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Boston unwraps new city Web site
By adamg on Wed, 07/20/2016 - 11:09am
New Boston Web site on a laptop.
Boston unveiled its new city Web site today at boston.gov (if you go to the old cityofboston.gov, you'll be redirected, or should be). Gone is the clutter of the old site. In fact, as you can see from the home-page, there's a whole lot of nothing there, unless you like staring at a blue version of the lagoon in the Public Garden.
That's because the designers are obviously going for the phone-on-the-go demographic rather than us decrepit old Miltons on clunky desktops down in Storage B.
As a starting point, there's nothing wrong with that, given the increasing use of phones, at least once us fogeys remember that the "hamburger" in the upper left will bring up the menu we're used to (and notice how it helpfully has "Menu" underneath). The problem is that, unlike the Boston Globe site, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to make the desktop site take advantage of the extra space on desktop screens - and "native" mobile screens seen on a desktop are kind of annoying. Look at the press-release page on a desktop as an example.
What the site looked like until this morning:
Beyond the look-and-feel, the designers have tried to grapple with a fundamental problem: People do not live the way City government is organized - in a series of discrete departments that might only make sense bureaucratically. The answer is a series of hand-crafted "guides" that try to make it easier for users to find all the information they might need on a particular topic. Think about owning a car in Boston - you might need to look up how to get a parking permit (Boston Transportation Department), when to move your car for street sweeping (Public Works Department), how to pay or appeal a parking ticket (parking clerk) or how to pay your excise tax (Assessing Department). The car-owning guide explains and links all those things. The site has similar guides for Buying and Owning a Home, Getting Around the City (in ways not involving a car) and Moving (all left unlinked as an exercise for the reader in finding them).
But in simplifying things, the site creates a new problem. It's great for first-time users that many intro pages now have detailed explanations of what they're about. But they're at the top of the page, in (at least on a desktop or laptop) really large type. If you're a regular user of the site, it's going to get really tiring, really quickly always having to scroll through that stuff.
A personal example: I love browsing the list of restaurants that have been shut for health violations. Before, if I hadn't bookmarked the specific list of restaurant permit suspensions, I'd go to the Mayor's Food Court and click on the list. Easy peasy. But where is it now? No clue, because they've changed a lot of URLs, so I click on the Search icon (minor annoyance for us desktop users: Once you click that, you then have to click in the search line that shows up; why doesn't the cursor auto-jump there by itself?) and search for "Mayor's Food Court." Yay, it's the top item on the results page and I click to it and am confronted by a fairly lengthy explanation of what all the different types of violations are. Which I will have to look at every single time I go to that page (the fact that none of the links to lists of violations currently work is, I'm sure, a temporary annoyance of the sort of thing that pops up pretty much all the time in major redesigns of sites that involve zillions of databases, such as this one).
But take a look. What do you think?
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
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Comments
Nice. This morning I tried
Nice. This morning I tried to go to Assessing on the website, and then real estate taxes on the website. It wasn't working. So I called City Hall. Nobody answered the phone. So I called the Mayor's Office and they transferred me to the Assessor's Office. Before I could even speak the person blurted, "THEY SHOULDN'T BE TRANSFERRING YOU TO ME BUT I WILL TRY TO HELP." I tried to be as sweet as pie so that they wouldn't hang up on me or transfer me to someone else. Inside I was seething. City Hall SUCKS!!
SO MUCH YAAAAAAAAAAS
SO MUCH YAAAAAAAAAAS
Not worth a million dollars
State and local web redesigns usually fall in the $50k - $200k range. Spending $1 million to redesign the Boston website and move it to Drupal is obscene.
Nowadays you don't even have spend much money on redesign. There are dozens of cities that have newly redesigned websites. You copy one of those, change up the colors and fonts, and you're all set. Local government web portals are a solved problem. There's no need to blow through $800,000 of tax dollars to reinvent the wheel.
Simple redesign, no, not worth $1 million
Even if it is in Drupal :-).
I suspect/hope the bulk of the money is going into making it easier to get information into and out of all the old databases the city uses that were not really designed for Web access.
Don't forget
The money for the two hacks running the redesign.
"Copy one of those, change up
"Copy one of those, change up the colors & fonts..." No thanks, Melania. Not for Boston.
So off base
You are so off base here, there's an incredible amount of work that goes behind each of these projects. You can't just take things from another site and copy them over, you need to take into account all the integrations and stakeholder needs.
And just what was so wrong
with the old website that justified this $1 million boondoggle?
Have you ever migrated a
Have you ever migrated a municipal website? The project falls into three phases: web design, site organization, and then hammering the content into schemas and porting it into the new CMS.
What makes no sense is that Boston spent a lot of resources coming up with a new design and a new site organization. Both are solved problems. Browse through a few local government websites and you quickly realize that virtually all of them are organized the same, predictable way. Predictable both for contributors and for constituents. The old website was organized that way. The new website is organized around an avant garde collection of "topics" which nobody else uses and the city itself is still figuring out.
