City launching redesigned website aiming to be more user friendly

By KELLEN TANIGUCHI on May 18, 2021.

ktaniguchi@medicinehatnews.com@@kellentaniguchi

The City of Medicine Hat is redesigning its website in hopes to make a more user-friendly experience for community members to find what they need.

“We’re actually building an entirely new website. So, we’re going through a complete redesign as part of our organization’s Citizen-Facing Digital Strategy (CFDS). That is an overall strategy where we’re improving the ways we communicate digitally with our customers,” said Colleen Graham, the city’s director of corporate communications.

Graham says the current website organizes content by city department, while the new website will group information based on how users would expect to find it. She says the website needed an update.

“We have received anecdotal information that the website is difficult to navigate,” she said. “But we also recognized internally that over time it’s in need of a face lift, and web design has evolved a lot over the last decade since that website was launched.”

The city worked with an external company who facilitated a site map testing survey, which closed Sunday night. The site map survey asked Hatters to find certain things and the software was able to track people’s movements through the site map and determined where they were getting lost and how easily they found information, says Graham.

The results are expected later this week and the city will use the information to make additional final adjustments to the site map before developing the new website.

The new site will also have a citizen portal, which will allow people to sign in and customize their dashboard.

“People would be able to select topics most relevant to them and populate their dashboard with those topics,” said Graham.

Graham says it’s yet to be determined what capacity the citizen portal will have and what transactions and interactions people will be able to have with the city – that will be determined in the coming months while they finalize the website.

The new website is expected to launch late this summer.

“It’s really about accessibility. We really want to create a website experience that is not frustrating for people and they’re able to go and find the information they’re looking for in a very simple and effective way,” said Graham.

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