There are 35 posts in total.
A web strategy for local government
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2016-03-11, 13:38:00 - 1881 words
"There will come a time soon when for some councils there won't be a council website any more - the website will be the council" - Tom Steinberg, founder, MySociety
Purposes of the strategy
- To document the roles of the council's website estate and how we might best achieve those purposes
- To agree key stakeholders
- To state ownership and governance of the web estate
- To plant a stake in the ground outlining our aspirations for the future
Purposes of the council website estate
- To deliver channel shift savings by enabling citizens and others to interact with the council digitally instead of by telephone or in person
- To promote the services the council offers (or commissions) to citizens and visitors
- To promote civic engagement shifting people from being passive residents into active citizens, taking an interest in the council, its policies, and its workings to enable them to better inform us in our decision making and be better informed themselves at election time
- To communicate key messages to target audiences
- To promote the city / borough as a location for business and tourism
Stakeholders and audience
The stakeholders of the council web estate are:
Wuthering Bytes – A Festival of Technology in the heart of the Pennines
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2015-09-30, 17:12:37 - 1015 words
I went to the Wednesday session of Wuthering Bytes, which was called Tomorrow’s People, exploring the future of public service provision and how councils, SMEs and individuals can work together. It was quite a departure from the usual local government technology events I tend to go to in that the topics were more of parallel relevance to my usual job rather than of direct relevance – but that said it was still of use for me to take back to work tomorrow, especially the talk about Open Source Circular Economy Days. It was also an good reminder to those of us who’ve become accustomed to the unconference / Open Space Technology format of events that it’s not the format of the event which makes it good or bad, it’s the quality people who turn up to speak at it.
I’ve not written a prose account of the day, instead, here are my bullet-point notes from the sessions, which may or may not be relevant to people outside of the context of the event itself:
Kathryn Grace – Digital Occupational Therapist – Digital tools and dementia
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Thinking a bit further ahead
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2013-11-28, 17:05:14 - 2616 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
Our primary focus for this project is on delivering an improved website in 2014 which will meet the needs of users and ourselves for the next few years, and which will be scalable and extensible for the few years again beyond that.
Whilst the world of the internet is still a fast-moving world, there’s no denying that the world of the local government internet is…
…a little slower! When dealing with technological changes, in most organisations which are relatively small or on which the organisation’s whole business model is predicated on the technology for service delivery it’s relatively easy for them to quickly embrace change and innovation and incorporate it into the business. But in local government, whilst its easy for webteams [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Thinking a bit further ahead .
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - To feature or not to feature? Where information turns out to be not as important to citizens as we expect it to be!
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2013-11-06, 16:28:50 - 1135 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
For many working in some form of communications function in local government, winter is our favourite time of year. Why, you may ask? One word:
Gritting!
We love gritting in local government communications – it’s the nearest we get to taking part in the excitement of 24 hour rolling news coverage; eyes are constantly tuned to the Met Office hourly forecast to see what the temperature’s doing, ready to push out to the Twitter Gritters the notice that the wagons are going out to treat the roads. And most council websites naturally have a prominent link to the gritting information on the home page, because it’s important, and therefore popular, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Like most councils, ever since I remember we’ve every winter put a [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - To feature or not to feature? Where information turns out to be not as important to citizens as we expect it to be! .
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - A usability review of council websites
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2013-10-31, 11:31:44 - 2786 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
We of course have our own ideas about what makes a council website usable – and part of the point of sharing the work in progress of this project here is to test if our ideas are shared by our citizens and our industry peers. But it’s always best practice not just to rely on one’s own generalist expertise and one’s own individual consultation work, but to also engage the advice of independent specialist experts, to either verify your own findings or alternatively shed light on where your own proximity to a project might be skewing the results in favour of what you might want them to be – this process is sometimes known as red teaming.
To that end, we [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - A usability review of council websites .
The C Word
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2013-10-14, 17:07:46 - 711 words
Over the last week or two at work I've actually started being a little bit naughty.
