Feedback on changes to Data.gov.uk implemented 15 October 2013


A number of changes to the Data.gov.uk website were rolled out sometime on Tuesday. I tweeted a few negative comments based on my first impressions. Subsequently three members of the Cabinet Office team responsible for the site have separately contacted me on Twitter or by direct message, with requests for clarification or additional feedback.

My notes are below. I'm mainly concerned with the unexplained removal of functionality. While I'm aware that there is some additional functionality in the pipeline, these changes don't seem to simply be transitional. There are also a couple of bugs which, while fixable, are rather obvious and tend to suggest a lack of basic checks on the site after the changes were implemented. (I'm less interested in the "look" of the website, as that is often a matter of taste. Somebody is overly fond of corners though.)

-- Owen Boswarva, 17/10/2013


In no particular order:


1. Site Usage graphics have gone missing

See http://data.gov.uk/blog/site-usage. Below is a screenshot of what the page looks like at the moment.

The page is a post about site usage, rather than the live charts themselves, but it is linked prominently from the homepage. Nobody bothered to click through and check it?

The URLs for the graphics in the blog post can be easily repaired. However it would also make better sense to link directly to http://data.gov.uk/data/site-usage from the home page.




2. New comments added to the forum are no longer flagged

Prior to Tuesday's changes the site had a Participate page, per the screenshot below.

The list of recent and active users is no great loss. However there is now no functionality on the site to highlight the latest posts in the forum. (The "Latest blogs & forum posts" list on the homepage only displays new threads in the forum, not when comments are added.)

Anyone who wants to see whether there are any new comments in the forum has to actually browse through each of the sections in the forum itself.




3. Posting history is no longer available

Users who log in now have something called "My Workbench", per the screenshot below.

It's not clear what all of the functionality does (no documentation). However users' full posting histories, previously the main feature, are now no longer available. Users have no record of comments they have posted in the forum or added to dataset records and data requests. There is only a reduced history of data requests, blog entries, etc. that the user has started themselves.

Combined with the removal of the Participate page (see 2. above) this means that users cannot pick up on replies to their comments, other than to check the forum threads directly.




4. Comment system isn't actually working

Since the changes were implemented on Tuesday I've tried several times to add comments to data requests and to catalogue records. I have consistently been thwarted by error messages as shown in the screenshot below. (I haven't tested the Add Feedback functionality.)




5. New comment system has reduced functionality

As shown in the screenshot above: no HTML tags, no text links, no rich text. One commenting system has been replaced by another with substantially reduced functionality. (Plus, oh joy, Drupal's annoying Lexicon module enabled by default.)

The new functionality also seems to disallow editing of previously posted comments.


6. New documents in the Library are no longer flagged

For some reason the Library page no longer defaults to showing the most recent additions first, and nothing appears on the homepage when a new document is added. This greatly reduces the likelihood that new documents will be noticed. Users will discover new documents only if they proactively click the Library tab, realise that the top item isn't recent, intuite the existence of Sort By options and scroll down until they find them, and sort the list by date.


7. Browsing functionality has been removed for data requests

Previously the ODUG page (http://data.gov.uk/odug), as shown in the screenshot below, included a "See data requests" link that led to a simple list of all public data requests with the most recent at the top. There was search functionality from that page.

Following Tuesday's changes that straightforward browsing functionality is no longer available. Users can generate a list of links to all data requests by (non-obviously) clicking the Search button without entering any search terms. However it's unclear how the list is ordered and there is no functionality to sort by date.

This means there is no easy way to find the last ten data requests, data requests submitted in the past month, etc. Only users who check the site very frequently will be able to keep track of new requests.

(As a side point, why are the submit dates for data requests and documents in the Library displayed in a US format?)





General Comments

All of the above are issues noticed in the past couple of days. I haven't gone through the site systematically, and there are sections I don't use very much myself. There are also all sorts of pre-existing issues with the usability and content of Data.gov.uk that I won't belabour here. (Have ODUG stopped maintaining their material? Why does the National Information Infrastructure blurb on the homepage link directly to the catalogue of unpublished datasets, without any explanation of either the NII or what "unpublished" means? How many more years before the website is out of beta? Etc.)

The more interesting question is why the above changes to the site were implemented without any announcement or explanation. The Data.gov.uk administrators tend to maintain a low profile, and I'm certainly not advocating the Olympic levels of navel-gazing we get from the GDS team. However it would have been nice to have a short blog post telling users what was going on. It's as if the admins think the removal of functionality simply doesn't matter.

Perhaps it doesn't? I am a participatory user of Data.gov.uk, in that I quite often post comments in the forum, on data requests and in the catalogue. Given that Data.gov.uk has rather few participatory users, that means I am necessarily unrepresentative of the wider body of site users who only show up as clicks or page views. I'm tempted to suspect that whomever signed off on the design changes implemented on Tuesday does not consider the participatory parts of the site to be important. That may simply be because those parts are not used very much; but of course one of the reasons they are not used very much may be the quality of the functionality. There's potentially a vicious circle here; the functionality isn't used, therefore it is neglected, therefore it isn't used, and so on.




[ Follow-up post, 21/10/2013 ]



Last update to this page: 21/10/2013