UPDATE 1 March 2010: Let’s see how the site’s doing seven months after I originally published this article.
Someone famous once said that the true definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the results to be different. Well I keep going back to the Sutton Council website and nine months after launch it’s still not any better. Arguably it’s worse.
You’re free to republish this article under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence with credit and a link to Adrian Short / Mash the State
Today I connected 66 councils to their citizens by making it easy to subscribe to their news by email. It took me around ten minutes. I’d say this was a fairly good use of my time in terms of the ratio of effort to value produced, but I can’t claim to have done it single handed. What made it possible is that all 66 of these councils serve an RSS feed from their websites — and they’re the only ones in the country that do. Hooking those feeds up to FeedMyInbox through the council pages at Mash the State was a simple matter of dropping a single web link into a template and pushing it to the live site. Job done.
RSS is a simple way of getting data out of a website and into another program. The technology is ten years old and RSS feeds are ubiquitous on blogs, on mainstream news media websites and in Web 2.0 applications. The three leading web browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari — all contain built-in RSS readers. Yet despite running websites costing tens of thousands of pounds annually each, only 15% of UK councils bother with RSS. Nothing could be more symbolic of large parts of government’s unwillingness to think beyond the confines of their own websites than making it practically impossible to receive basic local council information like news and events except by taking a trip to anytown.gov.uk to do it on the council’s own terms.
The ten minutes it took to emailify those 66 councils compare quite unfavourably with probably a similar number of hours I’ve spent trying to scrape Sutton Council’s news into a database, and from there through Delicious into RSS and Twitter. Writing screen scrapers — programs which extract text from web pages and turn them into structured, reusable data — is sometimes tricky but Sutton’s news is trickier than most. The news archive serves inconsistent page structures and even dynamically changing URLs to compete with. I vowed never to write another scraper, though as we’ll see, that’s a promise I soon had to break.
Screen scraping and copyright infringement are the dirty not-so-secrets of the civic hacking world. Show me a useful, innovative third-party civic website and I’ll most probably be able to show you the terms and conditions that were ignored and the data that was taken and repurposed without permission or legal licence. Similar behaviour is not unknown in the public sector itself, in some cases because government organisations are recycling that very same stolen data from third party applications into their own websites. The recent Rewired State National Hack the Government Day saw some incredibly inspiring, innovative and useful projects produced in very short order. How many of these projects didn’t involve citizens jailbreaking their own government to get the data they’ve paid for? What kind of society not only massively impedes but actually criminalises — in principle if not in practice — citizens devoting their own time, skills and money to write software to improve democracy and public services? Our society, it seems.
This has to stop. Hackers have shown their ability and willingness to surmount technical obstacles and run legal risks to get the data they need but less technical citizens simply cannot. No-one should have to. A rich, technologically-advanced and supposedly forward-thinking society such as ours should make citizens’ access to government data so commonplace that it doesn’t deserve comment. No technical wizardry required. No legal minefields to navigate. Just all the data served through common protocols with open licences that permit, well, anything. Then we can focus our time and energy on the considerably more interesting higher-order opportunities that come from actually using government data, not just getting hold of it.
Last week I launched Mash the State, a national campaign to get government data to the people. It’s not a new idea but our method is. We’ll be setting up a series of challenges to the public sector, asking one group of public bodies at a time to release one specific set of data. Our first challenge asks all local councils to serve up an RSS news feed by Christmas. I wouldn’t have bet good money in 2003 that by 2009 370 councils would still be without RSS, but here we are. I’ve thrown the gauntlet down and I’m pleased to see that a couple of hundred people have signed up to our website or followed us on Twitter to help make this happen. The councils have got over eight months to do what in most cases will not be more than half a day’s work to serve RSS from their websites. Others less fortunate will have to persuade their content management system suppliers to enable this feature for them. All have got plenty of time to perform this technically trivial task in time to give the public a small but highly symbolic Christmas present that shows that government in this country is prepared to trust its citizens with their own data.
As for my promise never to write another scraper, it didn’t last long. The very first task to build Mash the State was an hour spent writing a scraper to tease a list of councils from a government website. Join us and help to hasten the day when no-one will ever have to do anything like that again.
