User Story
01.
The city communications admin needs to give the community access to information and services they need from city government, but she only has a few people helping and there are too many requests.
02.
The city has a website, but it's difficult to maintain, and the information in it becomes stealth quickly.
03.
So citizens opt to call the city to get the information they need, which is not sustainable and leads to much frustration.
04.
Communications admin gets some budget for building a new website, and hires Granicus with the hope to: 1. Increase online engagement. 2. Provide easy access for government services. 3. Have a flexible website that it is easy and cheap to maintain
Business Goals
At Granicus, we were having increased competitive pressures around our application usability and pricing, which led to investments in both product design of our CMS and adding new services or widgets that our clients could use on their websites. Main business goals were:
Increase ROI by 15%
Increase flexibility of CMS by implementation of 5 new widgets
Decrease CMS usability calls by 20%
Problem Statement
How might we enable clients to easily and cheaply maintain their website so that they can provide easy access to government services for constituents and increase online engagement decreasing citizen calls to the organization?
Research
Leveraged existing logs from Customer Support
Conducted focus groups with existing clients
Used data from polls and surveys that were periodically sent to clients
Learnings
01.
Users needed to be able to change types of widgets on a page to cater to the latest priority of the city. For example, tax season, an emergency, or elections.
02.
There was no way to visualize the design of the page as users were making changes.
03.
It was difficult for customers to go back to a page they were editing.
04.
Most users did not know HTML, CSS or Javascript, which were needed to make changes other than just text.
Ideation
With the user problem in mind and results from research, I gathered the team to ideate on what a Wizard-like UI experience would look like for our customers. Then started validating our ideas with our power users.
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We quickly realized we were heading in the right direction, but there were additional needs that became apparent
Iteration
Through user testing the need for a way for easy access to common widgets and navigation tools became apparent, so we iterated on that.
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We continued to improve and clean up the design while testing with users and included a way to filter through the widgets, since the users did not always know the name of the widget.
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We also expanded the view to full width so that it would be easier for the user to see all the tools and their website.
Delivery
Outcomes & Lessons Learned
Impacted ROI as competitive (with the CMS changes and additional flexible widgets created) win-rate increased by over 30%.
From user feedback, we realized users don’t only save and publish, there were different content groups with layers of approval and permissions we needed to implement, so we needed to include this flow in our CMS.