Just starting a piece of work looking at vocabularies. Now here’s a really interesting discovery I made this morning.

There are certain councils that have marvellous reputations and are awarded gold stars from organisations such as the Audit Commission. I was eagerly awaiting my first visit to some of these websites after hearing such glowing presentations and great stories. And surprise, surprise within minutes I was lost in jargon, inconsistency between links and content, haphazard lists of categories and a mish mash of links, graphics and content. The user experience, or at least my tuppence worth was rotten.

I would like to know, and will send an email with this request, to find out exactly how much *user testing* has been carried out with these ‘information systems’ (for that indeed is what the web should be).

It cannot be said too often, that if the end users are never sat in front of a website and asked to complete some basic tasks and comment on what that’s like - then all the design by committee is a waste of time.