US Government on Web Design and even Usability

About three weeks ago in class, we talked about web design, and some of that discussion connected with the discussion of usability the following week.

Then, a day later, I received an e-newsletter from the ALA with a link to an article on The Huffington Post that described how the US government is establishing guidelines to provide design standards for federal websites. A link in this article led me to a blog post by Mollie Ruskin, et al., at the US Digital Service of the US General Services Administration (GSA).

You can read the blog post here: https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/

And you can read The Huffington Post article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/government-websites-deign-standards_56096a79e4b0dd8503085247

Please note, I also tweeted this article on the #LIS753 feed.

Given how extensive the bureaucracy of federal government agencies is, it’s no wonder that there’s a maze of websites to have to navigate, with varying designs and degrees of usability. I speak from personal experience from the summer term when I was looking at government websites to find information in completing assignments I had in all my classes.

So often, especially in the case of assignments for Government Information Resources class, I had to turn to search engines to make it easier, since the obvious links didn’t go to the information I wanted to find.

Of course, there are some pretty good government websites out there. The blog post notes that these design standards drew from the standards used by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and even Healthcare.gov — the latter catching my attention, given how problem-plagued it was when first launched.

One website I am very familiar with, owing to my undergraduate background, is that of the National Weather Service. Slowly but surely, it has been implementing a new design for the websites of its various 120 weather forecast offices (WFOs) across the nation. The ones in the Eastern Region got the new design first, and more recently, the Central Region WFOs got theirs, which includes the office that oversees Northeastern Illinois and Northwest Indiana. The new design definitely has a different-feeling look to it than the old design. But hopefully, there will be more uniformity when the design is fully implement for all WFOs, especially given how the outgoing design for the Western Region WFOs is quite different, and makes it a little more unclear how to access certain weather observation and forecast products.

The one quotation in the blog post that most caught my attention was in the part about the visual design: “We wanted a clean, modern aesthetic that communicates credibility, trust, and warmth and meets high standards of visual accessibility.” The use of the word “trust” really speaks volumes: While the US government doesn’t have a perfect track record with fulfilling its responsibilities admirably, its agencies nonetheless provide important services for us citizens that we should definitely use to our advantage. Website design communicates so much, and while the US government isn’t like a business seeking to make profit, it wants to convey itself as a reliable source of information and services, because it provides so much.

Ruskin, M., et al. (2015, September 28.) 18F — Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards [Web log post]. “GSA.” Retrieved from https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/