Tell Me

Dear Diary,

Whew.  I just finished going through the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's online list of parks, looking for the ones in North Seattle. I still have to verify that all those I listed are in North Seattle on my map, but there are certainly over a hundred.

At first it mystified me that the department's website doesn't - or at least seems not to - offer its own map.  But I can think of a couple of reasonably good reasons.

First, scale.  Some parks are huge, others tiny.  It's not unlike trying to get Russia and Vatican City onto a map at the same scale.  This problem is fundamental.

Second, there are park properties nested within each other, like Laurelhurst Community Center within Laurelhurst Playfield.  This problem can be solved in various ways.

So, no map.  What the department offers instead is a list of, currently, 413 parks.  (You get to this via the menu on the department's home page.)  They're presented by initial letter, mostly but not entirely alphabetically, grouped by four initial letters (e.g. EFGH) and then into pages of 25 parks.  Each entry on each page links to that park's main page.  The parks' names are presented inconsistently with regard to parks named after people; sometimes the surname is used, sometimes the whole name.

There are separate lists of community centers and pools.  If you click on the list of amenities, you get information about the listed amenities, but not necessarily information about which parks offer them.

Each park's main page offers one photo big; many also offer thumbnails of other photos, but flipside, I'm almost sure some of the smaller or more obscure parks are represented by stock photos.

Each park's page lists an address, the park's hours, and such, and has some text.  The wide variations in the text make another element present in many pages important; this is a list of "amenities", represented visually with symbols, not text.  There's certainly a symbol for restrooms, and I think the symbol showing waves in a cup probably means water fountains.  Sometimes a list of amenities in the text, however, includes ones whose symbols aren't in the list of symbol-coded amenities.

It all looks to me like a system that has grown organically, without much planning.

It's said that Seattle's parks levy, for capital projects, is in the red.  Since a serious upgrade to the website should certainly be treated as a capital project, that means it can't happen soon.  But having moved to Seattle in the first place to study databases, I'll pretend to be qualified to make some suggestions for that far-off day.

The department already codes parks by region, as shown in the announcement of seasonal closures linked to a couple of pages ago, dear Diary.  If it put those codes into the parks' pages, and then used them as links, someone who'd just moved into a neighbourhood and wanted to find all the local parks wouldn't have to go through all 413.  The amenities lists could be made links as they stand, though ideally they'd be made more thorough first.  (To be fair, the addresses already link to Google Maps.)

And these are just my ideas.  A really proper redesign would actually be an example of Seattle Process.  You're supposed to go around asking potential users what they want.

Right now, the department certainly has more important things to do, and as I said, money could be an issue for longer.  I just wanted to make the suggestions now, since for some unaccountable reason I don't much want to go through all 413 again.