Tuesday June 23, 2009 / 3 Comments

Last month, I was interviewed by Jon Ward of the Washington Times for an article about the new Whitehouse.gov Web site. The article, published this morning, speculates that “information is harder to find on the Obama Web site than it was on the site created and run by the Bush administration.” Since the views represented in the article do not necessarily reflect my own, I thought it might be best to share my personal thoughts on the redesigned Whitehouse.gov site:

General impressions:
I remember visiting the Whitehouse.gov site prior to and immediately after President Obama’s inauguration. What first struck me about the new Whitehouse.gov site was the dramatic full-width carousel or messaging area. Whereas the previous site felt more like a news site with lots of useful information spread throughout, this administration’s version of Whitehouse.gov has more in common with product or service sites— there’s a clear central message being communicated. This design choice is consistent with the current administration, as President Obama has tried to remain firmly focused on a core set of issues. (If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you know how important I feel it is for leaders to cast a clear and compelling vision.)

Social Media
The second thing that really stood out was how the site — and this administration — is embracing social media tools like YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter. I remember hearing about how Obama would be using YouTube for his Weekly Addresses, a break with the traditional “radio” address. Moving to a video format demonstrates an awareness of how more people are communicating and sharing information. But, aside from just participating in these existing platforms, I’ve been more excited by the various areas created to facilitate a dialogue between individuals, neighborhoods and our nation’s leadership. From “crowdsourcing” topics to be addressed to making financial decisions transparent and accessible— it’s obvious that conversation and participation are a priority.

Visual Design
Beyond the structure and content changes, I’m impressed by the overall aesthetic. Whereas previous versions of Whitehouse.gov felt a bit stale and older, the new site manages to feel fresh and contemporary while retaining a sense of heritage. I appreciate subtle gestures like the textured backgrounds and attention to typography. I think the bold use of blue does a lot to create a modern feel, but then all the little accents, soft shading and nods to architectural details keep the pages distinctive and appropriate to the function of the site.

Content
I can’t say I ever frequented previous versions of Whitehouse.gov. That’s been different since this administration took office. Given the regularly updated blogs and video content, I feel a lot more connected to what’s going on in the Whitehouse. And the fact that this less “formal” content is integrated into the site (versus being buried behind a “blog” tab) creates a sense of… intimacy? I feel more connected to the conversations, issues and personalities in Washington, more so than ever before. Just look at the site navigation— “Contact Us” is part of the main navigation! With that said, I have read some articles indicating content (press briefings and presidential remarks) is missing from the site or not current— that concerns me. But the fact that we as a people, organized together online, can identify these gaps is a testament to new levels of accountability that elected officials and businesses now face.

Site Structure
Concerning main navigation, I also find the structure of the site to be intuitive. Moving from left to right you have

• content that changes frequently (“The Briefing Room” and “Issues”),
• …followed by information about our current administration (“Our Administration”),
• …which leaves the historical content that rarely changes (“About the White House” and “Our Government”).

I can stay current with the most recent events or zero in on a specific topic I care about— this structure seems natural and supports different ways people might interact with information.

Finding Information
While the new site makes it easy to browse through recent content by either the issue or media type, finding an older press release on a specific topic is best accomplished using the search tool.

To test out the previous and new versions of the site, I performed a few searches. Both versions face the same universal search problem— how do you best help people sift through thousands of documents? “Paging” results is a pretty common solution for dealing with too much content, though probably not so useful for finding a specific video or executive order. That said, the newer version of search results is better in several respects:

1. The “narrow results by:” sidebar allows you to quickly filter a long list of search results by specific categories.
2. Search results are much easier to visually scan, and
3. The “view all results on one page” feature is really useful for people who want to search within a page (with a browser search, for example).

(As a point of comparison, here is the same search on the previous version of the site. )

Also, Whitehouse.gov content hosted on external sites (such as video content on YouTube) is very well organized into different groups, making it very easy to browse through videos. And, in the case of YouTube, as the ability to search spoken words within videos becomes common, it’ll be much easier to find specific video content. This is another advantage to embracing social media— we can all benefit from the advances of those external sites who are financially motivated to improve their different technologies. One feature missing from the current site (that existed in the previous version) is the ability to browse news by date (my thoughts on this below).

I also performed a few different searches using the Whitehouse.gov search and Google site search— I didn’t find any discrepancies.

Concerning browsing behaviors, while the main “Issues” pages are obviously edited content, I feel much more comfortable with the newest versions of these pages. On the new site, the writing within the Issues area is much more terse and to the point. Comments are written like a progress report: a list of short, bulleted accomplishments, with— and this is important— links to supporting events or comments. Contrast this with lengthy fact sheets from the previous site, which often felt more like press releases and photo opps. And on the old site, where there were specific accomplishments called out, there were rarely any links to supporting information. It’s also worth noting that within the issues area, the new site surfaces related content in a sidebar area. This is useful for browsing content related to that specific issue.

Disagreement
Contrary to what the Washington Times article suggests, I do not believe the new Whitehouse.gov site has traded substance for style.

1. Style is important, not just for making a good overall impression but for also communicating information. The new Whitehouse.gov site does a much better job at communicating information.
2. Decentralizing content and making it sharable beyond the Whitehouse.gov domain not only demonstrates community participation but actually increases accountability and accessibility, and introduces a certain vulnerability to those external systems.
3. While organizing content by date is currently absent from the site, there are much better ways of finding information that have been introduced or improved (see above).
4. And what about not organizing content by date? From the article:

The biggest difference is that the Bush Web site archived all its information by year, month and day, with a sidebar menu that allowed a user to view virtually all the information from, for example, a day in 2002 — speech transcripts along with video and audio of the speech, press releases, official statements, nominations, letters to Congress, executive orders — with three clicks of the mouse.

This suggests that organizing news by chronology is a better (“three clicks!”) way to sort information. I beg to differ. Who can tell me the year/month/week that Bush stood on that carrier and declared “Mission Accomplished” with regards to Iraq? Unless it’s a significant event, or happened at or around the same time as a significant personal event, we aren’t going to think about information in terms of time stamps. Keyword searches and topical filters are going to be much more effective ways to sift through a high volume of information. “With three clicks of the mouse” assumes a user know the exact date, which is rarely the case!

There you go. My 2¢ on the Whitehouse.gov site. Is it an improvement over the previous version? I think so. Can the site be better? Of course. Is is as good as promised by Obama— the popular opinion is not yet. But, as anyone who designs Web sites and applications knows, a site is never done— only launched and then improved with time and usage.