City of Seattle
MAP PORTAL:
The City of Seattle initiated a project to reorganize maps and Geographic Information Systems materials on the City of Seattle website. The project goal was twofold: first to allow a Citizen to easily find these GIS materials, and second to allow City staff to easily update the content. The solution was to develop a customer-driven, data-driven application.
To ensure that the solution was right for their demographics, we interviewed City department representatives, citizens, and businesses who use GIS materials and maps. We held a focus group which allowed those citizens to recommend how to organize the content in ways that made sense to them, so that this content could be found easily.
The Map Portal was one of the most visited pages on the City of Seattle website.
Highdive was brought in to both work with the 38 City departments who would supply maps to the public (GIS, Neighborhoods, City Light, Public Utilities, Census, Park and Recreation, Police/Crime, Permitting, etc) in an effort to set up a streamlined way of adding and updating the available maps, as well as with the general public — to design a new approach to map distribution.
Primary goals:
- Organize the extensive inventory of maps, used for numerous personal and professional situations, into logical groupings, and enable them to be found by logical search terms
- Provide a library of maps and a process by which disparate city departments can find, disseminate, organize, and update with ease
Tools Used
- Focus Group: elicit ideas about situations in which target audience would use maps
- Usability Study: observe behavior and fix areas of friction
- Content Prioritization: position calls to action and tools in order of importance
- Wireframes and Prototypes: used in the usability study and design process
Results:
- First ecommerce application on the City’s website
- Integrated interface for external customers (users are able to see multiple layers of maps data to evaluate how one affects the other : ie see census, crime, and business value layers in one integrated map)
- Coordination and process automation between departments sharing and utilizing maps data