City of Raleigh 

The City of Raleigh is the capital of North Carolina and is the 48th largest city in the country (estimated by the United States Census Bureau on July 1, 2007). The city continues to grow and prosper and is a 21st Century city of innovation focusing on environmental, cultural and economic sustainability.

The Challenge

As the city continues to experience growth, the need to provide more online and self service options to citizens and visitors became a priority.  The City of Raleigh desired to offer more innovative and advanced features and functionality on the city portal www.raleighnc.gov to meet the growing needs of its constituents and to meet their objectives for improved communication, efficiency, and cost effectiveness.  The goal of the engagement was to develop a web strategy, information architecture and design that would make Raleigh the number 1 rated City Portal site in the United States.

The Solution

Ironworks Government Solutions implemented a user engagement strategy to gain an understanding of the various audiences and their tasks by developing strategy work products which included research, analysis, interviews, focus groups, and prototyping.  Specific tasks included:

• Performing an expert heuristic evaluation of the existing City of Raleigh portal against industry best practices including content, navigation, visual design and functionality
• Performing competitive site reviews of city websites that have similar goals and objectives to the City of Raleigh portal
• Conducting stakeholder interviews to gain an understanding of the City and the needs of the staff
• Conducting focus group sessions to engage in an interactive discussion to question groups of people about their opinions of the current City portal as well as innovative concepts or ideas that may be implemented
• Prepared and evaluated online surveys that questioned users about how they use the site, how they rate and rank certain features or improvements of the site as well as general user demographics
• Developed audience segment definitions to identify the primary and secondary users of the portal
• Created personas based on the audience segments to assist with clarifying and identifying the needs of a potential user of the City of Raleigh portal
• Demonstrated new site organization by creating a visual site map and detailed wireframes that show improvements in usability and functionality
• Created an interactive prototype to demonstrate functionality, usability and scenarios for visualization and to gather user feedback

The Results

Ironworks Government Solutions conducted a thorough analysis and offered significant user experience and design improvements including the incorporation of faceted search and navigation and the proposed integration of social networking functionality. The new design has been accepted by the City and IGS is currently working with the client on forming the release 1.0 build of the new site.