Seattle.gov has been recognized by Juggle as one of the top city government websites in the state of Washington. Below you'll find an interview with Bruce Blood, Webmaster for the City of Seattle.
- Seattle.gov is a top notch web portal. What has been your role in its development?
I originally started working with the Seattle City light website, our public electric utility, at the end of 1994. Since 2000 I have been the city's Web Manager, thus, ultimately in charge of the website.
- Can you summarize the history of Seattle's web portal?
Basically it grew pretty organically, especially at first. We were amongst the first to use what is now the very standard business/living/visitor paradigm for civic websites. The portal was, essentially from the very beginning, trying to get departments involved. Then, from a citywide prospective, as they did get involved, trying to make sure that things weren't completely siloed. Basically our job on the citywide web team was to make it easier for the end user to see the relationships between departments with different lines of business. And a lot of that was and is still done by hand. In some ways, that's not the most efficient way of going about it, but the flipside is that you end up with a bunch of people that have the ability to look the city's website globally, and as I said, make those connections that a content management system can't do automatically.
- So collaboration has definitely been an important element of the website?
And it still is. Our department is only half, maybe, of the total resources that are working on Seattle.gov and our Intranet. Many of the other city departments have their own web management teams. On my team, we're responsible for the design, but in terms of content and how the sub-sites are architected, that's really up to them; the departmental teams. So there's a lot of cooperation that has to go on and we've been very lucky in that we have had minimal turnover in the departments. I mean, if you look at it over the ten years that I've been the Web Manager, it's been maybe 60 percent, but people tend to stay around for five or six years before they move on, and so they get to know their sites very well.
- What have been some of your overarching objectives with the website?
Essentially, we started out wanting to provide online all the services that you could get by calling or walking up to any city department. Eventually it kind of got there, so at that point the emphasis transferred to making it all more accessible to people in an easier way. There's always the goal of trying to look at it in terms of what a customer needs. Ultimately, customers don’t care which department they're getting their services from, as long as they can find the services they need. That's the goal. Sometimes we're more successful than others, but we keep moving in that direction.
- Has citizen feedback, in any way, influenced the development of these services?
Especially in the last three months or so, we've been doing a great deal of usability testing. One of the things we found sort of interesting about the award is that we're about two weeks away from launching a new version of our homepage and top level portal. So if you liked what you're seeing now, wait for two weeks and hopefully you'll like that even better! In addition, we always take comments from the public and try to incorporate them as much as possible. Ongoing, we're actually going to be doing even more testing. We'd like, one by one, to take the sections of the portal and really concentrate the usability testing on each and see where it leads us. No doubt that will show us a bunch of ways to improve quickly.
- So with this new web portal that you're building, obviously we're going to be expecting basically a new look, but are there any new exciting features that you'll also be working on for the new portal?
In the initial release, we have some new widgets for our event calendar, video and a number of things like that. Blog feeds are another widget that will be there. We're trying to promote content from the content providers much more directly to the top level portals, so there'll be some of that in the initial launch, and more as time goes on. And then, actually even more exciting, is on November 1st, we'll be launching what we're calling my.seattle.gov. It is a single sign-on based, personalized portal. In other words, the eventual goal is one sign-on that will allow the customer to get to everything on seattle.gov that needs some authentication. We're using a tool called Backbase, which will give it a very iGoogle-like interface, and allow end users to select from a menu of gadgets, essentially creating their own portal into seattle.gov. We're just at the beginning stages of that, but the goal is, probably by the end of next year, to have most if not all the transactional applications on seattle.gov available via single sign-on and the my.seattle.gov portal. In the meantime we have all sorts of non-authenticated services that we'll be able to offer to our customers.
- So why was it important to create an interactive way for citizens to create a customized dashboard?
Well, it actually came from our elected officials, both from the Mayor's office and the City Council. They’re pretty adamant about single sign-on being important. We decided if we were going to do that, we might as well make it as cool as possible, so that's what we're doing! We're out on a limb a bit, but it's going to be very interesting to see how much it's used and what people do with it. I can't wait to see some of the pages that people come up with. Single sign-on, I think, is a benefit that's pretty obvious. Users will hit an initial default page when they login, and it'll have some instructions about what else is offered and suggestions for what they might want to do. How many go past that initial default page will be a real interesting question.
- What kind of strategies do you think you'll utilize to draw attention, either to get new visitors or retain visitors and kind of show off the new features? How are you going to market those both on and offline?
Well, one of the things that we're working into all of this is using social media outlets. It's a whole new world for governments in terms of communicating with your constituents. We already have multiple departments that are Facebooking and Tweeting regularly. We have a number of blogs at this point, and are always looking at new tools, lots of videos, and things like that. So, we'll putting all the channels together in a coordinated way, and without spamming the heck out of everybody, making sure that it's visible and that every new feature we add is available to people, whether they click through or not. We’ve been pretty good about the traditional media and ways to use them, but now we're going to be using the newer media as well, and do it all in a really coordinated way. And we've had a lot of support from the non-government community. There are a bunch of folks at NGO’s who are really interested in using those tools to communicate with government -- not only Seattle, but King County and the state of Washington as well.
- You built a page specifically for the teen community in Seattle. What led you to build this page and how is it connecting you more with that community?
There has been an ongoing initiative from the previous administration in the Mayor's office that carried right on through to this administration to try to engage the public in a number of ways, but particularly engage folks in their teenage years. The Mayor has a Youth Advisory Council ,made up of teens, which is essentially operates like any other board or commission. Then, we have also a partnership with the Seattle YMCA for a portal called Puget Sound Off, which is a social media site specifically for teens in Seattle. The Seattle.gov Teen Portal was always intended to be the reference site for Puget Sound Off and the Youth Commission. We just did a round of usability testing on it and found out that it's probably not nearly as effective as it could be, so we’ll be making a bunch of changes.
The basic concept stems from the fact that there are two basic audiences, in terms of age demographics, that the city has always been particularly concerned with serving; one is teens and youth in general and the other would be, of course, seniors. In both cases there are major offices in the city that are pretty much dedicated to these two audiences, so it came down to having a web presence that would get these folks directly to the services the city offers.
We're pretty proud of both, actually. The senior portal has been a little bit easier because it's actually directed by the great number of services that the city offers specifically offers seniors -- we can focus on that. But with the teen portal, it’s been a lot of guesswork about what is going to be useful to that audience. So now, with a couple of University of Washington grad students heading it up for us, we’ve begun a total makeover for the teen portal. The team is in the process of doing usability tests and focus groups to find out what is going to be useful to the teens. Keeping something like the Teen Portal up to date is difficult. We've been fortunate to have a great partnership with the University of Washington's Daniel Evans School for Government, and a stream of great interns – Master's candidates much of the time – coming on board and helping us. We tend to assign them projects like the Teen Portal. It's great for them because they get to run the project and have a deliverable that they can then take back to the school and say, "This is something I did," and we get quality work that, often, we just don't have the bandwidth to take on.
- Is there anything else you want to tell us about Seattle.gov?
Well, the thing I like best about coming to work every day is that we really have the attitude of trying to be the best. I'm not saying that we get there, at least not all the time, but we really try, and I think it means a whole lot to the entire team here. It's a lucky thing, too, that I'm sitting here as I speak with a view of one of the greatest cities in the Unites States. It's a good place to live. Our first director here was a woman named Rona Zevin. The way she looked at it was: there's no point in doing it halfway. Let's try and be the best. That’s still the goal!