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

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

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.

So the solution we have hit upon is to use the common practice of having links at the bottom of the page as well as at the top. The bottom links lead to precise pages for precise requirements and as a result are often less important in the overall scheme that links at the top which lead into different sections. So if you can’t find a tab you normally click on, it will be at the bottom of the page.

At the same time, we have also made a few changes so that you won’t have to scroll down the page for material that you visit often. So:

• Everything you can get by clicking the Structure tab is also included in the About tab (which is at the top)
• Everything under the News tab is also included in the About tab
• Everything under the Resources tab is now on the front page in the main three-column box (in the right-most column)

At the same time, we have also updated and improved the content boxes on the right so that you can instantly click through to: the latest announcements, the latest public comment periods, and the latest blog posts. Links in the header of each of these boxes leads you straight to the relevant overall page.

We are pretty confident that all this combined will mean that in a month’s time, when you have all got used to the slight changes, more than half of the searches for content that took two clicks of the mouse should take just one; and more than half of the three-clicks will take two-clicks.

Of course we welcome feedback – although we would urge you to get used to the changes first – so please do add your comments below.

This 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.

Some of you will have noticed that the front page has been changing in small increments over the past six months or so: we’ve been trying to give the site a little more life, trying to flag up the most important and most recent information and so on.

This time, we have given announcements a little more prominence, as well as moved the bottom box that contained links through to ongoing work to the middle of the page. (And a few other small things.)

A redesign?

But despite our efforts, it remains a consistent complaint that information is hard to find on the ICANN site. (It doesn’t help that over the course of the past two years, ICANN has been producing more and more content every month.) And so we recognize that at some point soon there is going to have to be a complete redesign of the site, with every aspect reviewed and revised.

This blog post is a very small step in that direction in that we are asking you: what do you think we should do? What needs to be changed? What is better? What used to better, and why? What is the information you have difficulty finding? What is the sort of information that is of most importance to you? Would you like to see more video? Or more graphics? A cleaner design? Or a more busy one?

Please use this blog post and its comments function as a way to give us some of your ideas.

But before we get there, just for reflection and interest, here’s a quick rundown of the ICANN site over the years, complete with images.



This is the very first version of the ICANN site dating from January 1999. One link on the front page went through to the “ICANN Startup Fund”, and at the top was an explanation of what ICANN actually was: “… the new non-profit corporation that was formed to take over responsibility for the IP address space allocation…”

Bare yet simple.

As ICANN began to form (November 1999), the site grew more complex with links to announcements and to Supporting Organizations. Correspondence and Minutes appeared, as well as registration to the next ICANN meeting. The beginning of ICANN’s dalliance with bright colours began.



Two years later (October 2001), and the bright blue begins to spread dangerously…



And then, with the world governments’ eyes turned to ICANN in the first stage of the WSIS process, the site saw its second re-design in December 2003. If you wanted to know what it was that ICANN did, you could find just about every aspect of it in one of the boxes on the front page.

ICANN had, of course, continued to produce huge amounts of work, documents, presentations, letters and so on over the past five years, and the site tried to find a way of making it more accessible. To some degree, it worked, and the design stuck.



Nearly three years later (August 2006), and the everything-up-front approach had started to exhaust people. A redesign was called for and announced to the community with a special wiki site set up to gather input. The front page cooled down a little:



And all that was in preparation for the third redesign. The long lists were pulled into tabs running along the top; the migraine blue reappeared but so did calmer grades of other colours. A quick links choice was added, graphics appeared. The site started using CSS sheets and standard web design approaches. Everything seemed a little more organized.



And then the first video appeared, as well as information other than the organization’s announcements.



And then, with the front page opened up, the front page was given a more magazine feel, with more information about what was important and what people were interested in taking up space that has previously been controlled by whatever the latest announcement was.

The announcements were reduced to three, graphics pointing to main sister sites added to the left, and information on the front changed frequently as newsletters, and consultations, and public comment periods and magazines came and went.

Finally we end up where we are today, with five announcements up front, varying front page content and the main work pages of the organization given more prominence.



The question now is: what should the next iteration of the ICANN site look like?

Do we need to:

• Refocus on SOs and ACs?
• Or focus more heavily on particular issues?
• Add more graphics, or more videos?
• Rethink the colours or the design?
• Change the tabs and the linking pages?
• Reduce or increase the space given to announcements?
• Or, maybe, hire a professional design firm to suggest the answers?

As you know by now, all comments and thoughts welcome.

Mark these words: before you know it, you will grow to actually like the ICANN website.