20 Mar 2003 | Tim said...

Irrellevantly, i'm trying really really hard to make out what that photo is of...in the top banner above the "For" in "For Business." Is that a big shaggy dog? A land-mine explosion?

On another note, here in Mass...I basically refuse to try to use gov't sites to do things like renew my license, etc. I figure there is enough incompetance in the face-to-face transactions...I fear what on earth could happen in the "black box" of a poorly designed gov't interface. At least there's a discourse (albeit annoying) when I do things in person...not a sinking feeling of "uhh...what just happened...did that just work?" while at their site.

Maybe that's just me, though.

20 Mar 2003 | Paul said...

You mean the lion out in front of the Art Institute, Tim? Big shaggy dog? Naah, just JPEG compression.

But man, that site is bad. Check out the mystery meat navigation on the right side of the Traffic and Transporation page. A big snow route sign, okay, that probably goes to snow info. Something about teddy bears with unintelligible text underneath... because someone doesn't know how to make thumbnails in Photoshop. A boy and his dog... about dog adoption? What? The last picture is my favorite, though. It looks like a few people standing over a chalk drawing on the sidewalk... and it links to info about sports.

I'm sure that the right side was sold as an "exploration system for users", or some such nonsense. Great, just what I want to do when I'm looking for info: play mystery meat games.

20 Mar 2003 | 8500 said...

I found the information for the parking permits in under 5 minutes and within 6 clicks. I immediatly went for the search and entered "chicago parking sticker" and got zero results. I then tried "parking permit" and the first link on the results page was "Purchase a Residential Parking Permit." That link sent me to the city clerk page you mentioned.

The odd thing is that if I enter "parking permits" in the search field I get a much different order of results with truck permits dominating the first results page.

If you browse instead of search it only took a couple of clicks for me too. Under "For Residents" you click "Traffic and Transportation" and permits is one of the links on that page. This isn't to say that your experience (JF) isn't valid but it is the experience of just one person and mine seemed to differ widely from yours.

20 Mar 2003 | Tim said...

Ooh, a Lion...ok, I see it now :) Gracias. That's my not-been-to-Chicago-ever ignorance showing through.

I'm thouroughly enjoying getting lost in this site...much like you can't stop fiddling with an aching tooth.

I did find this disclaimer:

"The City of Chicago does not warrant or make any representations as to the quality, content, accuracy, or completeness of the information, text graphics, links and other items contained on this server or any other server."

There you go.

20 Mar 2003 | JF said...

8500, I wasn't looking for a Residential Parking Permit, I was looking for a sticker that shows your car is registered in Chicago. From the site: "If you live in the city and own a motor vehicle, Chicago city law requires that you purchase an annual city sticker." Here they call it a "city sticker" but elsewhere they call it a "vehicle sticker." Yuck all around.

20 Mar 2003 | 8500 said...

Here they call it a "city sticker" but elsewhere they call it a "vehicle sticker." Yuck all around.

That is a big problem when a site doen't understand the natural language of their audience. Your right it should be flexible enough to handle both terms.

20 Mar 2003 | Scott M. said...

I hear JF. I just realized I needed to renew my plates and had a hell of time. And good god was the server slow. I think I was on an Illinois site, not Chicago, but I've also had city sticker woes on the Chicago site, as well. It's crap.

20 Mar 2003 | Benjy said...

I remember trying to find a way to contact the city regarding a traffic issue that I thought needed to be addressed because of nearly daily near accidents. I spent forever trying to locate the correct city bureau or dept. to contact, and then I can either call the 311 city info line or call the dept. itself. Where were the email addresses or web forms?