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Having dealt with the issue of broken links on Sutton Council’s new website, today I’ll turn to some of the other usability issues that beset the hapless traveller on their road to local government web nirvana. True to the spirit of my own advice about fixing problems where possible rather than just moaning about them, I’ll present a fix that will curb some of the worst excesses and give the site better usability in some areas. Scroll to the bottom for the good stuff if you can’t wait. First, the discussion.
1. No distinct link colours, no visited link colours.
I’ve read half of these stories, but which ones?
Two of the web’s strongest conventions are to use different colours for links and body text, and to use different colours for visited and unvisited links. Ignore them at your peril.
Links need to stand out from body text so they’re easily visible at a glance, not just on closer scrutiny. The usual method is to use a contrasting colour for the links and to underline them. The underlining can be dropped in obvious groups of links such as navigation bars and at a push in body text. A different colour is pretty much mandatory. If you’ve got links, why camouflage them?
Using a different colour for visited links is all but essential so that the user can easily see which links they’ve used and which they haven’t. The more links a page has, the more important this becomes. Again, it’s effectively a mandatory usability requirement and so widespread it’s ubiquitous. Not using different colours for visited links is one of Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design.
On Sutton Council’s new site, the body text is black, the links are black and underlined and the visited links are black and underlined. Spot the difference? Clearly, badly-conceived ideas about graphic design have taken precedence over the convenience and sanity of the poor souls that might actually have to plough through some of the site’s several hundred pages. Or maybe the designers have short-term memories that can hold twenty or thirty items. Who knows?
2. The Clock/Calendar anti-pattern
Perhaps I’m not really in the target audience, but when I want to know the time or the date my first instinct isn’t to visit Sutton Council’s website. Right now I can see the time in three different places (watch, wall clock, taskbar) and finding the date requires no more effort than hovering my mouse over the clock in the corner of my screen.
Putting the current date and time in a web page is rarely necessary and often confuses. Aside from the obvious cost of cluttering the page with something that just doesn’t belong there, it can lull the user into a false sense of contemporaneity. Hey, this site is bang up to date! Just like the clock on my wall!
Sadly, the current date on a web page is often mistaken for the publication date of the web page itself. This is a problem as I hazard to suggest that very little of Sutton Council’s web content has been published within the last minute. It would be all too easy to see that date as being relevant to an otherwise undated news article or press release.
Dumping the current date and time into a web page is a shoddy anti-pattern that needs to stop. It’s a bad habit picked up by lousy designers (or lousy clients) who presumably feel that it’ll liven up an otherwise pedestrian site. If it’s not contextual it’s clutter, so leave it out.
Incidentally, given that the council’s PR department ploughs through nearly £600,000 a year, it’s worth asking whether we can get dated press releases and news articles for that money or will we have to stump up a bit more. What’s it worth?
3. Teeny text
Is it just me getting old or is the text just a tad too small? Yes, there are gratuitous “accessibility” widgets at the top of every page to adjust it, but a better approach might well have been to make it a bit bigger by default. Not everyone on the web is a 20-something 1337 h4x0rz.
Help is at hand!
Better Sutton Council is a Greasemonkey script I’ve written to fix these problems and enable colourful, legible and bad-date-free browsing.
How to get it:
1. You must be using the Firefox browser. No Internet Explorer, Opera, Chrome or what have you.
2. Install the Greasemonkey add-on if you don’t already have it. You’ll probably know about it if you do.
3. Install Better Sutton Council as a user script and if necessary, activate Greasemonkey by clicking on the greyed-out sad monkey face on the status bar at the bottom of your browser window. Once the monkey face is smiling happy and colourful, you should be ready to go.
4. Just refresh/reload/visit Sutton Council and enjoy a whole new way of browsing.
A couple of important points:
The software’s in the public domain. Modify to taste if you know how. If not, just enjoy it as it is or uninstall through Manage User Scripts on the Greasemonkey menu (right-click on the monkey face).
That’s better.
Sutton Council launched their long-awaited new website this week and it’s disappointingly dreadful in many ways. Possibly worse than anything in the design or content of the site is the sad fact that the new design has broken all the inbound links to the site, just like it did the last time and the time before that.
What does this mean, why does it matter and what can be done about it?