Today I travelled to Worcester for a meeting of a registers of deeds subcommittee that's providing guidance on the new masslandrecords.com site. There were many issues discussed, but they can be grouped into just a few major categories.
First is the speed of the site which currently is just too slow. Until that's improved, the old site will remain active. The second area addressed dealt with the layout of each registry's home page and the location of the various search options on those home pages. Here, it seems that "good web design practices" have come into conflict with our own observations of how our customers use the site. Good design practice treats the entire front page as "valuable real estate" that is not to go unused. Our experience, however, is that customers have a better experience when using a simple design that has visual clues to direct the attention to the most commonly utilized features. The third major area is how document images get printed or downloaded. The existing mechanism, we believe, requires too many clicks on too many screens and could be made simpler.
The recommendations from today's meeting will be forwarded to the web designer (ACS) and the group will meet again next month. In the meantime, the "old" masslandrecords site will remain the default search program while the "new" version will stay alongside as an option. If you haven't already given us your feedback on the new site, it's not too late to do so. After trying out the site, just send me an email with your observations and recommendations.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
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2 comments:
The main problem with the new masslandrecords that needs to be addressed is speed. I must admit it is faster than some of the eariler test versions, but it still needs to be improved.
I agree with you about "good" web design. Simplicity is better than cramming everything onto one page. Look no further than Google's main page for an example of this.
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