Inventories Don’t Lie- Austin Wants to Interact

The Design, Technology, & Innovation Fellows partnered with two City of Austin departments: Communications & Information Management and Communications & Technology Management, to build a better technology foundation and design a solid content workflow for the City of Austin. Here is what we’ve learned so far.

By defining the moving parts of the City’s website- we confirmed that part of the project had to focus on city services workflow for City of Austin employees- specifically, the employees who create digital content. Over the next 4 months, we will prototype a new content workflow with the digital team at Austin Resource Recovery. We’ve partnered with them before, and we’re excited about the next step. Our goal is that the new workflow strengthens our city teams’ ability to provide residents with the services they need.

First things first, before we started trying out new content workflows, we needed to know more about the content that currently exists on Austin Resource Recovery’s site. To do this, we completed a content inventory. I’ll skip the nitty-gritty here, but give me a shout if you want more details.

We focused the initial inventory on the residential portion of the website, such as:

• The curbside collection programs- think compost, trash and recycling,
• Street sweeping services,
• And the reuse drop-off centers.

By narrowing our focus to residential services, we were able to easily see that the majority of pages on their site are informational. Meaning that these pages offered information about the service- like a description of what Austin Resource Recovery does, but residents don’t necessarily complete a task on that page.

This wasn’t necessarily surprising, though, because we already knew that educating the community is one of Austin Resource Recovery’s strengths.

However, the most popular pages were actually those that had an interactive feature for Austin residents, in addition to providing information. The pages with the highest views included:

• How to find out their trash and recycling curbside schedules,
• A form to sign up for reminders,
• And an interactive map to find drop-off centers.

These interactive pages, such as the collection schedule, were focused more on accessing a specific service offered by Austin Resource Recovery, instead of only information.

While it’s true that the pages with the highest analytics are the more interactive, service-focused pages, residents will sometimes just need to read about a service. For example, we spoke with a resident last week who wanted to see a list of items that can be recycled in Austin, but also wanted tips on what does not go in his recycling bin. In this situation, he just needed information that would allow him to complete a task.

Similarly, if you are considering a home renovation project, you would want to gather the information for a building permit- or find out if you need one at all- before applying, right? This would be another instance of informational pages- while not necessarily interactive- still providing a service to the residents.

So this brings up an interesting question… with a caveat. The question is, how can we make getting information about a service easier for residents? The caveat- this question is going to continually evolve as this project progresses.

We’re currently in the beginning phases of prototyping and testing the initial content workflow for employees with that question in mind. Using our inventory as a foundation, we’re finding the balance between interactive service-focused pages and informational service pages.

Follow along here and by visiting our project page.