North Columbus News

The City of Worthington is undergoing an in-depth evaluation of the content and navigation of our website in anticipation of a redesign in 2023 to enhance the user experience for our citizens. We are working with our web provider, Civic Plus, which is a proven leader in developing municipal websites that inform and engage the community.

During the project, the team will research and test navigation, content and design elements to identify issues and make improvements so the website is informative and user-friendly.

The content consulting will take place in three stages:

1. Community Survey: a community-wide survey is available for people to evaluate the current site, share experiences with searching for content and provide other feedback related to navigation, content and ease of use.   Take the survey here.

2. Internal review: Interviews are being conducted with City staff to evaluate existing content, prioritize information and team goals, and determine how to meet the City’s goals while providing the most important information for our end users.

3. In-person user testing: Two groups of users/community members will be invited to participate in user testing onsite at a City facility. Based on results from the community survey, consultants will determine test scenarios for users to work through in the test environment. Users will be asked to find certain information or documents and will be observed for whether they could complete the task in as few clicks as possible. When problems are identified, the issues will be fixed based on best practices. The same people will then re-run the same test to see if the issues are resolved and the tasks are easier to complete. The consultants will advise staff on recruiting a broad sampling of community members with different web experiences. There will be approximately 12 people in each of the two testing groups. These user-testing sessions will take place later in Q1. Please complete this survey to indicate your interest in participating in user testing.

The results of the study and improvements made through the content testing process will help us determine what changes need to take place as part of this redesign. There may be changes to our main navigation, department pages and the overall hierarchy of the page. We expect to greatly enhance the online experience for our citizens by engaging them in this important process. 

Original source can be found here.