FIGURE 33: NAVIGATION FEATURES – COMPARATIVE

6.6.2 Issue Websites

The websites of NGOs and issue campaigns were considerably more accessible, professional and glossy than most of the youth sites, which could be attributed to a number of factors, such as resources, competition, mobilisation strategy and market awareness. They featured a wealth of information and applications, which poses a

NI Youth Forum

different challenge, i.e. of sorting, presenting and promoting this material in a coherent way.

In spite of the increasingly fundamental role played by the internet in every aspect of these organisations’ operations, very few of the cases examined achieved a truly distinct visual identity and user-friendly site architecture. Only two of the issue sites analysed (Fairtrade Foundation and Make Poverty History) combined style with substance in an accessible way. While both sites met most of the criteria assessed through the formal content analysis such as navigation tools and attention to users’ needs (e.g. see Figure 33), we posit that the key to their accomplished design is that they refrained from

overloading the pages, something demonstrably not avoided by the sites of Greenpeace, the Soil Association and Friends of the Earth.

Homepages cluttered with menus, links, features and sections is actually one of the commonest pitfalls in web design. Nielsen (2007a: 4) argues that websites should scale back their features and dramatically simplify the user experience for initial use: “after all, to progress to the deeper engagement levels, prospective customers must first

successfully pass through the initial use phase”. While producers are usually keen to promote the rich material of their websites, prioritising messages, being selective about which features are truly central and highlighting those in a visually bold way may be much more effective a strategy. This is the strategy followed by the Fairtrade website, which focuses on a select few examples of its work (background to specific fruits or real life stories of communities and people) and uses visual links that take the user directly to the detailed page rather than the generic category, which simplifies the user experience (Nielsen and Tahir 2001).

In contrast to that, the sites of Greenpeace, Soil Association and Friends of the Earth are more text-oriented, feature long lists of not adequately distinguishable menus, options and links (the Soil Association website featured six different menus on the homepage alone), while the role of style and visual material is peripheral to the site’s architecture.

There is limited use of photos, which are used as generic background filler, while the colour palettes are underscored. In brief, these sites lack a distinct visual identity that would not only make for a more enjoyable visit, but also for a more memorable one, potentially establishing an affective and symbolic relationship between the user and the organisation. As for the follow-up visits, whereas the designers of the Fairtrade improved an already strong website by changing the colour scheme and simplifying the menus, changes to the websites of Greenpeace, Soil Association and FoE were marginal and did not tackle issues such as page overloading.

Overall, the findings of this investigation concur with the notion that a site’s design is not merely a means of communicating messages online, but an integral part of the

organisation’s actual, substantive message; or, to misparaphrase McLuhan in a rather deterministic fashion, the design is (part of) the message. Interestingly, however, what may have emerged from this discussion is an additional pattern which also potentially sees the design, and especially a comparison across time of whether and how the design has evolved, as a mirror of the site’s broader philosophy, strengths and

weaknesses, purpose (or lack thereof) and reach (or lack thereof). That is not to argue that web content analysis can lead to inferences about the intentions of producers or eventual uses of site visitors. Yet, each page of a website is a de facto cultural artefact (Brügger 2009) that carries interesting insights about the state of the organisation at a given moment – i.e. it constructs a reality in, and of, itself. This theme is further explored in the following sections, which examine whether and how the sampled organisations utilize interactive, multimedia and innovative features.

6.7 Outsourcing Interactivity and Convergence

The issue of how civic organisations utilise the unique properties of new media, such as interactivity and convergence, is of particular interest as it can indicate whether we are witnessing the emergence of a more symmetrical, inclusive mode of civic communication or merely the reproduction of top-down, close-ended messages. Our analysis indicates a definite lack of user-to-user and user-to-site interactivity and a limited sense of online community across the sample with the exception of the three youth portals and Urban75.

Perhaps surprisingly, this deficit of interactivity was particularly marked amongst issue websites, which were found to opt for a predominantly one-way mode of communication.

It should be noted that this finding does not contradict the earlier point made about a more consumer-oriented user experience based around choice (of issues, products, participation tools or methods). Issue websites give users choice of content, but there is a limited capacity for feedback, user input, creative contributions and virtual debates amongst users. This may be linked to the different engagement modes that youth and issue organisations aim for: the analysis of their core aim showed that, apart from

‘awareness’ and ‘involvement’, which were universally applicable, youth sites are oriented towards consultation and deliberation (at least nominally, given the lack of actual interaction on some of these sites), whereas NGO websites promote activism or protest.

This finding is consistent with Ward’s (2008) conclusion that civic organisations are opting for a strategic approach to online political communication (i.e. goal-oriented, persuasive and transactional), rather than a reflexive one (i.e. goal-modifying, responsive and coproductive). The content analysis during the first period (2005/06) showed that websites did not utilize many feedback/interaction features– an email address was

universal and a discussion board of some kind was featured by half of the cases, but few websites went beyond the very basics (Figure 34). Similarly, while most organisations facilitated offline meetups and some limited user-to-website interaction, very few cases organised virtual meetups or gave site visitors the chance to become integrated

contributors (Figure 35).

Given the recent emergence of Web 2.0, content sharing applications, user generated content and social networking sites (SNS), it was important to establish whether the twenty civic websites that made up our sample had shifted their online strategy to encourage interactivity as well as use of multimedia features, such as videos.