New City Website Rollout

[Robert Pettengill]

Just got back from California and tried using the city website to change my trash bin size. Quick impressions:

Positive:
Clean modern look

Negative:
Broken links
Missing content
Missing functionality
broken search results

What's going on? If this is typical of the new site there will be many complaints.

;Rob

[Jace Deloney]

Just to quickly add to this, I have heard MANY complaints from city staff about the new website. It seems as though dept staff are having a hard time getting the information on the dept pages that they want. Some have even said that Chris Florence has to manually go in, approve and then push all content live. Is there something we can do to push the city to make it easier for city staff to update their dept's page?

I wanted to get OpenAustin's feedback on this before bringing it up with the AustinGO Community Advisory Group.

--
Jace Deloney

Mobile | 409.289.2447
Email | jaced...@gmail.com
Twitter | @JaceDeloney

[Chip Rosenthal]

I think Rob's summation is fair.

This week, I sent a request to the Director of Public Information and Chief
Information Officer to convene an "IA Charette" to address navigation issues.

At this time, I see three major concerns with the site:

Missing content - The city had an analytics-based approach to identify the
approximately 10% of the content that would be migrated to the new site. From
what I've seen, this was extremely successful for the HTML content, and not
for other types of content. I believe that's an artifact of what the analytics
capture. I think there is a process in place to resolve that, through the
feedback link. (My main concern is that some of that info may be more
appropriate for the data portal, and so it's release may be getting
constrained by that process.)

Search - Solr/Lucene is the underlying technology. The underlying technology
is sound, but is not always returning helpful results. Tuning is needed. I
believe the tuning is happening. I use the site several times a week, and I'm
seeing improvements. As of today, a search on "neighborhood registry" returns
the desired result as #2. A week ago it wasn't in the first couple pages.

Navigation - I've heard from staff some plans that will address some of the
concerns, but I do have some fundamental, architectural issues.

During the development process there was a lot of opportunity for feedback on
the theme and front page mockups. I think those elements were successful -- as
Rob notes as a positive.

We didn't really dive into the site beyond the front, and I think that's where
the largest problems lie. I'm really happy we've got a new, sound, modern
platform -- and I'm glad there are plans in place for most of the issues. I am
concerned, however, that more attention should be focused on navigation and IA.

That's why I'm advocating that staff convene an "IA Charette" for (skilled)
people to provide feedback.

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Chip Rosenthal * 512-573-5174 * KE5VHV * ch...@unicom.com * www.unicom.com