Mass.gov: Building a wicked awesome new website for Massachusetts

In 2016, a study by a consultancy group found that 76% of constituents interacted with the Massachusetts state government through the website, with phone (55%) and in-person (39%) trailing far behind. This amounted to more than 235 million pageviews in 2016, making Mass.gov the Commonwealth’s digital front door.

At the same time, users were dissatisfied: In the same study, the old Mass.gov scored 32 out of 100 on a user satisfaction measure, while the best-ranked states — Texas and Virginia — were in the low 40s. Top private-sector websites were in a different league at 79.

Survey results from 2016 showing Mass.gov lagging behind other state and private websites in user satisfaction.

Mass.gov’s content was also in poor shape. The website hosted more than 250,000 pages and documents, including old toilet recall notices that were getting in the way of users finding what they were looking for. New technology wasn’t going to be sufficient — we also needed a new approach to content.

If Massachusetts had a reputation for being on the cutting edge of technology, Mass.gov was certainly not keeping up. We knew we had to radically rethink Mass.gov.

Vision

We began to lay the groundwork for Phase 1 with 5 key goals in mind:

1. Improve user experience for top services: Dedicate the bulk of resources to the most popular services to ensure that they are clear and actionable for the public.
2. Make Mass.gov constituent-centric: Shift from an agency-centric structure (i.e. you have to know that business licensing is under something called OCABR) to intuitive navigation that assumes no knowledge of government on the user’s part.
3. Improve findability: Implement a new, Google-powered search tool that reliably provides relevant results.
4. Audit our content to clean up distracting, confusing, and out-of-date information: Eliminate content that no longer serves a purpose and only gets in the way of users.
5. Empower state entities to transition themselves onto the new system: Provide a scalable solution that allows more than 100 state entities and hundreds of content authors to adopt the new content management system with ease and independence.

Timeline of the Mass.gov redesign from its start in July 2016 to the DNS switch in September 2017.

Timeline of the Mass.gov redesign from November 2017 to the release of analytics dashboards in July 2018.

To accomplish this, we embraced the industry’s best practices, technologies, and ideas.

Open source: We built our new site with Drupal 8 to take advantage of an established ecosystem of modules and contributors. We chose to make our project open-source, making it available for anyone in the civic tech community to add to and learn from, and enabling us to get feedback on potential bugs or security issues. The codebase was a significant investment of taxpayer money, and we wanted to make sure other states could use it. This is ideal for other states and organizations that undertake similar projects in the future.

Try, test, iterate: We used the Agile methodology to structure our work while developing the new website. This meant experimenting with different solutions, and testing and iterating on our product extensively until we were satisfied with it and our users validated it through their feedback. We reached out to hundreds of people for feedback at each step of our redesign process, from our 500-strong volunteer user panel to more than 50 one-on-one interviews with both members of the public and state and local government employees.

Results of a Treejack test used to improve and validate the Mass.gov information architecture.

Change in design from the old subtopic page content type to the new service page content type.

Data-driven: We needed to work on more than just hunches, or what we — sitting on the 8th floor of a government office building in Boston — thought was best for Bay Staters of all backgrounds from Cape Cod to the Berkshires, and everywhere in between.

For instance, we discovered that 10 percent of our content generated close to 90 percent of all the traffic. We focused on improving those critical pages instead of spreading ourselves thin over tens of thousands of low-volume ones.

Visual showing 89% of traffic on the old Mass.gov was generated by 10% of the content: The augmented Pareto principle in action.

Single face of government: With information spread out across numerous independently run government websites with their own branding and navigation — and private websites mimicking them to take advantage of people — users were confused as to which was the authoritative source of truth.

For example, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and Registry of Motor Vehicles, 2 of the single largest properties by web traffic (88 million pageviews combined in 2016), had their own sites separate from Mass.gov. We wanted to bring everyone back under 1 roof to improve the user experience and be mindful of the government’s role as the sole provider of essential services.

Confidence: Tying this all together was the mantra that 1 of our lead UI/UX designers developed: When it came to our constituents’ feelings when using the site, “The emotion that we’re aiming for is confidence.” Our brand is based on being helpful, human, dignified, and modern. Regardless of whether they come to Mass.gov to file for a divorce or get their child’s first fishing permit, Bay Staters need to be confident in Mass.gov’s ability to get them what they need, when they need it.

