Share your views on our new website!

IATI has released a preview of our new website’s homepage and we want your views by COB Friday 20th October.

Visit beta.iatistandard.org to review our new content and refreshed brand. Please then take a couple of minutes to fill out our feedback form (also at the end of the homepage).

IATI’s new website aims to deliver information that is easier to understand and navigate for our data publishers and users, members and newcomers. We plan to release early versions of key sections of our website soon and will continue to request your feedback to ensure we are on the right track.

Hi Rohini,

Limited space on the Typeform, so would it be ok to drop some notices/feedback here as well?

  1. `When will the other pages become available? Assessment of a website based on a single (home) page is a bit thin

  2. Could you make sure Reader View is available for the website? This is currently missing

  3. Will the website run under SSL? Google (amongst) others will start sending out warnings on security issues to users once forms are used on non secured pages…

  4. IATI being a data standard is not a key objective on the homepage, but it is hidden under “Publish data Take steps to publish your organisation’s activities to the IATI standard.” The word standard is only used once on the homepage.

  5. The main search has disappeared! What is the rationale behind this decision? How can users access archived data or quickly spot/find information. Not handy. It’s been replaced by a form-based D-Portal link/search. Jumping away from a page to get results on another Portal all together may be confusing, or at least guide the user in that process, perhaps a separate From-IATI-2-D-Portal separate page. Will avoid confusion for new users.

  6. Menu alignment to new IATI Logo

    could the menu be aligned to the bottom of the logo :slight_smile:

  7. What is the added value of the GeoMap? For me a reference to some data from the IATI Data Dashboard would be sufficient. A map with (meaningless) markers should be avoided: they just eat space for no apparent reason.

That’s it from me. Keep up the good work.

Siem

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Hi Siem,

Many thanks for these very useful points. I will add them to our bank of feedback and get back to you after the consultation period.

Thanks again and do let me know if you have any other thoughts over the next week.

All the bestm
Rohini

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I think I made a similar point via the form, but not sure, due to limited space. But, to echo @siemvaessen, I think this will be tricky. If people are led to thinking they can “search IATI” on the homepage that becomes a thing - they might start to associate IATI with a database that can be searched. And - if they can’t find what they are searching for, there’ll blame IATI. And then — if IATI switches them into d-portal, the whole UX becomes fragmented. End result could be a super high bounce rate

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Controversial opinion: I think this would be A Good Thing.

What if d-portal were embedded? I.e. you don’t bounce, you explore IATI data within the IATI website. IATI already owns iatidata.org

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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:

  • 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”.

  • 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):

  • 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.

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Perhaps related to the above: is the site designed to work well on different platforms (e.g. mobile etc)?

  • 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.

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