Web Usability Group

On November 17th, the Web Usability Group met for the first time to discuss the City's Web Portal. The group is comprised of citizens and City staff. The goal is to utilize the input and opinions from the group to help improve the City's Web Portal. At the first meeting, the group identified three key areas for usability testing:

• People finding contact information
• People finding City meeting information
• People finding inspection, permit, building information

 The Web Usability Group:

 

Who reinvents the wheel?

OK, we may have tried. With excellent, proven wheels already available, we got one.
We are currently working on configuring a Google Search Appliance to provide the portal search functionality. We will still have facets. We will get the very capable Google search algorithm.We will get the helpful 'did you mean...' when your typing fails you. We will get a search that learns from what people select. We will get a search that finds related articles.
In short, you will get search functionality that you have come to know and enjoy.

Don't Forget About the Right

The right side of the web page that is...

Every content page has a Related Information section in the right column. This section contains links to documents, contacts, schedules, additional pages and more. We re-styled the area to make it clearer and more visible.

If you see something missing in the Related Information section for a specific page, let us know.

News Items Get Dates

We heard it would be helpful if the news items had publish dates.

RSS enabled

The news items on the main page are now available via RSS feeds. Click on the link to start receiving the news!

Welcome...

Launching a new web portal and content management system in less than a year was a huge undertaking, of that, we were aware. When we launched Raleigh’s new portal August 2010, we knew it wasn’t perfect. As with any design project, we could have continued changing, updating and revising…never reaching perfect and delaying the launch. 

We went live. 

We have heard a lot of feedback, some positive, some constructive and some great ideas. We have been listening to all of it, and we have implemented some changes and we still have more to come. We hope to use this forum to communicate our site changes and gather constructive feedback for future changes.

Recent Changes:

• Back by popular demand…the department list dropdown. Located in the upper right corner is a short cut to a specific department’s page. If you already know the department you want…go there.
• Search improved…the search was horrible at the start. It wasn’t behaving as scoped and was pulling old content that very few people wanted to access. We have reworked the search and it is better, but we are not finished here.
• Current Council Agenda is located on the main page below the news headlines.
• Parks and Recreation have been creating individual facility pages.

Did you notice:

• Most Popular in the bottom left...it contains the top pages, documents and searches which are coming directly from our site analytics.
• Maps in the upper right…want to know your police district, recycling day or polling place? Want to see nearby schools, parks or libraries? Enter your address, get this and more.
• Related Information along the right side…content pages have links to associated documents, forms, web sites and contact information.

In the works:

• Adding dates to the News headlines on the main page.
• CSS changes to make the site more uniform and readable.
• Changing the site search to a Google Search Appliance to bring a more familiar search interface to the site
• Upgraded “News” functionality with more RSS feeds for your particular interest
• A mobile-friendly view of the website
• Some “under the hood” improvements…like an upgrade to our JBoss and Alfresco platforms

We want to hear from you.  What is something you’ve tried to find lately on the web portal but were not able to?