The webteam in Birmingham here, like many council webteams, sits within the Customer Services division of the council, rather than within either Corporate Communications or IT, like in many other councils. This means the word which underpins all the work we do is the word 'customer'.
Being frank, I was never particularly happy about us being moved from comms to cs when it happened - as a person out on the street who buys things, my overwhelming experience and view of 'customer services' is they're the people you take a faulty product back to, who spend a lot of time trying to pursuade you it isn't faulty, or the people you complain about an intangible service to, who spend a lot of time telling you the majority of their customers think the service is just peachy. I, frankly, have never been happy about my job being associated with that sort of thing.
I've also never really liked this description of our website users as customers, but it's only in the last few weeks or so I've been able to really crystalise why I've never really liked it. [...]
Read the rest of The C Word .
I only ever use search, nobody uses menus, nobody scrolls down the page, it needs to fit on the screen
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2013-08-29, 09:42:26 - 1206 words
There have been many a time I’ve sat in a meeting or been at an event, and I’ve heard the phrase ‘I only ever use [x], nobody ever [y]s’ in the context of a discussion of user behaviour on the web.
It’s an attitude which is not just the bane of all local government web officers’ lives, but actually is the bane of all people who spending a significant amount of their time making things for the web, as opposed to just consuming things on the web.
When the person in front of you declares that they never use menus, that they only search, even their own personal description of their own behaviour can be suspect. All web users will have their default preferred strategies for navigating around a web site – but the point is different web users have different preferred strategies; some people will prefer to use a menu, some people prefer to start off with a search box, and some people will jump straight to the A-Z section, if one is present. It’s also the case that – whilst a casual user might lose patience and go elsewhere if their preferred method doesn’t work for them – a persistent user will [...]
Read the rest of I only ever use search, nobody uses menus, nobody scrolls down the page, it needs to fit on the screen .
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - The importance of Eccles cakes to channel shift, or the value of less important content for search visibility
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2013-07-31, 14:20:12 - 2069 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
In thinking about the future shapes of our council websites, we all of course understand the need to perform brutally honest ROTE analyses of every single page on our sites, and likewise we’re all geared up for restructuring our websites and the content in them according to properly thought through content strategies.
So we know we need to get rid of those pointless pages about stuff the council has nothing to do with such as the history of Birmingham’s canals, or the history and recipe behind Eccles cakes, right?
Not so fast!
Both of those pages – canals on our own website, and Eccles cakes on the website for Salford City Council, are both in the local history sections of the website, and whilst some people [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - The importance of Eccles cakes to channel shift, or the value of less important content for search visibility .
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Current thinking about mobile device access of council websites
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2013-06-20, 17:13:18 - 1997 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
On 11 June 2013, Socitm – the national association of people working in the field of public sector online services – held an event to present their latest findings in the area of how people are using mobile devices to access council websites.
The headline fact that was revealed was that during the first five months of 2013, 27% of visits to council websites were from mobile devices – ie, 27% of the people looking at and doing things on council websites were by people using mobile phones and tablets, as opposed to on laptops and desktop computers.
Rubbish, leisure, and schools were the top three areas which people were more likely to look at on mobile rather than desktop, with libraries and housing following [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Current thinking about mobile device access of council websites .
www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - User testing customer journeys – it’s not just about the top tasks
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2013-05-24, 15:38:23 - 830 words
Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
When designing a new website, especially when proposing a radically new menu system (‘information architecture‘), it’s important to test with one’s potential users that the design and navigation proposed actually works.
There are many pairs of pliers in the usability tester’s toolbox to help them with this – card sorting exercises for navigation, eye tracking studies for layout, unstructured sessions with or without interviews to get a gut feeling for the level of success and/or to look out for potential problems outside the planned testing, and the setting of specific tasks to test participants to establish (a) if they can complete them at all, and (b) how easy it was for them, what their ‘customer journey’ through the site to task completion was.
The [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - User testing customer journeys – it’s not just about the top tasks .
Perfect