MyNeighbourhood Upgrade
MyNeighbourhood Accessibility Upgrades
We’ve recently overhauled the West Midlands Police crime mapping website, MyNeighbourhood.info, with a number of enhancements aimed at improving usability and accessability. The site had received feedback to the effect of ‘great information, not very easy to understand’. So in combination with West Midlands Police and ourselves we set about redesigning the user interface to better communicate the information that was already in there, whilst taking the opportunity to improve the site’s accessibility for disabled users.
Usability
Existing feedback was combined with some informal interviewing to figure what was broken with the current site design. It became apparent after a few interviews that there were three major aspects of the design that were causing trouble: The site was too map-focused; The language was inconsistent and non-standard; The interface was cluttered and not very web-page like.
A new site design was invented, and our guinea pigs were taken through the new site to confirm we improved on our previous design. The site’s navigation was re-organised dramatically, a separate page being set aside for each set of figures we wanted to present for a neighbourhood. We moved summary information to the front and a big ‘table of crime’ next, as it turned out this is what users wanted to see most. All of the sites language was debated, picked over, changed ten times and then finally agreed upon. Overall, it made the site feel a lot more like a web-site and less like a computer game.
Accessibility
While we overhauled the design for the masses, we also tried to improve the user experience for disabled users and users without the latest software. We made the site using semantic markup, so that it is still usable in a text-based browser and can be interpreted by screen readers, we made the statistics available in the maps and charts available in a tabular view and we made sure the site degrades nicely when there is no java script or flash installed. Any functionality that was implemented using AJAX-type techniques was first developed with a traditional page reload, then enhanced with AJAX if available.
Summing Up
Since the site has gone live, we’ve had a lot of positive feedback from West Midlands Police and their users, as well as being a great learning experience for all of us.
