Abominable…
Yesterday, I was quoted in a front-page Birmingham Post article, expressing my outrage at the shocking quality of the new Birmingham City Council website. I didn’t go out of my way to court media coverage for those views, but an early reaction of mine on Twitter seemed to attract some attention.
Usually I exercise a lot of self control when it comes to expressing opinion on underwhelming new websites and there are two main reasons for this. The first, contrary to speculation amongst the Birmingham Post website’s comments, is that expressing honest opinions about website quality is not good for business. Many of Made Media’s clients are in the public sector or receive funding from Birmingham City Council so expressing negative opinions about them is not a smart business move.
But the main reason is that I feel a good deal of sympathy for the web designers and developers in the trenches trying to build large websites. These are generally well-meaning folk trying their best to do good work, often on the end of baffling and harmful edicts from the powers that be, more concerned with organisational politics than serving Internet users. Toiling under pressure to get a large site launched, only to be thrown to the baying crowds on Twitter is a thankless vocation. Especially when Twitter is full of smart-arses who only want to talk about RSS feeds, and have no idea of the weight of political indecision that plagues these projects.
But, sadly, when I look at the new Birmingham City Council website, I don’t even get that sense of struggle. I just feel a collusion of low expectations and acceptance that this level of quality is ‘all we should expect’. This is the output of a team that has given up or doesn’t care.
For me, it’s not really the lack of RSS Feeds (inexplicable as that is) or the failure of the CSS to validate, or the difficulties keeping the site up on its launch day that really bother me. It’s the complete lack of attention to detail or quality in the content, design and information architecture that I find astounding. For those that need examples, there is a log of snarky highlights, but you just need to spend five minutes clicking around the site to see what I mean. It’s the equivalent of re-opening the Town Hall with bits of plaster falling off, missing roof-tiles, and sign-posts to facilities that never got built.
The response from Birmingham City Council so far completely fails to get to grips with this. Glyn Evans’ reasoning is that because the previous incarnation was so appalling we should simply be grateful that the new site ‘loads quickly’ and has working search. Why are Birmingham City Council blind to the obvious lack of quality in the new website?
I fear the answers lie in an approach to procurement. Typically, an organisation developing a new large-scale website would go out to some high-end specialist consultancies with experience of launching successful websites of similar magnitudes and for similar clients. These would operate a considered, proven process looking much like this:
1. Analysis - detailed review of current website content, user need, systems considerations, requirements for success, schedule
2. Design - careful information architecture, technical specification, branding, content plan
3. Build - web experts implement the new site build (and content migration) in accordance to the design
4 Quality Assurance - the website is tested throughly by the developers, the client and representative users of the site.
5. Deployment and Maintenance - the web changes constantly, so experts are retained to make regular updates
Note how this process puts an emphasis on understanding, design and testing. Exactly the things that appear lacking in relation to the Birmingham City Council website. An added bonus of this process is that by the end of phase 2, the consultancy and the client will both have a very clear idea of what the finished website will look like, and how it will operate. Because of this the consultant will be confident in committing to a fixed-price and delivery schedule. This prevents the website from going four-times over budget, and two years late.
One can only speculate as to how Capita, a huge outsourcing company, and not an expert website design consultancy, were awarded the contract to develop the new council website, but you’d guess that the politics of convenience played a large part. At a certain scale, people in charge of contracts tend to become interested more in the procurement process, than the output of that procurement. And I would speculate that this is the source of widespread disappointment in the finished website. I’d guess that the design and development process for the Birmingham City Council website was probably more like this:
1. Procure outsourcing partner
2. Procure Content Management System
3. Overpay consultants to set-up CMS.
4. Get team to cut and paste content from old website to new website. Wow this is taking forever!
5. Launch site for God’s sake. People are asking questions!
Birmingham City Council repeatedly make reference to the fact that the site has 17,000 pages. One might ask if anyone stopped to look at those pages before migrating them over to the new site, and checked whether the content and structures really made sense or served users? Perhaps we didn’t need all of those pages! You can see that very little thought was given, because a cursory review of the site shows that much of the content is broken or out of date.
A better process for dealing with 17,000 pages would be:
1. Write a computer programme to connect to the old CMS and import the pages into the new one
2. Set it to strip old, broken formatting, clean up dodgy HTML code, and report broken links and missing images
3. Run the computer program
4. Allow content and information architecture experts to restructure content to fit considered IA
5. Assign team to review each page carefully using a formal quality control process.
This process would not make a dent in £2.8m. Not even for 17,000 pages.
The conclusion I draw, looking at the new website, is that the team carrying out the build and migration included some well-meaning but inexperienced people, and suffered a severe lack of people with experience in IA and of successfully migrating and launching large websites. It also looks like the website was really treated as an IT migration project rather than an infomation design project.
And so on to the cost. Most coverage of the debacle to date has focussed on the £2.8m reported cost of the website. The fact is that real, sustained expertise at this scale costs money, and if the new website were truly to revolutionise the way we interact with our council, an investment in the region of £2 per council-tax payer feels like good value to me. The problem is that there’s nothing revolutionary about this website whatsoever. The current level of achievement is to swap out the CMS and design two new templates, poorly. You only get a shot to get it right with a website like this once every five years, and with this release we’re where we should have reasonably been, approximately five years ago. i.e. Not nearly as good as Manchester.
So it’s not the squandered money I’m angry about. It was the inevitable sense of wasted opportunity that tipped me over.
