Design Study
To design a user interface or website design/layout it is necessary to understand the current design vocabulary used by people that are producing similar website for other similar groups. And what type of viewers will be likely to use this site. In this case I been designing sites for two cit governments and did my first written study about Richmond Department of Public Works. Overall I tried to understand the zeitgeist of the citizen/city worker grouping.
City Workers develop business processes and divide the organization of the city upon a preconceived idea of what would most help the citizen, attract new citizens and business and deal with special interest of various groups. The success or failure of these processes effects a feedback loop and the slang or jargon develops into a complex spirit of a city's website or a "website zeitgeist" for the lack of a better term. Since e-government is still within it first 10 years the vocabulary of design is still in it early stages. The functional aspects of city website makes it a different design problem from what most developers are use to with most businesses, marketing, or single subject website.
Concerns for a city government designer include
- Customer Relationship to the city
- Tourist – people that want to come to a city for "X" reasons.
- Citizens – people that live in or close to the City. This can be sub divided into sub class
- Newcomers
- Residents
- Near By Residents of other resources (Linked cities, people that live in the county just outside the city
- Seniors
- Youths
- Overseeing Authorities
- Business
- People wanting to do business with the City of Richmond.
- People wanting to start a business within the Municipality.
- People currently doing business in the City of Richmond.
- The City of Richmond desire to attract new business.
- The mission of a city
- The results of limited resource
- The political environment
- Web design best standards
- Dealing with issues of the Digital Divide
- Freedom of information issues
- The drive to get as much information to as many people as possible including those who have challenges recieving that information
When the soup of all of these issues are brought to a single URL you see a different answer for each city website. But since they are not in a vacuum it can be usefully to understand the "website zeitgeist" across several cities and list some of the thing that make them similar and note there differences to work within the developing design vocabulary.
The first study that I did was for a redesign for a department of a city and it is my starting point for this site. So as I do more of them I will list the departments here and hopefully it will get better with time. please feel free to write me at stevenjhagen /at/ gmail /dot/ com if you have comments that might help.
Department of Public Work