The strategy behind our service pages: Focus on the people using them.
Earlier this year we launched the alpha version of the new City of Austin website with a limited number of city services. Why focus on services and not something like information pages about departments? Because through the testing we did with residents — asking them how they used the City website, and observing them as they moved throughout the website — we learned that residents are looking for the services the City offers, and not necessarily about the departments that offer those services.
Searching for City of Austin services
We also asked residents to show us how they search for city services. Every resident we spoke to told us they use a search engine to land on the page they want as opposed to using the menu and site navigation. Our analytics back up their stories: 61% of traffic comes from Google, and only 21% of site visitors use the navigation.
In addition to how they searched for services, we also heard:
- Residents want to see they what they need to do in order to access the service.
- They don’t like a lot of “flowery” language about what the department does (or how many divisions it has), they just want to know about the services.
- They usually just skim for the information they need.
- If they are using their mobile devices, they don’t want to have to scroll a lot to find the information they need.
I was curious about the fact that most of the comments and complaints residents made were about the same challenges I have when using the website as a resident. Secondly, it seemed like relatively low-hanging fruit — make the content residents need easier to access. Hey, no one said innovation has to be flashy. In fact, Hana Schank, a Public Interest Fellow at New America, gives us several examples of how innovation can be simple yet in the government sector, it’s those simple changes that mean a lot to residents. In her article, “Everything you Know About Innovation is Wrong”, Schank says:
“…What we learned from our research is that in the public sector, the most effective innovation teams are working on problems that at first glance are less about radical innovation than simply a leveling-up of services.”
Building a content model
Using this information and dozens of post-its with quotes culled from residents, we got together with our team to sketch out our content model for the service page template — our first attempt at leveling-up how residents can learn about City of Austin services. Part of my role as a Content Strategist is exploring the ways that re-structuring content can improve the lives of residents — even a small amount. It sounds lofty but think about the time and mental energy a well-organized website saves you. We want to do that for the people in Austin.
We identified:
- The fields we need to have on each service page.
- The fields that are required and those that are optional for content authors to fill.
- Permission levels for creating, editing, and publishing content.
- Any applications we will need to embed.
Our designers and developers took that information and built this:
Our approach to service pages
While making the content more accessible to residents was not quite the low-hanging fruit we thought it would be, we were able to organize the information on a page so that it would be helpful to residents. We also significantly lowered the reading level of each page by using service-oriented language and following the guidelines from our style guide.
A service-oriented title
We didn’t want to wait until the body of the page to incorporate service-oriented language, so each service will have an actionable title. We used words and phrases that we heard residents use, and were very clear about what the resident would find on the page.
Simple steps to access the service
Next, we introduced a “steps” block to explain what is required to access the service. Thinking back to the “how-to” essay prompts of middle school, our goal was to successfully access the service using the steps on the page.
What else does the resident need to know?
We heard from nearly all residents that they wanted to know how to access the service and then they would read any extra information, as long as they had the time. So we included a content block for supporting content — “What else do I need to know?” The content here gives a little more information about the service, but it isn’t directly tied to the steps a person needs to take.
For example, on this page, a resident needs to know how to find the day of the week when their trash will be picked up. They find that out in the steps and then scroll down, where they read about holiday pickup days — when their trash pickup schedules may be pushed back a day.
Because there are not that many holidays that affect trash pickup, it didn’t make sense to include it as a step. However, it is a helpful piece of information about the service itself.
Related services
The final section I want to call out is our “related services” block. If you’ve shopped on Amazon at all, this may be a familiar concept to you. If you haven’t, the idea is that you will see services within the same department that are related to the one you’re reading about, with the intention to provide a complete experience to one aspect of living in Austin. These related services will be auto-populated at first, and eventually, content authors will have the ability to choose which services show up.
What’s next
We’re really excited about the feedback we’re receiving from the public and City of Austin employees. The feedback, testing, and finding other, more complex services, have started us thinking on the next iteration. We’re seeing — and hearing — that there is a need for a very short description block before the steps to add context to the service, however it’s optional for content authors to fill out. We will continue to teach City of Austin employees about best practices and when to provide that extra context.
We’re a few months out from beta — when we will be redirecting residents from the services of austintexas.gov to those on austin.gov. Organizing the content this way has tested well so far and we’re excited to get these services in front of more people. If you would like to stay in the loop you can find us here on Medium, on Twitter, or on our project site.
