IT’s not what it seems

The coveted Christmas No 1 slot went to Hastings Borough Council (HBC) this Christmas, for their website. The arbitrator was something called the Sitemorse UK Local Government Index. According to Sitemorse, HBC had a ‘near-perfect overall score of 9.6/10 for digital compliance and user experience’. Long frustrated by the Council website’s user-hostile ways, Chris Hurrell takes a closer look at what’s being assessed.

The HBC press release about its sudden glory was unexpected, like a Sky Bet League Two club getting to the FA Final. Sitemorse UK runs a quarterly Index, monitoring the websites of over 400 UK Local Government organisations, and giving independent benchmarking for them.

Sitemorse is a useful tool for web admins to check performance and test links in a web site. The survey is an automatic process. However it seems limited in being able to check a broader ‘user experience’. The results do not involve  any real human interaction let alone any survey of people who have used the system. As such the results are pretty meaningless – and HBC’s claims to be the number one Local Government website for user experience need to be seen in that context.

The Sitemorse assessment appears to be generic and not specific to the requirements of local government in any way. For example, assessing how to report planning issues, dog fouling, council tax queries etc.

The Sitemorse measure of User Experience is based on checking link issues, spelling, images and email links. It is not an assessment of usability or user friendliness. The compliance score will only measure page response times and errors in links. It cannot measure usability – for example how many clicks / scrolls/ pages it takes to navigate and report an issue. Being bug free is not the same as having a user-friendly system. User-friendliness needs to be designed in from the start.

Sitemorse only assesses the top 125 pages in a website, a fraction of the HBC whole. Furthermore the Sitemorse software will have only assessed a small fragment of the web applications offered by HBC. It will not have assessed interactive applications such as MyHastings and the IDOX planning system. The Sitemorse score will have excluded large parts of HBC’s web systems.

As local residents know, the HBC website is a buggy, poorly designed, poorly tested and poorly implemented user-unfriendly labyrinth of inconsistent pages which even Ariadne herself couldn’t navigate.

HBC’s hollow brag reminds me of HBC’s claims to be in the Planning Advisory Service top 10 planning departments – a claim that was easily found to be misleading. The claim by HBC to be the number one local authority website is equally misleading and untrue.

Volatile results

Hastings had a strange ‘meteoric’ rise of 66 places in Quarter 4, and all latest top 10 authorities are new entries. Suddenly Hastings is up there with Sinatra:

And find I’m a number one, top of the list,
King of the hill, a number one…

It’s hard to understand how such rapid shifts in the table can occur when most websites are stable and not subject to significant changes in such a short period.

This suggests that the mechanical scoring approach is pretty random. Why would an unchanged website see such dramatic changes in scores over such a short period? The ‘meteoric’ rise might be explained by the Index being calculated for the first time in December with a new version of Sitemorse.

Ordinal numbering is a feature of the system. Are Hammersmith & Fulham Council so bad that falling 213 places in a single quarter is meaningful?  In the same quarter as HBC rose, Newark & Sherwood District Council fell 362 places. According to this system, many Councils fall or rise 2- or 300 places in a quarter, suggesting that whatever is being measured, it’s not consistency or excellence.

How HBC can have the top spot for Quarter 4 of 2022 before the Quarter has even ended is not explained.

A dog of a website

HBC’s expertise in IT has long been a problem (more ropey than expert). Many FOI (freedom of information) requests have been refused on the claimed grounds that no information is available as an officer has left taking correspondence or the relevant sought data / information with them.  Such data is usually stored on central servers and the apparent loss of such data indicates a very casual approach to the retention and security of data which breaches HBC’s own published Data Retention policies.

Yet here’s the Council using the slightest bauble to boast about their IT systems. This is deeply troubling as is HBC’s self praise and the lavish praise from a member who wouldn’t spot a bug even if it crashed onto her windscreen. It is simply not true that the HBC website is ‘accessible and easy to use for all our residents’. More time should be spent on system testing the system to identify and remove its many bugs rather than hollow boasting.

HBC place great emphasis on their website and use it to justify cuts to face-to-face services. However the website in important functions is basically unusable.

In order to report issues the user has to create an account (useful triage that must reduce complaints / issues considerably).

The search facility is persistently unfriendly:  no searching by phrases, the results poorly sorted, etc. Any member of the public wanting to find information will be hard pressed to find it. If they find some information it is likely to be partial and unsuitable.

The whole site is a buggy fragmented mess using different styles and different applications with inconsistent page navigation. It is a constant source of frustration. It compares unfavourably with the clarity of national .gov.uk websites that cover a multitude of complex and diverse subjects in a consistent and useful way.

A small council with a small number of staff to maintain and develop its website will always have constraints — and some bugs will always exist.   However presenting this lipsticked pig as the jewel in the crown is mind-blowing cant from HBC.

Glitches, so many

Meanwhile back in the real world, I tried to use Myhastings to report a dangerous structure over the Christmas Period. As soon as I logged in I received an error message (the bug is still there — and has been there for a good two weeks so far)

This is the old ‘object reference not set to an instance of an object’ message, beloved of third-rate developers everywhere.

Having navigated to the Report a Dangerous Structure page I then found a number of issues/bugs.  The report page is out of date and useless, and in four out of five cases passes the buck to other organisations.

Two of the four links provided are out of date and point to an invalid page address. The other two links point to pages that are generic and don’t allow reporting of dangerous structures.

Link 1 to ESCC: returns Page Not Found

Link 2 to Parks: returns a link to a generic page about Hastings parks — no facility to report

Link 3 to Foreshore Trust:  returns a link to a generic page about the Foreshore Trust — no facility to report

Link 4 Residential property:  seems to work (but has not been fully explored)

Link 5  Building Control:  returns Page Not Found.

For the purpose of this article I carried out a range of tests on the MyHastings ‘Report an Issue’ pages. My bug report list (which I will be sending to HBC) found many basic issues with the system. It’s almost as though nobody has ever tested the system before.

The limitations of the planning application are legion, including its inability to provide accurate updates on search criteria. HBCs web offering makes the Post Office/Fujitsu Horizon application seem well tested and professional. The Council should not draw attention to it.

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