Building a Digital Content Governance
Information Architecture and Style Guides for a Local Government
The below writeup is a subset of my work to create a content and documentation governance at a local government. The full write up of this journey is forth coming.
I recently had the opportunity to completely overhaul and redesign a Town department’s website, in preparation for the launch of their new service delivery.
I first assumed that the Town operated with a decentralized content governance, since each of the Town departments was responsible for updating and maintaining the content of their own department’s web pages. After digging in to the details, however, I found that — there was really no documented content governance at all.
This missing governance helped explain:
Inconsistent page architecture and page styles between different departments
An unclear information architecture and an unclear visibility of system status.
Lack of cohesive color usage and style conventions, which ultimately meant a lack of user indicators
The Approach
Decisions and circumstances ultimately culminated in the following plan:
I completely overhauled and redesigned the site architecture and page content for two Town departments: Building and Development Services (Building) and Planning.
These redesigns would serve as an agile, iterative approach. They provided a testing ground to find concepts and styles that worked and that could be easily replicated someday throughout the rest of the Town site.
The Frame
The impetus for this project stemmed from an exciting launch of a brand new service delivery within Building. The department’s new digital permit center was set to launch, and the directors and communications teams were preparing press releases, social media blasts, and web language about the transition from paper permits to online/web based.
I inserted myself into the conversations and proposed that:
“We were about to launch a brand new online service delivery on top of a broken website.”
The focus at that time was to add new information to the Building site, explaining the new online permit center. No one was acknowledging how difficult it already was to navigate the Building site and given the redundancy of pages – that there was not a clear location for this new information.
I offered to perform a site content audit, create a redesign proposal, and make any agreed upon edits. The process of this work is detailed below.
Research for the Redesign
The research for this project included content audits, interviews of subject matter experts, and collection of customer feedback data. This project did not have a budget.
Content Audits and Interviews
I performed two content audits, one for the Building Department webpages and one for the Planning Department’s. In each of these content audit processes, I also met with colleagues (the interviews) from these departments to better understand the subject matter and learn why information was grouped in certain ways.
Customer Feedback Data
Because this project did not have an allocated budget, I did not have a means to compensate research participants. Thus, I did not implement a formal survey or interview program for customer feedback. Instead, I tried to make use of customer information that the Town was already receiving: complaints!
We had two existing sources of complaints/feedback: one being the public, and the other Town staff. Both the public and Town staff were reliant on the Town website as a source of information, and I merely started taking note of phone call complaints and complaints from colleagues.
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Building Department Content Audit
I found that the original site map for the Building Department:
contained redundant / duplicative pages, and inconsistent information across those pages .
had different pages for building and for zoning, with no connections between the two or explanations of how they relate. Zoning review was handled in the Planning Department, but there were pages in the Building Department explaining (though not fully) zoning review.
contained summaries of zoning ordinance language, but these summaries were not complete and therefore imparting potentially new meanings. The zoning code should in itself be a source of truth.
had many pages that were just lists of links. The pages would keep sending you elsewhere within the site, without telling you why.
Building Department Customer Feedback
The most prevalent feedback from public and staff both was that they could not figure out how to find what they looking for on the Town website.
Both staff and public were ultimately using the Building website to find:Project thresholds for permit requirements
Permit fee schedule
Phone numbers for site inspectors
The refreshed Building Department site map. The original department site had 32 pages, but now it has 8 pages.
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Content Audit Results:
I found that the original site map for the Planning Department:had groupings of information that were inconsistent with the content groupings found in the zoning code
contained numerous pages for some zoning topics, but was missing pages entirely for other zoning topics
contained outdated information and had pages for plans and studies that have since been withdrawn
The refreshed Planning Department site map. The original department site had over 150 pages, but now it has 51 pages.
A Proposed Governance
The content governance that was ultimately used for the Building and Planning Departments’ webpages, and that is proposed for the entire Town website, is as follows:
Page Structure
Content should be typed directly onto a web page whenever possible, instead of uploading a PDF.
The webpage can be translated by the user directly in the browser. PDFs would need to be translated into – at minimum – the Town’s 5 official languages.
Webpage updates are immediately visible to the viewers. PDFs, we have seen, are downloaded by the user. The user then does not revisit the page to check for updates.
The webpages become an easy to maintain source of truth for staff and public.
Content should be grouped into as few pages as necessary.
Content groups should be determined by a department, and the web page architecture should reflect the department’s content groupings
Each content topic area should have one page, if possible. Utilization of accordions can help shorten page length.
Hierarchy Indicators
Home Pages should have a banner image at the top of the page