What?
ABS statistics are grouped into 5 major categories: Economy, People, Environment & Energy, Industry and Regional. The Theme pages, soon to be re-released as 'Topics @ a Glance', enable us to communicate specific information relating to those categories from one location.
Why?
The current theme pages are being redesigned in line with the Topics @ a Glance concept. We aim to provide better navigation to an improved range of information. A sample of pages has been created to give our customers the opportunity to provide feedback on the proposed changes.
When?
We will amend our current prototypes based on the relevant customer feedback and aim to release the new Topics @ a Glance pages by the end of 2009.
#1: SE
The page that has been published on 12 Feb looks nothing like the prototype displayed above.
#2: Ruben
Sorry , more of the same gov.au blandness. I believe that releasing ABS data to the dev community in a web accessible way would yield more exciting results. Then _everybody_ could start building pretty interfaces for the data.
Have a look at some of the stuff they are knocking together over the pacific:
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#3: Dany
Most clients had difficulties with the word 'Themes'. 'Topics' is simpler and more appropriate.
The 'Most Popular topics' is not necessary. it takes valuable screen space. It would be better to use the space avaiable for 'All topics' and put a small icon next to each topic.
I like the drill down method. Suits both 'Tourists' & 'Miners'.
#4: Format Ninja
The layout of this govermental site (goverment statistics) is fairly well planned. However i think we would all agree that there is still work to be done. Links are helpfull but currently to access information such as industry graphs and pure statistics i had to use about 7 or more links. All round well done but its still a bit of a maze.
#5: Chris
'Topics @ a Glance' is better than 'Themes'!
The logic in the distinction between 'most popular topics' and 'other topics' escapes me. Is 'small area data' a topic or 'statistics'. Would it be better to have 4 topics ( Economy, People, Environment and Industry) and divorce Regional Statistics from Topics at a Glance. The side level navigation gives this level of prominence but the National Profiles are not well maintained.
#6: Sarah
I like the alphabetizing of the top left menu. It will make searching faster if there are more catagories to search through.
#7: Roy
Like the graphics, makes the page come to life a bit more. Think it could be caught in a little bit of no-man's land. Ie, the current page has links to all the sublinks (ie - two clicks from the home page), this introduces a third click. Maybe we can either add in the links like the current page and the graphics or strip out the detail from the proposed page (ie, just keep the big themes).
It might also be possible to add these themes to a sub-menu (built into the menu rather than on a page).
I quite like the theme page and believe this should be the homepage (augmented with some of the other information).
#8: Al
Looks good. A very minor comment is that the ordering of top level headings on the main part of the page (Economy/People/Env+Energy/Industry) is different to the left hand navigator. The ordering on the main part of the page might be logical to some but not to me. (The navigator is alpha - not necessarily optimal - but based on any different ordering concept I'd expect to see Economy + Industry close together...which also makes it clear they're two different paths.)
#9: EK
This design is alot more user friendly, particularly if you can leverage off other reliable sites that have information needs, as demonstrated with the dam level informaion