It is good to know Lancashire is one of the councils thinking out of the box, and catering for its users. Things (as we say here in Lancs) Can Only Get Better.

You have to admire people or councils that make a start and work towards digital engagement and enabling users to access the info they require in an efficient way.
Power to the People.

For myself I think Lancashire’s implementation works better than Westminster’s, though I agree the search box needs to be more dominant. Two strengths for me are the prominent switch to Classic view (which is not obvious on Westminster’s site) and the strong single-image design of the site’s homepage to support council campaigns. Provided they can maintain the freshness of the design by further campaign images, I think it’s a potential winner.

But as ever, its all very well having a Google style homepage. If you don’t get the fundamentals behind it right then its all rather academic. Reliance on the search means that users must be able to find what they’re looking for first time (or second at a push).

When I tried out Lancashire’s site I gave up on the new model pretty quickly, switching to Classic view for an altogether better user experience.

In Leicestershire, we have always struggled to get contributors to our website to test with users and we know we have to make improvements, but what we have implemented is (in effect) ongoing live testing with all our users through the use of the SOCITM survey and “comment / rate this page”. All the comments coming in form this are checked monthly and we then note any changes made because of them.

Like you I’d hope that they’ve done user-testing through development, it’s certainly a big step to take without having actually talked to real people during development…

I’m not sure I’ve ever visited my council’s website – what would you actually want to do there? Serious question?

Simon

I guess this is just me being lazy and, rather than shutting down navigation, we should concentrate on making it better. How to do that though is the big question.

@Pez exactly on ‘less-experienced users’. IME designers often think people have – or worse *should have – the same webskills as them. met far too many who ooze arrogance.

@martin I find it all too easy to believe, and, worse, that it wasn’t done as part of an iterative process, i.e. properly

There’s another issue which is what is their specific homepage use. Most traffic would come from Google search and referrers so is it designed for homepage users? that segment?

@cyberdoyle if search has been properly tweaked and optimised as your searches might suggest then it could work, *but I’m still to be convinced that closing down navigation and forcing a shift to search works for all the audience. I haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.

Simon