I wish that Alan had comments enabled in his blog so that this felt a bit more like a discussion than lobbing bricks over the wall.
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Domain Name Envy](http://www.diverdiver.com/2003_07_29_diverdiver_archive.html#105951408792594590)
I'm sorry, Alan, but this is just totally wrong. And as I've said before, indicative of the problem at the heart of UKOnline (and gov.uk in general) - too much focus on the structure and heirarchy, and not enough on the user's needs/wants, , or activities.
Study after study after study has shown that
1. People do use guesswork as a primary means of discovering domains. I've seen it in every single usability study I've ever been involved in. I saw a piece of research only last week in which 55% of respondents said they did it.
UK Government may see a different story in their logs, but this is because of the lack of intuitive domains. This does not mean that people choose to only use search engines, but that you force them to.
2. Even if people discover a site initially via a search engine, it's important that they are memorable for the second, third, and fourth visits. Because then, they don't have to go to a search engine, and you've saved them a lot of effort. Habituation and discoverability. Will and clue (sorry mate)
3. We agree: Long domains are bad. Long domains are bad precisely because they involve too much typing. You can't have it both ways: either people only use search engines, and the domain length is irrelevant, or people do type them in, and so it is important.
More grist to the mill
How many man-days are lost each year, simply because anyone trying to contact an individual in .gov.uk has to remember to stick ".gsi." or ".x.gsi" in the domain? I know I get it wrong every single time I compose a mail to a civil servant, and I'm a bloody geek with 5 years of dealing-with-govt pain under my belt. Somebody once told me that this wasn't fixable. Because domain forwarding is an esoteric technology, uh-huh.
- Google turns 157 references to parliament.gov.uk, almost all as mistakenly though intuitively typed URLs. Some of these * are actually on parliament.uk itself!* How many people a day type it into their browser? Why is goverment policy "get lost, you ignorant user?"
- test it for yourself: take a look at ukonline's own weblogs, and see how many have 'open.gov.uk' with a null referrer, indicating that someone's typed it in.