Test results for Rochdale Borough Council
Welcome,
According to our records, this website hasn't had a major update since it was first registered with us - webteam members can update this information themselves.
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| Totals | Navigation | A-Z | Site search | Readability | Score | Tests | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total scores | 95 | 0 | 147 | 137 | 130 | 509 | ||
| Number of tests | 17 | 0 | 17 | 17 | 16 | 67 | ||
| Usability Index (total score ÷ number of tests) | 6 | 0 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 8 |
About the scores
Each task can be tested according to five different criteria - navigation from the home page, navigation using the A-Z directory (where present), searching on Google, searching using the site's internal search, and the readability of the page. Scores are assigned according to 10 = Very easy, 8 = Easy, 4 = Difficult, and 1 = Gave up. As more users complete any given test, the score for each aspect of each task becomes a mean average of all the individual testers scores, and thus the more tests are completed the more reliable an indication of the usability of the website can be seen. The total scores in the table are thus the sum of the averaged scores for the whole suite of tasks which have been tested.
The Usability Index is the sum of the scores of all the tests which have been carried out, divided by the number of tests which have been taken for this council, resulting in an index score between 1 and 10, with 6 being the score which a nominallly usable website with room for improvement might be expected to achieve. If any criteria have had fewer than 15 tests, or the site as a whole has had fewer than 50 individually tested items, the final Index scores are shown in a grey background to indicate insufficient testing for the result to be a reliable indicator.
The Importance column shows the mean average of how important all the testers considered the ability to complete this task to be, ranging from 0 = Unimportant to 5 = Very important.
Specific comments made about this council
Elections - find out when the next ones are - 2024-10-22
Search results dropped from Very easy to just Easy because the previews were potentially confusing. But that's really just a quibble rather than anything consequential. Beyond that quibble, the presentation of the next elections section into the different kinds of elections there could be was textbook! Especially considering some councils don't even bother to mention forthcoming elections when it's quite close to them...
Freedom of Information Act request - make one - 2024-10-22
I was expecting a form to complete
Noise nuisance - complain about it - 2024-10-22
I hovered between Easy and Difficult on account of initially feeling misdirected to Crime and antisocial behaviour on the home page when I should have gone straight to Environment and pests, but scored leniently because I erred more strictly in another test. I'm appreciating that the link to the form is *above* all the text rather than below it.
Parking - find out how much it costs - 2024-11-04
I knocked the Navigation score from Very easy to Easy because of it not being possible to find the parking charges from a map
Read the council's greenhouse gas emissions report for the previous year - 2024-10-22
I cut some slack for the navigation test on account of although I couldn't find the exact document, I found a wealth of information about the wider topic which wouldn't necessarily have been expected when these test tasks were originally conceived. When I found the page with the information, some kind of graph or pie chart would have bumped up the readability score from Easy to Very easy.
Telephone number - find the main one - 2024-10-22
Considering most councils now make it very hard to find any phone numbers this was very easy even without cutting them slack in that regard