Kudos for breaking the mold and I love the design from a "this is new and fun" perspective, but I completely disagree from a functional perspective. It looks really neat (if a little over-testosteroned), but if I'm visiting the police's web page then I might want to do one of the following (there are plenty more, these are just an example):
- Find the non-emergency number for the police;
- Report a crime;
- Find my car that has been towed;
- Pay a fine, citation, traffic ticket, etc;
- Find the nearest police station (to get fingerprints, etc);
- Apply for a job;
- View a map or statistics about crime.
To do any of those, I have to start at the picture of cops, scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (past lots of press releases), click on "about" and then start navigating. Or notice the tiny box on the far right side of the screen, click "about" (why click "about" if I want to find my car? I dunno), then start navigating. Some of these links are also in a PDF [1] just in case I haven't gotten my "Acrobat Reader wants to update itself" message for the day.
I'd say this is at least 25% less functional than some other (probably much cheaper) very plain sites I've seen for similarly-sized cities. [2]
In other words: if you aren't in the business of user experience, think twice before presenting a novel user experience. The business of police should be policing, not looking cool online. There is a zero chance that a technophobe would be likely to solve their problems using this site, thus increasing the burden on (already depleted) staff at stations.
This is just their news website to promote themselves so people don't think they're doing a crappy job. Their regular website still exists and it just as boring and functional as ever: http://city.milwaukee.gov/police
Clearly it is intended for those use cases, because, as grandparent said, the links to find the answers are there, it's just not that easily available.
I'm not sure exactly what issue you're taking up here, because grandparent clearly states some very straightforward and common user scenarios that any police website should be expecting to handle, and handle efficiently.
This site loads like a dog on my machine. Or perhaps that's a shout out to the K9 unit.
Except it's not the police web site. It's an auxiliary site intended for news. Go search for "Milwaukee police" and see what the #1 hit is and what the official web site is. It's not this one.
"Official" or not, it's a public-facing website for the Milwaukee police force. What it was "intended" for, and how the public is going to see it, are two different perceptions that are clearly not aligned.
I don't see how they're clearly not aligned. As far as I can tell, you got confused because you saw a direct link that was not well labeled and didn't notice the "news" in the URL. Do you have any reason to believe that the average person who goes looking for the information you describe will find and attempt to use this site?
I'd say this is at least 25% less functional than some other (probably much cheaper) very plain sites I've seen for similarly-sized cities. [2]
In other words: if you aren't in the business of user experience, think twice before presenting a novel user experience. The business of police should be policing, not looking cool online. There is a zero chance that a technophobe would be likely to solve their problems using this site, thus increasing the burden on (already depleted) staff at stations.
[1] http://www.milwaukeepolicenews.com/wp-content/themes/milwauk...
[2] E.g., http://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/police/