The City of Austin Needs Your Help
If you’ve ever been to the City of Austin website, you’ll know that it’s in serious need of revamping. Several months ago I was looking for information on homelessness in Austin and my search took me to the City of Austin website. The information on the page I found was over 4 years old. I don’t need to tell you how bad that looks to visitors. As we all know, the first step toward improvement is admitting you have a problem. That’s just what the City of Austin has done and furthermore, they want Austinites to participate in the re-design. That’s a smart move. If you want people to use your website, it’s a good idea to involve them in the design and it’s a great idea to find out what they want from your site.
To facilitate the re-design, the City of Austin has created a survey. To participate in the survey you may either fill out a paper form, available at several municipal locations, or you may take the online survey. The survey is even available en español.
I took the survey and it took less than 5 minutes to complete. They will ask you what things you would find useful on the upgraded site so it might be a good idea to look over the current site and have a think about what works and what doesn’t work. This is your opportunity to make a local government site more useful so don’t miss out on the opportunity.
In addition to the Web usage survey, focus groups and town hall meetings are planned for early 2008 to further collect public input and ideas for the new Web site and its services. The survey will ask you if you wish to participate.
Austin, City, Website, Survey, Usage
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