They have that 311 catch-all number, so I decided to see if there's now a form for the same purpose:

I decided to again try and make my same complaint:

• The drop-down for issues is very limited, and you're supposed to figure out that "Internet Miscellaneous" is the one to pick for those issues not listed. Personally, I'd think that's to report site errors.
• The next page asks for address, but doesn't specify whether it's the location of the problem or the contacting person's home address.
• My issue doesn't have a street address -- it's in regards to an onramp. So I put an "x" since there's no street address, but I get a pop-up saying "You must enter a valid number (or leave blank) to continue." So, I leave the number field empty I get a popup staying "You must enter a valid street address to continue." Huh? I thought you just said I could leave it blank! So I put in the street coordinate and move on.
• The form field to state the problem is only 1 line tall --hard to see what you've written.
• This page also asks for the "Caller Information," meaning address, etc. Good thing I put the problem's address and not mine on that last form -- I wasn't sure what they wanted. And online, I am not a caller.
• I submit the form and all I get is a blank page. Did it submit or not? How do I know it was received? wait for a response? Wait to see if the issue is ever solved?

20 Mar 2003 | Dave said...

On the nightmare of Mass Govt. web sites:

My wife, 4 months ago got a speeding ticket (from State Police). Being a good citizen, she goes to the SP web site, finds a link to pay for the ticket, inputs the information & receives a receipt saying the ticket is paid for.

Fast forward 2 months and her car registration renewal is rejected due to an outstanding speeding ticket. After 1 hr on the phone, it turns out you can't use the web page to pay for tickets *the same day you get them* because the officer has not put them into the system... "But why was my CC charged?" my wife asked. "Because thats how our web page works!" (BTW, I looked. No notification about same day payments, nothing... and she had to resubmit the payment!)

Insult to injury, when she returned to the page to make a payment on the ticket after confirming it was in the system, the page only takes payments during "normal business hours" (nothing like the efficency of the web hard at work!), and you are told this *after* inputting all information, including CC number...

Man, I'd like to meet those designers in a dark alley sometime...

20 Mar 2003 | steve said...

On the other hand, a government site that gets a lot right is Virginia's DMV. I've changed my address, created a plate, and renewed my registration all without hassle.

20 Mar 2003 | Steve said...

I don't remember having that much difficulty paying for my city sticker when I lived in Chicago. Then again, I may have just used whatever URL they included in the renewal form. And anyway, why are you getting a sticker now? Thought they didn't renew till June or July. New car?

one thing I've found with using governemnt sites is that going to the broad state or city site is a nightmare, because they are so often organized by city department. Once you get to the appropriate department, things go much more smoothly. For instance, when I moved to California, it took a little work to find the DMV site. Once I was there, scheduling appointments to get my license and registration was very simple.

20 Mar 2003 | norton said...

Imagine trying to renew your license in Baghdad right now...talk about troubles.

20 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

MN has a new state portal:

http://www.state.mn.us/

I'm so embarrassed.

Obviously, all of these government agencies are FINALLY getting these portal proposals that were proposed back when portals were hip (umm...'97?) through all of the red tape.

20 Mar 2003 | Sean said...

About 99 percent of municipal websites are just plain awful. I'm the webmaster for the City of Coconut Creek, Florida http://www.creekgov.net and I'm constantly amazed at why government organizations with so much valuable information to share dedicate so few resources toward organizing or presenting that information effectively.

The Center for Digital Government holds the premier state, county, and city government web site awards where they pick an annual 10 Best List. Most winners are terrible. But I've been told, at times, to "do what they do."

In most areas like engineering, finance and all the usual city services, the bigger cities are always the "leaders". I have to explain that the same does not hold true for web sites.

I see other cities and counties hiring "tech" guys to run their sites rather than graphic artists, designers, information architects, writers or editors. My position, for example, was really for someone who can run IIS and script in ASP, blah, blah, blah. It's a fluke they hired someone who can do more than code.

Also, government agencies can't deal with hiring for non-quantifiable positions. While a city engineer can point to their certifications, degrees and years of experience, those things either don't exist or are meaningless in the creative fields. That's why government brochures, license plate designs, most forms, and other publications look like an amateur did them - because they did.

