One of the most consistent complaints I receive as general manager of public participation is that it is hard to follow what ICANN is doing, particularly with respect to navigating the main website and finding material. So, we have embarked on a usability survey in which you, the community, will be asked about your use [...]

One of the most consistent complaints we hear from the community is the lack of ICANN materials – reports, announcements, webpages and so on – in languages other than English.

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.

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We’ve made a number of small but hopefully useful changes to the ICANN website this morning. The reason is that one of the most common complaints we hear is that it is difficult to find things on the site, or to navigate around.

One of the problems is the number of tabs we had at the top of the page – several of which overlapped – what is the difference between “documents” and “resources”? Why have a separate “structure” tab? What purpose does “events” serve? We also wanted to make the increasing archives of videos and photos more readily accessible and that would meaning adding yet more tabs to an already cluttered masthead.

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Above is a screengrab of the ICANN front page. You’ll notice that it’s slightly different. The changes are explained briefly below, but we’d like to take this opportunity to ask people to think about the future of the website – it’s overall look and it’s overall functioning.

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