WASHINGTON -- When President Bush's whitehouse.gov site opened its virtual doors on Saturday, it wasn't without glitches: The First Homepage was riddled with broken images, placeholder messages and bad links.
When asked about the state of the site, a harried White House spokesman said, "we're still trying to get everything up and running here." Monday was the first day at work for Bush's new press aides. Bush transition spokesman Tucker Eskew could not be reached for comment.
Wired News spoke on the phone to Jakob Nielsen -- design virtuoso and well-known Web usability critic -- about what's good, what's bad and what needs to be fixed on the U.S. Executive Branch's Web window to the world.
Wired News: Did you have a chance to look at the new whitehouse.gov site?
Jakob Nielsen: Yes. What's actually astounding is that the problems are still there despite having been reported in public. People can make mistakes -- but taking this long to repair them (is unusual). That indicates to me that they still don't have their act together.
By way of comparison, when Hewlett-Packard launched a new Web design, I discovered some new error there. I just posted it on my home page as a kind of challenge -- let's see how long it takes before they fix it -- and it took three hours.
WN: What are the good points of the new design?
JN: First of all, one has to grant that the Bush administration doesn't have as much time to prepare as they traditionally would. But that site could have been put together by one person in a few days.
There are a few good things about this site. It's simple, which is good. Many of the early White House websites were filled with pictures, which took a long time to download. It could be because they don't have a lot of content, but it is easier to navigate.
They've done quite a good job of accessibility for disabled users. It's very easy to access text-only version from every page. That's very good. Most other websites don't have that.
They've generally done a good job (on accessibility). Compared to most company websites, this website is actually fairly good. But they have problems (with putting labels on images for text-only connections).
Also when you look at things like the biography of the (most recent presidents) those are very brief, which is good. What is bad is that there are no links from the brief biographies into in-depth ones.
WN: What's bad about it?
JN: The worst is lack of content. There's close to no content, to be honest.
The new administration doesn't have a lot of accomplishments yet. But they could have things like who was nominated for the Cabinet, including biographies. A lot of additional information about things they're doing, their policy papers, things they're planning on doing.
It also seems odd that when you click the press page, it doesn't provide you with the address of the press office, which is a standard thing to do.
When they put up the inaugural address, they could have supplemented it with multimedia.... A good thing to do is to have audio clips of particularly good sound bites.
Several audio clips of good pieces of the speech and maybe a few video clips as well would have been a reasonable thing to do. A really professional organization would have had those things up within minutes or within hours of the speech. At least two days later they should.
There's actually a coding deficiency in the text-only version. They reversed the sequence of two of the directories in the path. It indicates a lack of debugging. Those types of problems ought to have been detected, particularly due to the small size of this website.
There are actually two different goals met by the same website: Background on the administration and the history of the White House. They are somewhat intertwined. If they separated out the two in more of a clear way, when Bush took over there'd be no need to touch the area of the website about the White House in general. That would not be political and that would not need to be changed.
WN: They took some pages from the old whitehouse.gov site, but some are out of date.
JN: They still have information about tours from Jan. 17, which has to be updated. You don't want to keep old information on your website.
There's also not a link from the White House logo to the home page. Every page has a White House logo, which is good.... But you should be able to click on the big obvious thing on each page. The search function is easy to use.
WN: But if you click "Search" without typing anything in, it searches for the word "search."
JN: Now that is silly. That's a good example of small things that haven't been put right. It's a lack of quality assurance.
The bigger thing is that it ought to be possible to make a small website like this in the time available. It quite feels as though it might have been an afterthought for them.
WN: Let's say President Bush reads this interview, and says we need to hire Jacob Nielsen to fix whitehouse.gov. What should be done?
JN: What really should be done is the full process, which is that you want to start out discovering the users' information needs, which is why people are at the website. If it were a normal company, you'd have access to the server logs for the most popular areas and also the search logs.
Given the tensions between (the incoming and) the outgoing administration, maybe they couldn't get that ahead of time. There ought to be a rule that when you're changing administrations the old one has to turn over information to the new one.
Even if they couldn't get access to the server logs, they could still run usability tests, so you'd get information about what worked and didn't work from the old site. Now that they have the new design up and it's very, very thin, you need a plan to put up content (perhaps from the campaign website).
WN: There's also the inauguration website and the transition website.
JN: Usually I would recommend against repurposing content, but given how sparse the site is, that's probably the first thing they should do. They could get that moved over in a few days. I say a few days instead of a few hours because you may want an editor to review the content to make sure it's appropriate for an official site.
I'd put together a two-step plan: A quick fix, in two days or so. And a longer-term fix, which could possibly take a few weeks to do. And to do that you'd take a look at what are a user's tasks, and what information architecture could be in place.
I'm not sure that the structure that they have now will hold the vastly more information they'll have available half a year from now.... That's an important task, to map out a scalable architecture.
If you had a huge budget, you'd hire several designers and do a parallel design exercise.... The goal would be to explore several different ways to have page designs represent the information architecture. That's about a one-week process. After that you pick not the winner, but the winning aspects of the best designs. The rest you throw out and say it's the cost of doing business. Then you iterate two or three times. This could have been done in a month.
WN: What would you take from the old whitehouse.gov design?
JN: What I remember is that I thought it was rather heavy, both in terms of the graphic and download time, and putting it on a little bit thickly about how good they were. It comes from politics, but I think you want to scale back a little bit.
That would be my advice for the new site as well. The less blatantly you promote yourself, the more credibility you gain. Credibility is a major issue on the Web.
WN: What examples could the whitehouse.gov team follow?
JN: The standard thing that comes to mind are sites like Amazon and Yahoo, which let you get through large amounts of information in a very efficient manner. They should probably take some lessons from Yahoo since they'll have a lot of (information eventually) in place.
Another point is that given their particular position, they need to have more of that official image to it as well. And that's a little bit odd when you look at the homepage right now. It doesn't look very official. It looks like someone put it up in two hours.