21 Mar 2003 | alisha said...

"On the nightmare of Mass Govt. web sites:...
Man, I'd like to meet those designers in a dark alley sometime..."
---
bah! I would have been spitting bullets! Im suprised she even got a auto-response and a receipt.
---
"I imagine that theres no bigger political nightmare than building a government site."
---
Depends on who youre dealing with. We did a website for a branch of the German Environmental Agency and it was a dream. They were organized, honest, fast and paid well (and on-time!). I guess not all bureaucrats are the same. But then again, we only had "designer, engineer and bureaucrats". Maybe that made it easier.

21 Mar 2003 | Marshall said...

"The essence of everything is simple."

The essence of that line: oversimplification.

When discussing a site that is in desperate need of repair, sometimes oversimplification is a good starting point. Rampant disorganization encourages it; user frustration often demands it.

But while it's one thing to preach about the importance of distilling a project down to its most intrinsically significant purpose, it's quite another to suggest that the essence of everything is necessarily simple.

Of course, the sentence makes logical and syntactical sense, literally taken. However, even conceding the point on its face:

The essence of everything may be simple, but is it adequate?

--MSV

21 Mar 2003 | JF said...

I believe that simplicity is the natural state. Complexity is man made. Obviously not everything fits neatly into that description, but I believe it to be generally true -- especially with web sites. People make things so much harder than they need to be. And, often the more people involved, the more complex it becomes. I've often found that quantity (of pages, of people, etc.) is a cover-up for quality. A few smart people can run circles around tens or hundreds of average people. A few smart, well thought-out pages can be much more useful than tens of hundreds of decent pages. Again, not everything fits that description, but my experiences point to more cases of that being true than not.

21 Mar 2003 | Steve said...

JF, I agree with the bulk of what you said regarding simplicity and the results it achieves, but to be a bit nitpicky, I'll argue that simplicity is most definitely not the natural state of things. For one, nature certainly doesn't send that message. More pertienently, it's easy to make things a chaotic, complex mess. It's often difficult, and always takes some thought and work, to make things simple. In part because it can be difficult to define what simple is: Is it putting all the links people want to go to in one location, under a good categorization scheme, or is it putting few links on a page with clear paths and then letting people go their way?

Simple is work. It's not easy. If it were simple, we'd see a whole lot more simple out there, becuase most people at the end of the day (including myself) are lazy bastards.

21 Mar 2003 | JF said...

Simple is work. It's not easy. If it were simple, we'd see a whole lot more simple out there, becuase most people at the end of the day (including myself) are lazy bastards.

Amen. Simple most definitely is work. It's a ton of work (although many people don't understand that). Mark Twain's famous "I didn't have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one" quote pretty much sums it up for me.

You see, what's hard about being simple is rejecting the urge to mess things up. For some reason people are given to messing things up -- to over complicate, to obscure, to confuse. Simple is work because it's very difficult to resist those urges. The value often looks you right in the face, but people tend to hardly ever see it. So often they feel the need to prop it up, to lather on the design, when they should just leave it be.

Yes, that last paragraph was complex (and maybe confusing). Shit. Maybe I should have just stuck to Twain's quote. See what I mean?

21 Mar 2003 | Darrel said...

> It's a fluke they hired someone who can do more than code.

Ha! That's exactly how I got hired. They were looking for someone that could use 'FTP, run servers, and update web sites'. The job paid OK, and they got 150+ applicants.

I was pretty much the only person with a background in actual graphic design and it was then that they realized that's what they needed.

The MN state portal above was, as you imagine, designed by a huge committee of IT and other employees. A few IAs or UI people would have been a logical addition.

24 Mar 2003 | Toby said...

The City of Chicago is one of my favorites by Luka Bloom. I like the Christy Moore cover.

26 Mar 2003 | Jacko said...

PLEASE NOTE: Effective March 1st, vehicle stickers will not be sold online for the remainder of the 2002-2003 sticker year (March 1 - May 31). Please refer to sales locations below to purchase your sticker. Online renewal sales for the 2003-2004 vehicle sticker year will begin June 1st, 2003.

You can purchase them online from the city clerk of chicago, but not until June 1st!

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