David Galiel New Media Consulting

Nextgov.com, a website that focuses on “Technology and the Business of Government”,  published a Flash-based presentation of federal federal websites (linked at the end of this post), that they, and the experts they consulted, consider to have implemented best new media practices.

Nextgov.com notes,

These sites are not what we would consider to be the best of all federal Web sites — though they certainly could give a number of others a run for their money — but rather sites that employ what consultants say are best online practices. They don’t all make use of the latest and greatest in Web 2.0 technology or sport cutting-edge designs, and that, we’ve learned, can be a good thing.

Each of the agencies responsible for these sites paid careful attention to what their users wanted to see and do online. While technology changes rapidly, striving to meet the needs of the public will always be the foundation for any great government Web site, online researchers told us.

[Emphasis added]

The sites are, NASA, Library of Congress, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Social Security Administration, and Transportation Security Administration.

The presentation offers as good a starting point as any for discussion about appropriate technology and user-centered design. The content is good and points to many applaudable features on the federal sites discussed.

Unfortunately, the presentation itself violates basic principles:

• Unnecessary use of Flash for a static presentation, with distracting, delayed, fade-in effects, where simple dynamic HTML would suffice;
• A non-intuitive secondary navigation system within each agency study (the unmarked green bars at the bottom). The designers acknowledge this by adding a gratuitous and inaccurate “roll over green buttons to learn more” (inaccurate because rolling over does nothing, the buttons must be clicked) – and then compound the problem by placing the notice only on the fifth and final page of the first tab, NASA’s, a page one can only reach by….clicking on the green buttons;
• This, in turn, exposes the linear thinking behind the presentation – an assumption that user will necessarily view the tabbed sections in order, like a slide show;
• Low contrast between background and text, particularly headlines, in a fixed-width, 960px Flash app;
• Non-selectable (and thus non copy/paste-able) text and non-printable content limits the ability to share and link to the content or to review it offline;
• Inaccessible to vision-impaired users – a text to speech application cannot access the content in the app, and there is no separation of presentation from content, so it cannot be viewed without graphics or styles.
• Non-cued links – clicking on any of the images launches a new browser window loading the agency website being reviewed, with no indication (either in a status bar or pop up) of this behavior.
• A pseudo-address bar, showing the URL of the agency being reviewed, features non-selectable text – clicking on it launches the agency in a separate window. The links haven’t even been proof-read – the TSA link features a double back-slash, and several of the links go to “index.html” or “index.shtm” rather than to the actual root domain, as the other do, to protect against broken links if the target site changes its technology over time (and changes a home page to index.php, index,htm, index.asp, etc. Redirects created during a technology update should take care of such changes, but one should never make assumptions about target domains).

It is unfortunate that these and other violations of best practices undermine what is otherwise a good presentation about how government websites can and are utilizing best practices.

Nextgov – Best Practices for Government Web Sites [page loads Flash presentation]