Well what do you know? It’s a new look for WhatDoTheyKnow

Our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow has a fancy new frontage.

Coming hot on the heels of TheyWorkforYou’s new homepage, the fresh look is part of our rolling process of design improvements. Out goes the rather sober grey and burgundy colour scheme, and in comes a fetching cobalt blue paired with banana yellow.

As you might have guessed, though, there’s more to this than a new palette. Yes, in the fast-changing world of web design, fashions change and dated sites can run the risk of looking irrelevant—but we are also keen to ensure that any new design works for its keep.

Not just a pretty face

It’s important, when we invest time and resources into a redesign, that there are tangible improvements. So, like almost everything we do these days, the changes will be subjected to scrutiny from our Research team.

They’ll be checking that we’ve:

  • Improved the site’s usability, making it more obvious how to browse or file FOI requests;
  • Encouraged users to take the step of making an FOI request, even if the concept is a new one for them;
  • Enabled people to understand what the FOI Act is, and what rights it confers.

That’s a lot to expect from a simple redesign, so let’s take a look at how we hope to achieve it.

The title

Of course, the first thing visitors see is the title text. It may seem pretty simple, but, as anyone who writes will know, the shorter the sentence, the harder it is to get right.

Take it from us, this deceptively simple piece of copy represents quite a bit of anguished brainstorming:

title

It tries to distill a complex idea into something that absolutely everyone can understand, even if they’ve never heard of FOI before. Meanwhile, the subtitle highlights your legal right to information.

The count

Alaveteli, the software this and many other FOI sites around the world are built on, has always included two figures on its sites’ homepages: the number of requests that have been made through the site, and how many public authorities it has contact details for. The image below displays WhatDoTheyKnow’s stats at the time of writing:

count

It’s a nice way of showing that the site is both useful and used, but there’s something else, too: when users see that other people have taken an action online, they’re more likely to take the plunge themselves. It’s the same thinking that informed our byline on WriteToThem: “Over 200,000 messages sent last year.”

How it works

The homepage now includes a simple graphic to show the path you can expect to take if you go ahead and file an FOI request on the site:

howitworks with link

Breaking the process down into just three steps makes it look manageable, and there’s a link deeper into our help pages for people who want to understand the FOI Act better.

For those who prefer to browse

Some content remains the same. We’ve still included links to the latest successful requests—albeit lower down the page, so as not to distract from the page’s main message, that you can make a request. These show, more graphically than any piece of copy could, that you can get results:

successfulrequests

They’re also a great way into the site for people who just want to browse: they are a random assortment of requests that have recently been marked as successful, and can often throw up some surprising and interesting subject matter.

Sharing the benefits

Provided that we discover that the design has been effective in the areas mentioned above, we hope to roll it out as an option on the wider Alaveteli codebase, so it can be implemented by anyone running an Alaveteli site.

Meanwhile, the open source code can be accessed on Github by anyone who would like to use it.