A mock-up of what the new front page may look like

Since June, ICANN staff has been working hard with external consultants Revere Group to redesign the website to fit with the community’s needs. Revere first carried out a site audit [pdf], pointing out all the areas where the website didn’t fit in with best practices and guidelines.

Then it carried out the online survey as well as around 15 in-depth interviews with community members and staff to find out what it was that people felt the website needed to do. And it also went through the full logs of website visitors to find out who was coming to the site and from where. And from that created a research document [pdf] summarizing the findings.

Based on these two documents, a new taxonomy [pdf] of the site was developed in iterations. New categories and menus cover all the different aspects of ICANN as an organization and structure them more simply and logically. And from that, wireframes [pdf] – blueprint designs – for new webpages were drawn up and new functions and approaches were discussed in an effort to make the site as easy to use as possible.

Design

Once the wireframes were in place, the study then moved into a design phase where a wide range of different approaches to the actual site look were drawn up and run through a group of around 10 staff over the course of a month, and the designs were gradually honed down to the point where the blueprints for the different pages were created as images.

And that’s where we currently are, as of 21 October. The remaining steps are the important ones – figuring out how to implement the new approach, ensuring that we keep as much of the design and new functions sketched out earlier in the process.

We will be working on a timetable for that in the next few weeks and will try to be conservative in our estimates so we don’t end up over-promising. But it is probably safe to say that before the next meeting in Nairobi in March 2010, there will be an updated and fit-for-purpose website that should finally put an end to most, if not all, of the usability issues that the community has had to deal with on ICANN.org for the past few years.

We are publishing summaries of the different aspects of this whole process so you as the community can see the work that has been put into this effort. Hopefully you will like what you see.

Usability study work summaries [pdfs]

• Site audit
• Research
• Taxonomy
• Wireframes

Each meeting’s videos are also archived on a video page on that meeting’s website e.g. http://syd.icann.org/video. And since we now have the Adobe Connect conferencing software, you can also find full conference videos of individual sessions here and on their specific webpages (find it through the schedule).

With that all done, we are delighted to see that more of you have started watching them, which leads us to the Top Ten videos for the past month – listed below. Enjoy.

So, we have embarked on a usability survey in which you, the community, will be asked about your use of the ICANN.org site as well as what you would like to see and what you like and dislike about the site. We have hired some experts in this field – Revere Group – to undertake the work and have an open ear and an open heart to ways in which we can improve the ICANN website.

So if you have ever had difficulty navigating ICANN’s site, now is your chance to help make it all work better. There is a simple online survey to gather information. Provide us with your email and say yes to being provided with updates and we will keep you up-to-date with progress as it happens.

You can find the survey here: http://icannsurvey.wufoo.com/forms/icannorg-site-survey/ or you should be able to view it and fill it in below.

Note: This survey has ended and is now offline.

We have been working hard on this for nearly two years and ICANN now has a translation manager as well as a decent size budget and much better internal systems for putting things through translation. The amount of translation we do (and interpretation at meetings) has jumped and we are doing it at lower cost and with greater accuracy than ever before.

But we recognize that this is only a partial solution. The ICANN website is the main entry point to the organization and it remains defiantly English. While we translate more documents than every before, only a tiny proportion of our webpages are in other languages, making it hard for community members to find those translated documents and to keep up to date with ICANN and its work.

We are working hard on fixing this. One of the biggest issues is the development of a content management system that enables us to link the same information in different languages. A second is the fact that ICANN’s main website has many thousands of pages and so we could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars translating webpages that hardly anyone ever reads. And tied in with that, a third issue is the fact that as ICANN staff we are acutely aware that expenditure of the community’s money needs to be justified, either from direct community input or in clear improvements to participation.

Community requests

So we have come up with a system to tackle the second and third issues while we work on the technology to fix the first, and that is: community-led translation requests.

At the bottom of every page on the ICANN website you should see a ten-language lines of words, the first being “Translate” in English. If you click on your language’s version of “translate” a box will pop up that will ask you in that language if you wish to request that the page you were on be translated. If you click through, we as staff are notified that someone has requested that particular page be translated into that particular language.

We can then use the clear community demand for particular pages to translate information as it is requested by the community.

We have tested the system with multiple people and multiple computers running multiple operating systems through multiple browsers so we are pretty confident that unless someone goes to great lengths that every request we receive for a particular page comes from a different individual. The system should also work across the board, no matter what computer or software you are using.

And the winner is…

We put this system up without announcing it or telling anyone three weeks ago and have already been amazed at the response – 1,182 requests so far across all languages, the biggest single page and language being 165 Chinese requests for the front page.

Responding to this, we have already send the first webpage for translation – the UDRP webpage at http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/. The front page will take longer as we need to devise the best way to keep it constantly up-to-date but we have heard from you loud and clear and are working on it as we speak.

And before you ask – yes, we are aware of the irony of only having this blog post in English. A proper announcement in the 10 languages is in the offing.

So there you go – thing’s you didn’t realize were on the ICANN website: a community-led translation priority tool done through two simple clicks.

Previous things you didn’t realize

Part 3: Scorecard
Part 2: IDN Glossary
Part 1: Virtual Bookshelf