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Shout Out for Utah.gov

Wednesday, June 10. 2009 at 11:23 PM | by Coby Logen in Government 2.0

Utah.gov is quite an impressive site!

The best part is that Utah.gov isn't just innovative and sexy, but also well-organized and easy to use.

If you're interested in State and local government site design, I recommend Paul Canning's summary of several innovative things that Utah is doing online. Dave Fletcher, the Utah CTO, also wrote a good post on the objectives and back story for the Utah.gov portal.

My only criticism is that, generally, icons (such as those front-and-center on the Utah.gov home page) are best paired with labels that are always visible. But this is a minor criticism.

Great job, Utah.gov Web Team!

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Thanks for that Coby!

#1 paul canning (Homepage) on 2009-06-11 08:21 (Reply)

You're kidding right??? okay - it may be trendy - and cute - and lots of other things - but it is a usability nightmare. Everything is moving and certainly the user should have control of what moves and what doesn't. Then the icons are fun to play guess the icon game! But several of them are not representative.

#2 Anonymous on 2009-06-18 16:12 (Reply)

If one animation and a few bad icons are the worst things about a major State-wide portal overhaul, and the team behind it is listening to customer feedback, then by all measures it is a huge success.

Dave Fletcher is receiving and digesting this very feedback, and I believe he will adopt it: http://davidfletcher.blogspot.com/2009/06/absorbing-comments-on-new-utahgov.html

Government web teams must be given the room to try new things and make improvements where needed rather than have their work criticized as a "nightmare," lest we risk deterring government web innovation.

Given the state of most other State websites, if this is a nightmare, then please let's have more!

#2.1 Coby Logen on 2009-06-21 11:08 (Reply)

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