Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2011 > November > 30 > Entry
Get your gripe on: city looking for website feedback
Hey, remember back in the day when the City of Austin decided it was going to redesign its website and people kind of lost their mind?
How far we’ve come! Now the city is ready to preview its redesigned website in public so that people can lose their minds in person, instead of behind the relative anonymity of the Internet. This is progress!
As reported on the City and County Beat blog by Marty Toohey, the city has scheduled several meetings to show off the new design to the public. The next one happens Thursday, 6 p.m., at 811 Barton Springs Road.
There are two more sessions after that, Monday at 6 p.m. and Wednesday at 9 a.m.
According to the city’s announcement, this will be a chance for people to see and offer feedback on the website before anybody else can see it. As such, we don’t even get so much as a screen grab on the website.
The webpage says:
The AustinGO team and more than 30 City departments have worked hard for the last six months, creating a cutting edge open source content management system and recreating and reimagining the Website resources Austinites use to access City services and initiatives. Participants will be given a list of tasks to complete on the site and data will be gathered on how they use the site. They will have free time to explore the site and participate in the debugging process. They can also share ideas for improvements and expansions for the site in the future… Austin’s new website is cool - but you can help make it even cooler.
A few nagging questions:
- Given that this is, you know, a website meant for the Internet, why not do an online preview/testing session? Is there an experience that sounds less inviting than a room full of people complaining that they can’t find that thing on the webpage that was there before but now it’s not there and WHY ISN’T IT THERE ANYMORE, SOMEBODY HELP ME FIND THIS THING!
- Perhaps they could even do a webinar? I mean, come on. Believe it or not, we have the technology.
- Doesn’t two and a half years seem like way too long for a website redesign? I know this is par for the course for government work, but still.
Was this brave experiment in open source a success, or will there need to be more effort devoted to cleaning up new problems? If you go to one of the sessions, let us know what you think in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: Austin, Internet
Comments
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By Travis Acerno
December 8, 2011 3:53 AM | Link to this
Awesome post! I will keep an on eye on your blog.