Inside the City’s resident feedback inbox: Why a service-oriented approach matters
When Austin residents want to send the City feedback, they can go to Austintexas.gov/contact-us on the current City website and submit questions or comments.
We receive emails covering a variety of topics, including:
- reporting broken links and misspellings
- looking for police reports or how to pay a parking ticket
- questions about building, event, and business permits
- looking for trash pickup days
- questions about City code
- looking for recreation centers to rent for events
- comments about street or sidewalk construction
- and more
Many of the emails contain resident’s sentiments on our website and how we can improve.
These emails provided great background research for the start of the digital services project and have informed our approach as we go out and research with residents.
We’re using these emails and all of our research to provide City staff with insight on resident’s current pain points with their department’s content and how moving to a service-oriented approach will begin to alleviate those pain points.
Below are real emails from residents. All names have been amended and personal information has been removed for resident’s privacy.
The issue: Residents want to find services, but are being made to understand our organizational chart to find them
From: Arla
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2016
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
I’m a new resident facing recycling for the first time. The complexity of Austin’s recycling/trash program is overwhelming for a new resident — which is where a website can help. In the list of “departments” I’m unable to identify which one handles this topic. I’m unable to find what to do with specific items, for example, air conditioning filters. As a new resident, I just don’t find this website helpful for recycling. Is there another website that addresses this issue better?
What we’re doing: We’re changing the navigation of the site to be service-oriented
We observed fairly early in our research that many residents struggle to find what they need on Austintexas.gov. They don’t know or even care which departments offer which services. They just want to be able to access the services themselves quickly.
While there is a bit of vanity in our desire as City departments to highlight ourselves and our divisions, residents are telling us that they just want the services, and we’re making it difficult for them.
We’re prototyping a new City of Austin website and the navigation of Alpha.austin.gov is focused on getting residents to the services they need fast. They’ll still be able to find department information if they need it, but they won’t need to know which department owns a certain service in order to find it.
The new navigation highlights themes that are most important to residents. These themes were chosen based on card sorting and think aloud testing performed with residents, as well as reviewing the services with the highest visits based on Google Analytics.
The issue: Residents are frustrated by how difficult the content is to understand or find
From: Henry
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2017
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
This web site is cumbersome to me. I would like to find out what the procedure is to find the zoning on a piece of property with only the address. I just moved to Austin. I am a Texas estate broker, and need the ability to access zoning in order to practice my trade. I spent 1+1/2 hours yesterday and two hours this morning on-line trying to do. figure it out.
From: Harold
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2016
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
This website has me in a loop. Cannot pay traffic citation on-line.
From: Katie
Sent: Tuesday, February 19, 2018
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
This is probably one of the worst websites to navigate. You cannot find anything! Why would youth sports here http://www.austintexas.gov/resident/kids not take you to the page where you can sign up for activities? Why would it take you somewhere for adults? Finding recreation centers is hard to find. Why is this not on the homepage OR under resident? Again, worst website to find anything.
From: Submitted as anonymous
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2015
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
You can’t find contact information for ANYONE on this website. I’m trying to contact somebody in the permitting office to email me the permits that my company ALREADY PAID FOR, and I can’t even find the email address or number for the permitting department. The search function is also pathetic, I have better luck just typing it into google and having google direct me to the right page.
What we’re doing: We’re training staff to decrease the quantity of their content and increase the quality
There are currently over 11,000 pages and 10,000 documents on Austintexas.gov. This huge amount of content, some of which is redundant or outdated, severely impacts a resident’s ability navigate the site as well as find things in search.
To prepare departments to transition to Alpha.austin.gov, we are training staff on the importance of archiving content that is redundant, outdated, and trivial, on writing with plain language, and how less is more when it comes to digital content.
We’re also improving the public-facing design to make contact information clearer and inline with each service so residents can focus on one paragraph of content at a time.
The issue: Residents struggle to access our PDFs
From: Nancy
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2015
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
Hi! I can’t download the proper form I need to apply for a short term rental license (type 1, partial unit). I’ve tried on three different computers. I would appreciate it emailed directly to me or for someone to make it easier to download (changing the version of adobe, etc.) Thanks!
What we’re doing: We’re taking City forms digital
We’re researching with residents to understand their needs in digital forms and prototyping what that can look like, because we’ve learned, PDFs just don’t cut it.
Not only do PDF forms require residents to download a PDF, fill it out, email it as an attachment, and wait for a response, but PDFs are often inaccessible for users without the sufficient computer skills or software and those with visual disabilities. Learn more about how we’re digitizing forms at the City of Austin.
The issue: Residents struggle to use the website on a mobile device
From: Nathan
Sent: Sunday, March 27, 2016
To: AustinGO
Subject: Form submission: AustinTexas.gov Feedback
City site on mobile has huge amounts of headers and footers, is hard to use and search.
What we’re doing: We’re designing mobile first
With over half of our traffic coming from a mobile device, the City of Austin is committed to improving the mobile experience we provide to residents. See the comparison of Austintexas.gov to Alpha.austin.gov on a smartphone:
Try the sites on your own smartphone. You can see the strides we’re taking to design for mobile first. We will continue to design for mobile and test with residents on their mobile devices throughout the digital services project.
