Darwin City Council Website Australia's Best!

Online, July 20, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Council websites provide important information on everything from pet registration to garbage collection dates and noise restrictions. This is why it is important for council websites to be user friendly and usable

600 participants were asked to complete some simple tasks on each website, in the end, Darwin City Council came out on top.

To see the full report go here: www.loop11.com/council-websites/

One of the tasks was to find out on which day waste is collected in their area. For this task, the City of Melbourne just edged out the City of Perth to lead the way, but shockingly Sydney and Hobart City Councils both scored a 27% task completion rate; less than half of Melbourne's 55% task completion rate.

To directly compare the usability of one website to another we followed the ISO definition of usability. ISO 9241-11 defines usability as the "Extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use." This gives us three areas to focus on: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

Darwin City Council had the best score with 74% (The only website to score over 70%). Perth and Adelaide Council had the lowest scores with 54% and 58%, respectively. There was little difference between the remaining three websites with only 7% margin separating them.

Surprisingly, Hobart City Council did not come in last. Despite the lowest task completion rates and longest average time per task Hobart was saved by a good "ease of use rating". But clearly there's a lot more work to be done by Council websites to help people navigate efficiently and find the appropriate information, especially by the Perth and Adelaide Councils.
This report was generated entirely from results obtained through running a usability study with Loop11.

www.Loop11.com