Thank you for providing an opportunity to comment. We thought it may be more useful to share them here with the community, as others have done.
We would like to repeat the feedback provided at the MA, in particular:
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The first line that people see on the website (is that a “tagline”?) does not quite align with IATI’s vision and mission. “IATI is a global initiative to drive sustainable development through open data” is a good description of several initiatives in the data revolution space, but does not say what is unique to IATI, its specific niche/role. We would recommend: “IATI is a global initiative to help achieve sustainable development through open aid data”.
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As Siem pointed out, it is hard to assess a website based on the home page only (on that note, we would recommend sharing the site map for feedback). One serious problem in the current website is the near-impossibility for non-Anglophone users to find the information that already exists in other languages (eg guidance, outreach documents, codelists). The beta home page does not seem to address this. We would like to know how users will be able to 1) know there is information in other languages and 2) find it easily.
Additional feedback, now that we’ve had a chance to look at the page more (and read others’ comments):
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Building on Siem’s point about the standard, we agree that it should be much more visible on the home page, integrated messaging. We would also expect it to be a section of the menu (at the top), so those who need technical content know where to go.
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We fully agree with Siem about the map, it takes a lot of space but the information is not meaningful (if not worse, as discussed here How to place activities of national scope on a map)
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The flow of information between the various sections is somewhat confusing. Not sure what will be under “About IATI”, but below “Use data” and “Publish data” we find “IATI members”, then “See IATI data in action”, then “Explore international dev projects”, then governance, then the forum. One would normally expect governance, members etc to be available through “About”. The difference between “Use data” and “Explore international dev projects” is also somewhat unclear.
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We should see more content at once on the screen (thus less scrolling). On Chrome, the first box (with “IATI is a global initiative…”) fills up the screen, a lot of scrolling is needed to see the full content of the page. The user cannot get a general sense of the page structure, sections, etc, at once.
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Perhaps related to the above: is the site designed to work well on different platforms (e.g. mobile etc)?
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Finally, some contextual information is needed for the 3 links at the bottom: “Contact IATI”, “Contact Support” (support for what? Is this not IATI too? How does one decide between these 2 contacts?), and “Subscribe” (to what?).
Thank you again and we look forward to seeing the next version.
