Today I used the State Secretary’s website. It’s supposed to inform the good people of Massachusetts where to vote. The key phrase is “supposed to.”
Now, I know where to vote. I was using the website out of curiosity from a technical and usability perspective. Well, I’m glad I did. I entered in my address where I’m registered to vote and received this error, “Your Search Produced No Results”
I enter in the same information on Google (maps.google.com/vote)and my voting location comes up perfectly.
Governments are going Google all the time. So Mr. Galvin, what do you say? (P.S. I support Galvin for re-election just FYI.)
Please share widely!
If I enter my full street as I would on most web sites (e.g., “Main Street”, not my real street), I get the error you describe. For whatever reason, the state site uses a pull-down for the “suffix”, such that if I enter just “Main” and pull-down “Street”, it works. Not a good design decision given how people normally enter addresses.
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p>Google, of course, understands web design and is very flexible about how you enter your address.
but not the issue that I was describing. I correctly entered my information and used the drop down menu to select the correct suffix (e.g., avenue, street, etc).
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p>My educated guess is that the system doesn’t know how to handle street names that are two or more words long. The street name of my address in Cambridge is two words long.