The quiet holiday period has afforded time to revisit and review in more depth the new Law Society site.
Reading Room, the site developers, describe the Law Society project thus:
Reading Room are implementing a fully integrated internet, intranet and extranet solution, including the creation of a knowledge management portal powered by Autonomy. // Reading Room has a strong track record of undertaking enterprise projects involving the development of complex content management systems and integration with internal resources. This website will be personalised using the world leading intelligent pattern recognition software, Autonomy. It is Autonomy that will also power the internal knowledge management platform. // The design of the site will benefit from Reading Rooms commitment to creating usable and accessible sites that are simple to use.
It is surprising therefore that the site is – it has to be said – a bit of a dog. I’ll pick just two aspects of the site to illustrate:
Basic navigation
The Main Menu is arranged vertically in the header panel with two unfortunate consequences: the rolling Javascript sub-menu items are difficult to select; and the header panel occupies a full one-third of the browser window (at 1024 x 768 resolution).
The secondary menu includes two items with quite substantial content – Links and Areas of Law. One would expect to find these in the main menu.
The Links page is headed by a linked list of categories. When activating a link, the category list remains in place with the search results listed below – out of view! So it’s not obvious the page content has changed.
Automatic hyperlinking
One of the features of Autonomy is (to quote):
the ability to suggest contextually relevant legal content pertinent to the legal issues being researched. Through automatic Hyperlinking, Autonomy significantly reduces the time taken to navigate to the right information, identify previous precedents and facilitate reuse of existing material.
This automatic hyperlinking works well when applied to articles internal to the site, but falls down substantially in relation to external resources. Here are two examples of its application:
- Selecting News and Events – Legal News, generates external links under the UK Legal News heading (see here)
- Viewing a News article generates external links under External related articles in the sidebar panel (example)
While the technology is undoubtedly smart, the effects of the current implementation are dismal.
- These pages are slow to load.
- The only external articles linked to appear to be judgments in the Court Service judgments database and items on the GNN (Government News Network) site.
- The link texts, being generated from the target page’s Title, lack “information scent”. For example Court Service titles are in the unhelpful form “Court Service Judgments Neutral Citation Number …”, and GNN titles “Published 29/11/2001 P/2001/660 28 November…”
- The relevance of these articles is typically very low (hover over a link to view details) – reinforcing the second point above
- Links to the GNN articles don’t work
