Information Architecture

Information Architecture principles should be defined to allow future web properties to be built with some consistency.

It would be impractical to attempt to define the information architecture for all of the websites and systems that a Local Authority will need now and in the future. Therefore information architecture guidelines should be designed that include the methods, mechanisms and information used to create the user journeys for any associated website. This should include practical aspects, such as navigation, information consistency, search results and links to related content; but also provide the reasoning behind the principles to allow them to be flexibly applied in future updates.

Global interaction standards

Designing and defining common user interactions in order to keep them consistent.

Having a consistent set of user interactions for the most common activities is not just an issue of corporate branding or appearing to be joined up, it is essential in order to reduce the ‘cognitive load’ (the amount of thinking that has to be done) required by users.

Guidance documents should be produced covering common interactions, for instance:

• site registration (where single sign-on is not used)
• date inputs
• forgotten password processes
• form save and retrieval
• pagination

Global visual language

Providing standards and guidance for the look of all council websites.

A global visual language would define the layout, element position and priority as well as imagery treatment. It should seek to allow creative flexibility for website owners to make distinctive and appealing websites while providing guidance on how to ensure that it the site is clearly part of the the Local Authority portfolio.

The guidance should contain specific advice on such aspects as: page layout, common navigation positioning, image treatment, font and HTML/CSS usage and image content, and should be provided for multiple devices and platforms.

Joining Local Authority properties together

Connections between people and communities must be encouraged by creating links between the resources that those people use.

This should be primarily through visual design; the family of Local Authority sites should all use common design elements. Information architecture, all labelling, navigation and options should be consistent wherever possible. User experience must be consistent, efficient and based on common search & navigation features. There should be a simple, consistent means of promoting important initiatives and information, and all opportunities for offering related information should be exploited.

This commonality should include properties and services related to the Local Authority including partners.

content subscription/notification

Letting users know about changes to the content they are interested in.

A service should be provided that allows users to subscribe to receive notifications of changes to any content that they have an interest in.  The service must allow the user to specify existing content (a page, or site section) including user generated content (such as a conversation), or a topic of interest where they will receive notifications of as new content of interest is created.

Not only should users be able to manage all of their subscriptions in a single place, but they should also be able to choose an appropriate method of notification from SMS, email, RSS, Facebook, Twitter and IM.

Common navigation tool

Joining up many websites with a consistent way to find your way around them.

In order to present the many different Local Authority web properties as a coherent family of sites, a common set of navigation tools should be provided.  These tools should provide: some element of common branding; a link to the main Local Authority website; a set of top level navigation links to other websites and commonly used facilities; links to timely information; and a common search tool.

The tool should be managed centrally in order that changes to the links can be kept up to date and to reduce the cost of making any changes across the entire family of sites.

Single sign-on

A consistent and comprehensive view of each user and a better experience for the users.

Any Local Authority system that requires a user to login should allow the user to use the same login details as all other Local Authority systems.  This requires that a federated single-sign-on service is implemented.  Further to this, the SSO service must:

• allow logins without exposing the user’s password
• allow differing levels of authentication such as a hardware token
• provide mechanisms for systems to retrieve the user’s profile (with their knowledge and consent)

The SSO system must provide interfaces for users to create, manage and enter their login and profile information.  Third party systems should never request the user’s login credentials directly.

Federated search

A single search across all council web content.

A federated search service must be provided that not only indexes content from the internal content storage repository, but is also able to index content from external systems initiated either through content change notifications (for changes that require a very fast updates) or a regular crawling mechanism.

The search service must also provide interfaces that allow other services and sites to query the search index and retrieve matches by keyword, topic, location, site and content type.  These interfaces should include ones that return both user facing results (HTML/CSS) and machine readable results (JSON, XML) in order to make integration with other systems.

Transactions must be easy, obvious and ubiquitous

All transactions, especially financial ones, must be easy and obvious. They need good process and form design. They must have well stated and easy to understand validation requirements. Help should be contextual rather than stuck away in a separate silo. All information needs to be re-used subject to privacy controls. Transaction pages have to be simple to understand, have easy to access security policies and be fully accessible.

Transactions are part of the key group of website features that should definitely be available via mobile devices.

Services must be connected

It is important that the many services and information provided by the Local Authority can be grouped together. They should be linked in ways that assist citizens rather than in a single way that reflects the organisational structure. Service groupings should not preclude per user personalisation choices.

These service relationships must flexible, adaptable and not merely hierarchical and should be made visible wherever it is useful rather than simply reflected in a site navigation.