming and recontextualising it, either just for themselves or for a wider audience. Serving full-text feeds from your website is one way your organisation can be a part of that. If you choose to ignore this, you’ll be at a disadvantage to those that don’t.

You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one over the system management software that comes with the Acer Aspire 9300.

A jack has been plugged in!

A jack has been unplugged!

Do you think I don’t realise already? Who’s the one doing the plugging and unplugging?

An important usability principle is to conserve the user’s attention. Let them focus on what matters most. Emphasise the main event, quieten the minor details and remove everything that simply doesn’t need to be shown.

For pity’s sake, don’t pop up a balloon just because I’ve plugged my headphones in.