Youth Central gets a makeover

It is interesting to see that the site, which had previously featured plenty of whitespace has gone for a bolder, heavier, moodier and darker look. 

It is important to consider that the site isn't just aimed at a youth audience, it also has to appeal to youth workers, local government departments and other users.  But in any case, this look is against the grain of sites like The Age and RMIT.  From my own experience with youth focus and reference groups, I believe that this is something that teenagers at least, do prefer.  As a general trend, young people seem to be more adapted to the web, and require less whitespace than older, more conservative web users.  This is at least the case with the extremely popular Wyndham Youth Website, as well as a lot of MySpace web templates.

One of the most prominent features is the news ticker.  This sort of page style fading news navigator has been used widely on websites since it featured on popular sites like afl.com.au and theage.com.au.  It is accompanied by a new main menu item "News & Features", and the focus of this section is on new media such as podcasts and streaming video.

More effort seems to have gone into accessibility of the site, with ALT tags on all of the images this time around.  Feedback from disabled users certainly helps to provide information on how to optimise this aspect.
Some subtle information architecture changes can make a big difference.  Consider for example "About This Site", which has become "What is Youth Central ?".  This link has moved to the top right with the secondary navigation and is very important.  Without this link, first time users have very little context.  Typically you'd expect "About This Site" to contain information on how to use the site and who built it (which it previously did), now the focus is more on "What is this site about and who is it aimed at and what benefits does it provide".  This is a small change that could make a big difference.

Some slight changes have improved the main content menu of the site.  For example "Get Local" becomes "Your Local Area".  This would seem to make sense, because with main menus you really can't use vague terminology.  If you do use vague terms, people get confused and will generally ignore whole sections of your site.  Interestingly "Get Involved" has been dropped in favour of "News & Features" - young people probably don't like to be asked to get involved ...  Anyway, the redesign didn't address what to me is a glaring problem - too many main links.  Even a portal site such as this one should never have more than seven main links.  If I was building the site, I'd try grouping some of the generic "Jobs & Careers", "Travel & Transport", "Managing Money" etc. into a single heading.  You can still get to the content within a couple of clicks if you introduce other efficient methods of navigating the site.  The "I want to" picklist did this on the old site, but it has been removed.  Not sure why, I personally think this sort of user-driven navigation feature is a good way to go.  It could have still been useful by renaming it.  Instead, a picklist has been introduced for "Your Local Area", which I feel would be in reaction to user backlash from the "Get Local" main link as much as anything.  The picklist is a good addition, but as previously stated - more should be done.

A good idea could be to either capture some basic info on the user (i.e where they live) and provide profiled information (such as jobs, events and council services in their area). 

Finally, some of the more interactive features have been embedded into the homepage.  This includes the poll and newsletter subscription, which gives the appearance of the site being slightly more interactive.  And the external websites are differentiated a bit better this time around.

Conclusions

While the content on the site has improved, this redesign is more of a style sheet tweak and some patches over some glaring information architecture problems.

I generally don't think that this site provides as much user interaction and content contribution as it could. 

It is still a bit conservative, as a government site should be, but doesn't really offer enough to attracted return visitors.

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