“The emotion that we’re aiming for is confidence.”

Impact

Our team stood up a proof-of-concept site within 3 months of the project start, refined it based on user feedback, and launched the new site just 1 year after development began. When pilot.mass.gov (which had been live since late 2016) transitioned to become the full site in mid-September 2017, the home page changed and users landed on the new Mass.gov by default, launching a new era for digital services in Massachusetts.

The front page of the old Mass.gov compared to the current iteration of Mass.gov.

Our Content Strategy team — experienced editors and writers — and data scientists used Google Analytics data and cluster mapping to identify 19 “top services,” ranging from taxes to recreation to public safety, and then worked with the relevant agencies to migrate and improve content. In this process, we didn’t just “lift and shift.” Instead, we took the opportunity to make the content easier to read and process for all constituents. We’re continuing to rewrite pages at a sixth-grade reading level, and we’re stripping away governmentese and legal jargon.

We also began content performance experiments where we paired 1 of our content strategists with a partner agency and leveraged web analytics and user feedback to make targeted changes to pages to improve their performance. We’re now scaling this data-driven approach by building dashboards to automate the analysis that we initially performed manually.

These key improvements are making a difference for more and more users. During the transition period, we’ve been running both old and new Mass.gov at the same time. Our objective was to have 80 percent of our web traffic served by the new site by June 30, 2018. Instead, as of May we had already crossed 90 percent, a more than fourfold increase since September 2017. On any given week, around 1.2 million visitors now generate 3 million pageviews on the new Mass.gov.

Beyond content improvement, a number of key factors drive these numbers and the modern, secure, and user-friendly experience on the new Mass.gov.

1. Responsive and mobile-friendly: The site adapts seamlessly to whatever device it loads on, as compared to the old site that really only worked for desktop users.
2. Accessible: Extensive testing with the Perkins School for the Blind and adoption of best practices means that Mass.gov meets or exceeds legal accessibility requirements.
3. Search: The new, Google-powered search tool serves the most relevant results, with filters and facets to make it even more powerful. (Oh, and it also serves laws and regulations from the Legislature’s sister website, which had previously not been the case.)
4. Content management system: Content creators no longer need to be IT staff willing to suffer through a complicated publishing experience. The new, intuitive platform enables subject-matter experts, communication leads, and others to publish content efficiently. Our content authors learn to use the system via our online resource library and training videos, and can rely on the support of an in-house Customer Success team.
5. Documents: The new content management system makes dealing with documents easier for authors and simplifies compliance with public record requests.
6. Security: We moved Mass.gov from an outdated server to cloud hosting, and added mandatory 2-factor authentication for all users.

But wait, there’s more!

Not only did we convince the Department of Transportation and Registry of Motor Vehicles to join Mass.gov, but all of this was also achieved on-time, on-scope, and in some cases even ahead of schedule. That’s a remarkable achievement in itself for a sector that has often been plagued by costly delays, and it allows us to look to the future with ambition and confidence.

Images of Bay Staters from all backgrounds, all of whom use Mass.gov.

What’s next?

We completed Phase 1 with the launch of the new Mass.gov. This transformation expands access to digital services to all Bay Staters. Making the site mobile-friendly and accessible was critical for equity, reducing barriers between constituents and information. Within state government itself, agencies are now prioritizing their online platforms and beginning to rethink how they fulfill their missions. We are breaking down silos in the flow of content, providing a better experience to constituents, and strengthening their trust in government.

In the current Phase 2, we will deploy analytics dashboards to all content authors to empower them to make data-driven improvements to their pages, with the ultimate aim of having high-performing content on the new site and shutting down the old site in December 2018.

Over the longer term, Phase 3 will see us focus on digitizing additional services. This will also entail integrating our core applications and implementing single sign-on across our digital ecosystem. Finally, we will also build in open-data tools to the website, freeing up the power of this information to everyone.

A wicked awesome Mass.gov is already here, but our journey has just started.

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