Michigan.gov Provides An Awful User Experience On The Web

I don’t want to write that headline without stating that I’m not too surprised I had to write it. When it comes to government websites, they are generally poorly conceived and executed; they often feel thrown together, disjointed, and difficult to deal with. Perhaps this is a lot like the physical interactions one would have with bureaucrats, but I like to think that in this day and age, we could plan a better experience for our constituents.

Michigan.gov is no different. While it was recently redesigned for the arrival of the new Governor, it feels strangely thrown together out of a mishmash of the best ideas of 2006 with a little bit of children’s book thrown in. Not that their would be anything wrong with those particular concepts if they were executed a little better–because I can handle aging aesthetics–it’s that when you combine the aging looks with poorly planned content and design, you get a bit of a mess.

I can’t easily find anything on the site; I don’t know what is important; I don’t know what to focus on; and I am very irritated while on the home page trying to find any thing I might want to access as a citizen. I know what I might want to go to that site for, but don’t know if I’d have the patience under normal circumstances to look for it.

One of the most troubling aspects of this design is the haphazard way in which the primary navigation seems to have been thrown on; conceptually, I get what they’re trying to do, but in execution it utterly fails to inspire confidence in what I’m doing as a user. The idea here is to create a drop-down menu that is revealed when one hovers their cursor over the appropriate menu item. The problem in this instance is that the actual drop-down materializes above the menu–this is highly unusual and jarring, and entirely unrecognizable to some of the folks I’ve talked to informally.

This is why, despite the aging aesthetics, I was able to enjoy my various interactions with the old website. Information was easily found and I was not bombarded by a visual experience that is difficult to engage with.

The Proposal

What I would like to do first is address why I’m even bothering with this particular case study; what caught me by surprise was how far it seemed we were stepping back as a state in terms of our web presence. Not in visual appeal, though these particular visuals do not appeal to me, but in the site’s structure and execution. I’ve never had to plan for such a large website, but I’m utterly unconvinced that the state could not assemble a team that could do the job without the whole site conflicting with itself for each element’s importance.

What I’m proposing is simple: a well thought out structure with visuals that are a little more mature, yet can showcase all that Pure Michigan has to offer.

When I landed at Michigan.gov and noticed the new design, the first thing I wanted to fix was what I felt to be one of the worst aspects of the site: the primary navigation. It made browsing tougher than necessary.

This is one of the most confusing menus I’ve come across.

My solution was to create a drop-down menu that acted as expected and would inject a little helpfulness into the interaction.

Standard drop-down menu behavior.

It seemed as if the designers of the current site were interested in offering up some news items and headlines as primary content, but it was difficult to interact with their current layout for this purpose. Users first need to discover that this section is important, which is not all that obvious based on the layout:

What is this even showing?

The section (above) shows headlines and a few other quick links to various sections of interest on the site. Each of these requires that you rollover the appropriate word–headlines, residents, visitors, business, governor–in order to bring up the appropriate content which is all then shoehorned into the same size box. Very confusing.

I decided to create a section that would end up being one of the primary highlights of the home page. Any content you might want to feature here, from announcements about tax time to timely press releases, could be shown with extra large photography and a synopsis; this would rotate through any number of items.

Solution to the confusing headlines.

And finally, to make the quick links section a little more useful I broke things out into more useful categories and made them all instantly visible. Additionally I added another section that could be used to highlight important multimedia:

Again, the whole point of this exercise is not to critique the aesthetics of the current site, but to point out how a poorly executed experience can be as taxing as poorly crafted design details.

This is but one solution among the many that exist, but this site needs a fix and fast.