Audience, Purpose and Maintenance

The first two questions blow up right in your face at the very beginning.

We all have to make decisions during website design about who we want to be using our website, what we want to offer them and what they will want to do on our site. Yet these are the hardest questions to answer at the beginning of a project. These decisions can bog the project down right from the start when the money is available, the sponsors want to see results and the team is fired up to start to work. So decisions are made about database design and selection or content management or search design based on readily answered criteria such as cost or team familiarity or what's been offered by the sponsors.

Sometimes the website is just a side result from a larger project. Sometimes, a website project is designed with one audience in mind but turns out to have great appeal to another. 

As an example, I'm going to critique a website I think would have had great appeal to local historians and their friends, the genealogists, but doesn't provide the access they need.

From tweets at the annual American Historical Association Meeting, #AHA2015, I ran across this digital history site: HerHatWasInTheRing.org. Over 3000 records of women who ran and were elected. I've read through the About page which has only this to say about its purpose: 

The “Her Hat Was In the Ring” web site and database are part of an ongoing project collecting information concerning women who campaigned for elected public office before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in August of 1920.   

I approached this website wearing several hats: my role as the designer for a local historical assocation website, as a local historian and as an educated member of the public. 

My first impulse was to look up the Massachusetts' women and find if any were from Topsfield. 

At once, I hit a problem. I searched "Women by State" for Massachusetts which returned an alphabetical by-last-name list of 94 women's names. Unfortunately no other information was provided in the list. In order to find out if any women were elected to public office in Topsfield, I would have to select each name, one at a time, and look at her record. 

I did click on the first name: Martha A. Adams. Here's a copy of her record:

Martha A. Adams

Birth Date:1811

Death Date:

State:Massachusetts

Marital Status:Married

Other Occupation:

Political Party Activism:This woman was not a political party activist.

Social Reform Activism:This woman was not a social reform activist.

Biography

Martha A. Adams was elected to the School Board of Melrose, Massachusetts in 1882 and served through 1885.

Additional Notes

CAMPAIGN

Political Office: School Board Member

Election Year: 1882

Political Party: Unknown

Elected: Yes

View Details

Notes:

Photographs

Resources

Author	Title	More
Goss, Elbridge Henry	The History of Melrose, County of Middlesex, Massachusetts	Details

Author	Goss, Elbridge Henry
Title	The History of Melrose, County of Middlesex, Massachusetts
Publication
Publisher	The city,
Publication Date	1903
Additional Information	p. 204
Page Information

From this layout, it appears as if "town" is either not being provided as a searchable data field or is not one at all. And from reading the About section, it may be that no data field for town or county was intended to be provided. A puzzling choice for a database of locally elected officials, if that is the case.

I looked up "Women by Office" and found many different offices. "Board of Education" revealed over 300 records and "County Superintendent of Schools" revealed over 1200 records. But there's no option to break these records down even by state. Again - an alphabetical list by last name with only names - not even state names. 

(I looked at the "Women by Name" and those results do list State and are re-sortable by State - although results only return 10 at a time.)

Website projects as large as this one take enormous resources and time, as I know well. This one has had enormous amounts of data input over several years, it appears. It's staggering to think of the amount of work that entails. For my local purposes, I wish the search functions had been refined a bit more - to let me search by town within state, to display state names in the position results, to allow for resorting by state name, to see more than 10 results at a time.

I tried Googling "Topsfield site:HerHatWasInTheRing.org" with no results. I tried the same for Massachusetts but only got results where Massachusetts was named in the general text. The site is providing dynamic results which Google is not indexing. And the site's search functions have been strictly limited.

Out of curiosity, I searched out "Martha A. Adams" on the census records at Ancestry.com. I found her in the 1880 census in Melrose - she was married to a clergyman - John G. Adams who was listed as 69 years old. Ancestry.com's transcription of the record listed her age as 69 but a closer look at the original census document revealed a transcription error - her age in the Census was listed as 49 which puts her birth year at about 1831 not 1811. I checked the 1870 census listing and there she is listed as 39 years old so I'm certain about the 1880 census transcription error. (And, yes, I submitted the change.) I also searched Elbridge Henry Goss's "The History of Melrose" , http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008651371, but it does not contain Martha A. Adams' birthdate so I suspect HerHatWasInTheRing.org used the same transcription error I found. 

It's hard to design for unfamiliar audiences. One of my favorite cliches is: Websites reflect the organizations of people which designed them. Archivists design for archivists, professors for students, class projects for the class. Local historical society sites frequently forget to put their state name in their title because they know that they're in Oregon or South Carolina or Massachusetts. The "Project Creators and Staff" of HerHatWasInTheRing.org are all academic scholars and students. The website they created doesn't provide the access or information that a local historian, a genealogist or just an interested member of the public might want to have.

General website designers, especially user interface specialists, know how to do this. One of the tweeters at #AHA2015 asked: How can we build a popular audience for the type of women's history that you're doing?  and the response seems to have been "Build for a specific audience." I hope that the full answer was what a good website designer would say: "Keep asking the audience you want to attract." That should include at the beginning but it can also include all during the project, at the end and ongoing after site launch. 

But that's hard to do and nobody wants to put in the time, money and effort. To generalize just a bit: that's why so many digital history sites look so dead. It's because they are.