I like the new government look http://alpha.gov.uk/
I don't know if you have seen this already but I quite like http://alpha.gov.uk/
I like the feedback options to users, the local content, the reactive forms and above all the simple user interface.
Robert Fransgaard -
Creative Director and Senior UX Consultant | User Experience and Rapid Design Visualisation team at Capgemini UK
www.fransgaard.com/blog
www.twitter.com/fransgaard
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Cheers Robert, really interesting.
Good to see they've already mentioned accessibility on the blog.
James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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Yes absolutely.
It IS a prototype but already at this stage you need to think ahead especially with a project like this.
I think it is a bold move by any standards and especially government to create such a public facing proto type. Gut feel it will pay off big time as they crowd source feedback from the industry
Robert Fransgaard -
Creative Director and Senior UX Consultant | User Experience and Rapid Design Visualisation team at Capgemini UK
www.fransgaard.com/blog
www.twitter.com/fransgaard
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Looks and functions really nice. A lot more easier on the eye than current .gov sites.
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I know its a prototype but I actually think they've gone mad with whitespace, the amount in places really is atrocious. Design wise its quite poor and not helping to sell what might be a good product.
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Are some pages broken, such as the redundancy advice example?
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| Ben Millard wrote: |
| Are some pages broken, such as the redundancy advice example? |
How do you mean "broken?" Do you mean a broken link?
I just clicked on it (today) and it opens up fine.
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The main content of that page has a blue textured background. The rest of the site has a white one, from what I've seen. The legibility of the text is a bit less because of this background, which makes me think there's a missing element which should be adding the white background.
The departmental carousel is a fresh way to show what's new, for central government! The clickable area seems a bit glitchy (Firefox 3.6.17 on Windows XPsp3). It has an alpha-transparent PNG mask to shape the images - a clever technique which rarely gets deployed to 'real' websites.
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| Ben Millard wrote: |
| The main content of that page has a blue textured background. The rest of the site has a white one, from what I've seen.
The legibility of the text is a bit less because of this background, which makes me think there's a missing element which should be adding the white background. |
Ah, yes. I noticed that too. Thanks for the clarification.
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Just realised this topic was created about a month ago, so this project has been running for a little while by now? After rummaging around it somewhat thoroughly, I wrote a more detailed technical review of alpha.gov.uk on my blog.
| Ben Millard's Blog wrote: |
| It’s an interesting ‘direction’. But the best of us already know the direction, it’s our day job, and many sites have been doing it that way for years. |
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| Ben Millard wrote: |
| The departmental carousel is a fresh way to show what's new, for central government! The clickable area seems a bit glitchy (Firefox 3.6.17 on Windows XPsp3). It has an alpha-transparent PNG mask to shape the images - a clever technique which rarely gets deployed to 'real' websites. |
Ben I never picked up on this so had to go look using the same browser and OS. The carousel doesn't work how I expect it to, clicking on an arrow I expect it to rotate but it sorta very quickly does then redirects me. Very odd indeed. Enjoyed your write up and thanks for the nod and agreement! It sounds pedantic to some but to me aesthetics are very important when trying to sell a concept and at the moment it looks like someone has taken the view that the majority of users have either huge screens or require glasses!
Would be curious to know what you think of our version of directgov bearing in mind we have limitations and started with directgov as a platform.
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My 0.1s impression is that it's great. Strong, clear visual indication of what's what. There aren't loads of different styles, just enough, and they felt coherent to me. Font sizes also seem reasonable, with headings particularly strong. I do like a bit of Rockwell, sorry to say. 
- The absence of bullets from the many lists of links reduces visual noise.
- No focus rectangle or :focus styles?
- HTML has a big Advice Guidance section commented out. That can seem like content hiding and increases the filesize, anyway. If the CMS is generating the links on-the-fly then a slight CPU waste as well.
- HTTP caching is disabled, in effect, since the homepage is set to expire as soon as it is sent?
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| Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:37:57 GMT
Content-Type: text/html Expires: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:37:57 GMT X-Expires-Orig: Mon, 20 Jun 2011 20:37:57 GMT Cache-Control: max-age=3, must-revalidate, private Etag: "937d33-835279ae3d18" Transfer-Encoding: Chunked 200 OK |
So yeah, a few things to ponder. But overall
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Ben thanks a million for this, you've pointed out a few things we've missed and others definitely worth addressing when we come to do a redesign/realign later in the Autumn.
The linked headings thing has been bothering us but we felt that underlining them would add too much noise to the page, same for adding an icon beside them to indicate they're links. However, I think where there are descriptions underneath there should be a more link so you can click that or the heading for the same target, maybe just hasn't rolled out to all pages just yet.
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What a delightful site. Sure puts other government sites to shame. Governments in Australia where I live, could learn a lot from that site. But then of course, they would have to begin to see faults in what they are doing. That's not going to happen anytime soon.
Kirsten Plotkin
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Happy to see such websites and also the analysis that you guys done......
Dreaming why this could not happening in INDIA
-muty
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