Welcome to the council website usability dashboard! Please note - I built this site in 2013. I probably need to make some time to give the look and feel a bit of a refresh, really!
Traditional user testing of council websites in 2013 when this site was first created was done in one of two ways - (1) commission a usability consultant to run a study either with a panel of experts or a panel of ordinary people selected from a pool of volunteers, or (2) wait for the annual Socitm Better Connected report on all councils. Whilst these approaches have their stengths, they also have their drawbacks - principal amongst these being a sample testing of just 10 common tasks from the range of hund
The purpose of this site is to provide an alternative methodology for determining the usability of different council websites in England, Scotland, and Wales - by letting users carry out a series of tests from a wider pool of 70 possible tests covering a much broader spectrum of council website services, and by using a crowdsourced approach to testing the theory is that biases introduced by single testers will be averaged out amongst many testers. This does not replace other methods of user testing referred