Rather than spend a million dollars on that experiment, Boston could have maintained the existing site structure, ran a 1:1 port from their old CMS into Drupal, and ripped the core assets (CSS3, JS, HTML5) from any one of the other major cities in the USA that underwent a recent redesign. Working within that framework there is a lot of room for you to make improvements of your own, but not so much room that you risk completely blowing it making rookie mistakes.
Do that, and a $1 million project becomes a $150,000 project. Boston residents get a respectably modern and mobile-friendly website, and the city proves itself fiscally responsible to its taxpayers.
Some Parts Are Still the Same
I'm a heavy user like yourself, I use the assessor's website frequently to lookup properties. It took me a couple of clicks to find the lookup feature but if you click on their link it'll take you to the old cityofboston.gov database. I'm giddy with delight that they didn't change it but also makes you wonder why they didn't change it to the new format.
Right, except when you click
Right, except when you click open the real estate taxes and payments link within the old Assessor's webpage. Once you click the real estates link, it then bounces you directly back to the new website. Aggghhhh!!!
Don't worry, assessing search
Don't worry, assessing search is on the roadmap to become a responsive squarespacey app designed to tell you how much your home is worth and how your tax dollars help fund schools and fix potholes and clean parks and create bicycle lanes and make your city government work for you.
Tried to submit feedback to
Tried to submit feedback to them via the site and the feedback form submit button isn't working. Of course.
Looks like an intern or someone's nephew did the site for free. I am so sick of this "design for mobile and screw all you desktop users" trend. "But it's responsive!" It's as if we've collectively forgotten everything we've learned about good web design over the past 20 years. It's lazy and makes for such a poor experience that I just don't use the sites at all.
Sent from my Mac Cube hackintosh retrofitted for Intel i7 dual boot El Capitan and Windows 10 with 22" desktop monitor that can display more than 2 rows of icons if the designers just sized them appropriately
No, this site is not responsive
I didn't want to use that word, because I'm not sure anybody outside Web-design circles knows what it means, but no, boston.gov is definitely not responsive - it's a mobile-only site that is kind of annoying on the desktop, even if you can navigate it, more or less.
A true "responsive" site, even one that is designed "mobile first," at least makes an attempt to conform to basic desktop Web UX (OK, shoot me now) when it detects a desktop brower. Regardless of what you think of bostonglobe.com, for example, it doesn't leave vast amounts of the desktop screen just empty, forcing the user to scroll and scroll and scroll.
I didn't realize that the new
I didn't realize that the new .gov site wasn't responsive, I assumed it was using a template like Zephyr or one of the myriad other templates that are (though my comment about being responsive was more about the general design trend than about this particular site). I know responsive sites TRY to make adjustments on the fly but often the designer still has to tell the site what accommodations it should make depending on what device is being served. I see plenty of responsive sites that look awful on desktops because no one bothers to tweak them. Either way, the designers here obviously didn't think about desktop users much, if at all. Which is all too common now.
You could be right
Maybe they did use a responsive theme, but just forced the desktop templates to mimic the mobile ones exactly.
responsive-ish
Right now the layout seems optimized for tablets. On the desktop it retains a lot of whitespace and keeps the main menu hidden behind the "hamburger" icon. While some people may prefer a more compact layout, I can easily imagine user testing showing the current layout being more successful, even on desktop. I'm okay with space but I don't like giant hero graphics.
They might've adopted a "mobile first" strategy but apparently not a "content first" strategy. Those numbered links, 1 Guide Buying and owning a home, 2 Having a car in the city, etc. don't wrap their text on an iPhone in portrait layout. On the iPhone they're Buying and o, Having a car, etc. If the iPhone is turned to landscape, then all the text is viewable. Also on iPhone the top header area (hamburger menu, "City of Boston," search icon, setting gear icon), is always visible and way too big.
Anyway, I'm glad they've worked on it but I hope the recognize that the web is meant to be iterated and they'll continue improving it (i.e. they didn't just contract a company who's now done and no one on payroll will continue improving it).
Boston Finance Commission should be included.
Boston Finance Commission should be included.
Search mechanism should sort results by date as well as other sortings.
Reich 4.0 theme
I see what they did there
https://www.boston.gov/sites/default/files/department_icons/icons_public...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Germany#Nazi_Germany_and_World_War...
Made to create a good first impression
I'm sure they're working things out still. Overall I think the site is very good at giving a good first impression, but it can be difficult to get at more detailed information. The URL changes caused me some confusion at first, too, but presumably that's just a temporary problem.
Here was my first experience with looking at the Parks Department's new page this morning:
I typed in the old address for the Parks Department page (http://www.boston.gov/parks) and was brought to a pretty page that listed just nine well-known parks. At first I was horrified that this was the new page for the department and that they had omitted basically everything that a resident might find useful there. After a little bit of searching, though, I realized that the department page is now at https://www.boston.gov/departments/parks-and-recreation. I don't have any problem with the page having that address now that I know it's there, but it would be nice if the less detailed page with the nicer URL at least had a link to the department home page. Once I was at the department home page I was able to find pretty much everything I wanted, although getting to the link to the Open Space Plan (yes, I look at it somewhat frequently) required scrolling way down the page and expanding the "Reports and publications" section. On the old site there was a link to the report in the list of links on the left side of the page.
