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Manchester City Council

manchester.gov.uk

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Re: Manchester City Council

#181

Post by laumars »

rusew wrote: post #176
laumars wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. One of my pet peeves is people who insist that "good design" has to have an emphasis on being pretty. Design is as much about function as it is form, and in the case of government sites, having easy navigation, accessibility and relevant content is far far more important than being pretty. Sadly, most UK government sites are both ugly and horrible to navigate. Or at least that was the trend until recently, t…

But users who perceive a site to be "pretty" will usually experience it as easier to use than an uglier site, even if the uglier site is easier to use structurally. "Pretty" often translates to "easy," because users trust the design more.

Interesting point. I hadn't considered that kind of psychological effect but it does seem plausible given the perverse subconscious crap that people perceive (wine tasters listing off red wine flavors when tasting red-died white wine, miracle healing properties of placebo drugs, etc)

Re: Manchester City Council

#182

Post by JoeKM »

yen223 wrote: post #32
jerguismi wrote: post #11

No. Goverment web sites should be minimal design & content - black text on white background, no extra graphics. I don't want to pay taxes so that these latte-sipping designers can create cool projects.

You want government websites to look like a domain-squatter's page: https://www.gov.uk/ ?

Yes please. That is the most beautiful government website I've ever seen. Simple. Readily informative.

Not only is the landing page excellent, but most websites can't figure out layout beyond the landing page. Check out an article page:

https://www.gov.uk/being-taken-to-employment-tribunal-by-emp...

Simply elegant.

Edit - The landing page could look less like a sea of links if they put a simple 16x16 glyph icon next to each link that represents it.

Re: Manchester City Council

#184

Post by wisty »

Spooky23 wrote: post #81
nnq wrote: post #57

UX fail: Big useless slider/carouse with the slide captions obscured under the huge pics, way under the fold... and to prevent this big fat carousel from being too low on the page (...but it still is), useful services links are one click away under that 'other services' button, instead of being able to just scroll to them! ...it's amazing how many people totally miss the point of sliders/carousels/slideshows: to sell…

That's what they are doing -- they are trying to "sell" adoption and a city festival.

Really? I didn't notice. The caption was under the slider, and I couldn't see it. I just saw some picture of a family.

Re: Manchester City Council

#188

Post by 6d0debc071 »

EGreg wrote: post #131
DigitalSea wrote: post #70

I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider. While I agree that the trendy loo…

Why don't governments design sites with multiple themes for multiple targets? And speaking of being accessible ... why do their sites have so much small text? No, I think government agencies could make better use of fonts and sizes, at least.

> Why don't governments design sites with multiple themes for multiple targets?

http://www.manchester.gov.uk/accessibility/settings

Really though, the chances that tertiary government - like the ones who manage a city - keep a website designer on staff seem low. What would he do the other 360 days of the year? If they want to buy something like that, chances are it has to go out to tender. IT departments in non-IT firms are likely to be predominant busy with dealing with network issues, making computers run far too slowly, and issuing new mice and keyboards.

Heck, their CMS is certainly government procurement service. They advertise the fact on their site:

http://jadu.net/gcloud/cloudstore

The real question is why a bunch of councils don't stick their money together and lock a bunch of programmers up in a basement to make cool tools for them.... That would seem the obvious thing to do - what are the odds that your council has a demand that no other council has?

Re: Manchester City Council

#189

Post by meerita »

DigitalSea wrote: post #70

I applaud the change and thinking outside of the box, but the Manchester City Council website looks like a $45 Wordpress theme off of Themeforest. The slider appears to offer no value to the site other than taking up a massive amount of room without really justifying its existence. I'm not a designer, I'm a developer and I am struggling to understand the reasoning behind that slider. While I agree that the trendy loo…

I think you over reacted and misjudged a lot on this and I completely disagree with you.

They've used blue on links, clearly the best color for color disability and the contrast is really nice on the homepage and other sections. I do not foresee any kind of eyesight problems.

The rest of the stuff you mention as a catastrophe are really just minor problems. They can be solved without problems. Most of the images aren't objects on the document, they're just background images on span elements, so no trauma for the disabled.

Buttons, if rounded, better studies has shown, and this website is not using parallax, so what's the point of attacking designers who clearly didn't abused of the latests and hottest webdesign techniques.

Re: Manchester City Council

#190

Post by DanBC »

xlevus wrote: post #187

What's with the last image in the carousel? It seems to take strong cues from soviet propaganda. The red flag, workers holding their tools, ready to fight. Did Manchester become the Soviet Republic of Manchester? http://img0083.popscreencdn.com/101036667_amazoncom-chinese-...

People in the UK are fine with such images. Soviet imagery (usually fake cyrillic with reversed capital Rs) makes its way into advertisements and such pretty often.

Most youth will only be vaguely aware of the origins of that style of imagery.

It is a bit weird, now that I think about it. It's a bit like Korean bars being "Hitler themed".

It would have been a lot more weird if they were showcasing actual Manchester City Council workers.

EDIT: Here's a great book about soviet political posters. I won an award at school, and I chose this book. It was handed to me by, I think, Baroness Warnock. I can't remember what she said, but it was kind and funny.

(http://www.amazon.com/The-Soviet-Political-Poster-1917-1980/...)

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