Camden London Borough Council are currently re-designing their site in a very interesting and very transparent way. Learning perhaps from the public mistake of Birmingham and the private but altogether more serious mistakes that see council websites turn into cash blackholes with no discernible improved product at the end.
The Camden council web team are documenting the project stages, sharing their learning throughout and encouraging public feedback and comment on the process. Clearly grounding their development priorities in usability research and accessible design the process has only just begun, but all results so far are online.
This is surely the way to go. Demonstrating a transparent process, backed up by research, using clear methodologies, encouraging the public and volunteers to involve themselves and providing articles and pieces of interest from which others can learn. It will be interesting to see how the site turns out many months from now, but I am willing to bet it will be pretty good.
It appears council website re-design methods are hopefully changing for the better. Gez wrote on the blog back in March about Bristol City Council holding an event for the local digital community to share expertise on their new website strategy. So a trend perhaps for websites which have had the public eye cast over them before final deployment?
Websites can be an expensive old business and if for their own sanity as well as their users, councils should open up their web re-designs and strategies for a bit of public constructive criticism. A point we have laboured over many times on this blog (and especially in our audit) is the simple, easy wins which make a users life so much easier. By creating an interactive and inclusive process you get all this useful information BEFORE you have built your site – a bit of a no-brainer if you want to actually implement it.