That was a fairly typical experience - it's just not that easy (yet?) to get from place to place on the site. For example, there are no links between the Schools page and the Education Cabinet page. The familiar (to me, at least) https://www.boston.gov/budget address gives a page not found error rather than redirecting to https://www.boston.gov/departments/budget. Once you're on the budget department page you have to scroll a fair amount to actually see the budget documents, and you have to expand a different section to see each past budget. I'd rarely want to look at those budget PDFs anywhere but on the desktop, so the emphasis on making it usable for mobile users kind of falls flat on that page.
And, on the topic of all of the scrolling, it's kind of annoying that when the menu is open you can't scroll the contents of the page at all.
Still, overall, I see why they made the change. If you're visiting the site for basic information it seems like a much more welcoming site.
This is how the old website
This is how the old website looked in 2007. The design started out clean but it got cluttered.
Hideous
God I hate *hate* this squarespace-inspired, white space inundated, giant graphics, only works on mobile design trend popping up everywhere now. And I'm a millennial so it's not just "old fogeys". The spacing and the text size and just all of the visual components are really... overwhelming? They literally hurt my eyes to try and piece together. Everything is sized awkwardly.
That said I like some of the organizational changes they've made. Grouping together everything about cars. Putting "main transactions" there at the top - with the top 15 or so reasons would be coming to the page. Except again, scrolling through the list, the spacing issues, the tons of white space, makes it unpleasant to find what you're looking for.
Why does that big image take up literally the ENTIRE screen when you load the page? They couldn't have had the alert/major point bullets on a floating element over the bottom half of it? It's like having the entire upper fold of a newspaper say BOSTON GLOBE and nothing else. It's sucky design.
Also having the city councilors all listed on the front page with their emails but having to head into the council subpage to find out who you should be emailing is dumb.
As long as they make "search" work.
Make search work well and I'll forgive the rest. I did a few test searches and it looks ok so far.
But I still agree, the giant graphics look silly on my 21" monitor.
Thank you!
All this feedback is helpful and I've added it to our work list. There's much to improve, but our site will always be getting better if we continue to get great information about it from our residents.
As for the current site, as you explore what’s new you likely will notice some gaps. Some of this is by design, but with any new website there are also some bugs, broken links, and misdirected URLs. If you find a problem, let us know by dropping a note to [email protected] and we'll try to get it fixed straight away.
Of course, some problems are not quick fixes. That's why we’ve also created roadmap.boston.gov. There, you can check out our road map to see what’s coming, send us your ideas and share feedback, as well as vote on others’ suggestions.
All of this will shape the evolution of the site. Thanks for participating!
Thanks for joining in the
Thanks for joining in the conversation. I have a much more substantial complaint.
Your site has menu categories for "Residents", "Businesses", "Visitors", and "Students". I trust the City of Boston administration is aware that it has something like half a million commuters coming in every day? People who work in Boston but live in the surrounding suburbs? People who are not residents, or businesses, or visitors, or students? People who ultimately pour vastly more money in parking and restaurant patronage alone, than do "visitors", i.e. tourists?
Maybe you could consider how the city website, or perhaps the city administration itself, could better meet the needs of this enormous population?
Because, speaking as someone who has been in that demographic for over 25 years, the City of Boston gives every impression it considers us of no account. Maybe antagonizing an astonishing percentage of the people in a position to vote on state-wide referenda isn't the best long-range planning? Boston already has to do with the people in the western half of the state resenting the taxes they imagine Boston is soaking up and voting in legislators that promise to fight funding the MBTA tooth and nail. Do you really have so little need for friends you can treat commuters so slightly?
My charitable response: If
My charitable response: If you want to take part in civic life in Boston, there are some great homes on the market in my neighborhood.
Less charitably: You mean you use all our city services without contributing to city revenue, but expect the city to pander to you anyway?
311 Top Service Requests
List of top service requests with quick links to send request to 311.
#5 on the list is "Request Needle Cleanup"
Compare City Council Minutes. Cambridge. Boston.
Compare the Minutes of Cambridge City Council at
http://cambridgema.iqm2.com/Citizens/Calendar.aspx?From=1/1/2014&To=12/3...
with the Minutes of Boston City Council at
https://www.boston.gov/departments/city-council
How our municipal governments have tried to make accessible our Government Documents is also covered at
http://guides.bpl.org/government_information
I see what they did there...
404
/snow not found
Connect to the Net, broadband access...
Folks, many kids around the metropolitan area need better connection to the Net, broadband access for these cities' services, to learn more about our municipal governments. On a related note, according to the City of Cambridge the BTF Broadband Task Force... not a public body subject to the Open Meeting Law
https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/4tvrzu/cambridge_broadband_task...