Blog | 27 February 2019
Part 3: Useful is not enough – you need to aim higher
It is really quite obvious. To be successful, a site has to work, it has to effectively help with the right things and it has to be used. But ask yourself this: have you set up an organisation to work on that whole process?
Some 15 years ago, I visited a public organisation that had just launched its new external website. We discussed how the new site had been received and the webmaster replied that it had gone very well. "We meet all accessibility requirements", the webmaster said happily.
Fast forward to the present and the same industry, the public sector, is going through basically the same thing with the web directive. The requirements of the Digital Accessibility Act will start to apply to websites and mobile applications from this year and beyond.
Or jump over to a site in any industry and see how much focus is put on getting mobile menus to behave, page descriptions to be Google-friendly or thumbnails correctly created and used by the editors.
Then go back to that website manager 15 years ago and realise that it's still the same feeling of happiness that the site works. Because that's what these examples are all about. The satisfaction of having ticked the box: the site is usable.
And so far so good, of course. We can be happy to have taken a step in the right direction. But accessibility is not a goal, it's a tool. Just like mobile-friendliness. A usable site is a starting point, not an end point. The real goal is to create the right effects, and for that to happen, the site must offer something that the right people want and need to do – and they should actually do it.
In English, this is usually expressed as "usable, useful, used" and has been described since at least the 1990s. A bit difficult to translate into Swedish but "användbar, nyttig, använd" perhaps.
So what is the problem? It is old and well-known.
It is. But far too many have not drawn the right conclusion. Those with the greatest potential to do a solid job put their energy into "usable". It's about central web editors and about the few in a large web organisation who work full-time with the web. They are, of course, management leaders, system owners or channel managers. But it is also strikingly often communicators and web editors who create guidelines, train, manage start pages (if they manage to avoid becoming de facto web support, that is).
All this is certainly needed. But the responsibility for "useful" is passed out in the organisation. Product owners, managers and editors who have little or no time for their job are effectively left with the entire job of making the site useful.
There are exceptions, of course. For example, we see a centralisation of resources in many web organisations, which is ultimately about this issue. But if you recognise yourself, the first months of a new year are a great opportunity to dissect your web/management organisation. Are you spending the right proportion of your resources on "useful" or are you hiding behind "usable", which in comparison is fairly simple, often has a facet and does not require much business knowledge?
If that last one sounded a bit inviting and negative, so be it. Because the upside is as bright and positive as it gets. It is when we work to create benefits that we really make a difference.
