Did You Notice?

We released some small changes today, did you notice? The changes were a result of the Usability Tests and should be fairly subtle in nature. If you like a challenge, see if you can find the 17 changes, but stop reading now because they will be mentioned later in this post. The goal is to make small changes to enhance the user experience frequently. Some changes may be more noticeable than others.

Behind the Scenes Changes
Some changes were substantial but hopefully you won't notice these at all. The initial launch had far too many CSS stylesheets. While making some of the other changes, we used this opportunity to collapse all the CSS styles into one file. This was a very tedious task, but one that needed to be done to move forward.

Using the Data
When we outlined the I Want To lists for the main and landing pages before the launch, we relied on staff's working knowledge of content people request. The design called for a consistent look across the landing pages, but we have realized if items look too consistent, the changes may go unnoticed. We are using the site analytic data and user feedback to customize the I Want To lists. The first landing pages to get revised I Want To lists are Arts & Parks and Public Safety. The others will be revised soon.

Finally...the Changes

1. Calendar, Maps and Directory moved to upper left for increased visibility
2. Department dropdown list moved to upper left for increased visibility
3. Search moved to upper right, a typical search field location
4. Alerts background image removed for visual clarity
5. Alerts icon added to draw attention
6. Alerts text color changed to match other hyperlinks on site for visual association
7. Most Popular moved to bottom right to balance other changes
8. Most Popular defaults to searches
9. City of Raleigh News items list is one column rather than two columns to make titles more readable
10. Blue background color removed from landing page secondary articles
11. Removed survey from content pages to reduce visual clutter
12. Removed Connect With Us from content pages to reduce visual clutter
13. Moved Alerts above Related Info on content pages to keep Alerts prominent
14. Text changed to black/bold on Related Information headers to improve readability
15. Calendar enlarged
16. Calendar uses more Google Calendar native functions like clickable entries, map addresses, copy to my calendar
17. Employment listings are alphabetized for readability

Web Usability Group Meeting

The Web Usability Group is meeting Thursday Feb. 24, 2011 from 4:00pm to 5:30pm.
The meeting will be held in the Raleigh Municipal Building (222 W. Hargett St) in Room 305. If you are interested in sharing your opinions and ideas about the City's portal, please join us. If you have questions, please email.

Survey says...

Now you can know what the survey says. The first version of the online user survey just accepted your selection. The second version displayed the text results of the survey after you cast your vote. The latest rendition displays the results in graph and text format. The online survey provides an insight into public opinion on various topics facing the City. We have used the survey to gather public views on some of the recent decisions facing staff and Council like the smoking ban in City parks and the results of the Crabtree Valley Transportation Study. Take the survey and each time you return you will see the latest results. It does rely on cookies to keep track, so if you clear your cookies, you won't see the results. Share you opinions...and see what others think!

The GSA Landed...

Our infrastructure team may have thought something landed in their network rack when amidst all the black and silver sea of clones appears a bright yellow Google-stamped box. The interloper is a welcomed addition to the Web Portal search. The GSA (Google Search Appliance) replaced the SOLR search engine on our Web Portal in early January.

The Basics
The GSA has some great native capabilities, aside from being a proven leader in search engines. It is smart enough to suggest spelling corrections if you mistyped something. It makes use of the faceted search tags within our content. It will even give some of its own suggestions after you search for a term. Like google.com, it indents results that come from the same domain, or in our site case, from within the same content area. If you want to see more from a specific content area, just click the 'More Results from' hyperlink.

The Document Gotchas
The SOLR search engine was configured to use friendly document titles that our content contributors entered in the Content Management System. The GSA, like all other web search engines, relies on the document title property that is within the file itself. Most people probably don't pay close attention to the title properties in their documents and many free PDF conversion software takes great liberties in populating these for the new PDF. In short, we tried to clean up and populate as many document titles as we could before GSA went live, but we could not get them all. You may see a cryptic document title returned in search if we have not gotten to it yet.

If you were accustomed to searching for DXF and DWG files in the old search, you won't be able to pull these files in the GSA search. It doesn't support these types, but, you will still find the pages that list all these files with links to the documents.

We are not short on any old documents so we zipped up some of the archival documents ZIP files. The GSA  doesn't search into the ZIP files or provide friendly titles like the previous engine, so the ZIP files may seem a little different. We plan to implement an advanced search option that will allow people to look for archival documents, forms, press releases, etc.

Ready, Set, Search
If you haven't tried the new search on the Web Portal, try it out! If you search for something and just can't find it, let me know. We could be missing content that you find valuable. We could be using words and terminology that differ from the public's wording. Whatever the circumstance, we want you to the find the information you need!