Main conference presentation

When a public administration met its citizens: changing perspective, creating new tools

Cristina Lavazza and Andrea Fiacchi

Monday March 26 2007, 9:30 - 10:15AM

This paper is about the ways to improve findability in a web site of a public administration. Sviluppo Italia is an agency aimed at developing the country thanks to a wide range of economic tools/products. It is difficult to find the contents of our portal for two reasons:

• we talk to different targets
• we manage a wide variety of topics

During the years the information has rapidly grown up, much faster than the solutions adopted to cope with the problem of information retrieval and usability. We were working on the navigation tree and labels of the most difficult sections in order to re-organize the hierarchical tree.

We’re currently adopting the solutions used by e-commerce sites offering products or services. Nevertheless adopting a pure commercial logic is not correct to our purpose because the inner characteristics of our content are not clear and objective. Besides we need to offer clear and reliable information about our agency according to governative politics.

In the paper we will shortly tell you about the data collection step, will investigate the topic of the new communication logics and finally will say something about the application of these classification systems in a traditional CMS.

The contents tell you the way

Our site contains a wide number of very heterogeneous contents.We started our job interviewing all the operation areas of our company to know what they have to tell to their audience. In the meantime we analyzed the information requests received by our CRM to understand:

1. what our clients want
2. where our site doesn’t match their needs.

Crossing all the data collected we argued that the structure wasn’t working anymore and we had to dare a substantial change of route: create a customer oriented portal with many access point and navigation paths (multidimension).

PUSH and PULL approach: that’s all folks!

We set up 6 points of view to surf the site. Three of them (who am I? – where am I? – What do I need?) are facets that permit to the users to follow their own way in searching the site: this is the PULL action where a user doesn’t follow a path designed by the information architect but create a personal navigation path to reach a specific content. The other points of view (who’s talking? - what do we offer you? – what’s hot?) are traditional hierarchical tags that open navigation paths thought by the IA according to a typical PUSH action (the company decides what subjects need to be pushed according to its agenda). Besides that in home page we reserve a “the users make the site up” area, a real folksonomy that brings in home the ten most wanted items.

How we customized our CMS and lived happily

Three years ago our company signed a contract with a little Italian software house that created the CMS we’re working on, a traditional tool supporting a traditional information architecture. We decided to work together to personalize and modify this software so that it could support the facet logic.The final result is a traditional CMS with some added innovative tools to search and surf the site. With these new tools we can implement:

1. a multidimensional navigation based on facets, tags and folksonomy
2. a “guided research function” based on alternative/additional criteria compared to the facets
3. the “search function” that – as the e commerce sites - give you back the searched item and some clues to deepen the research.

This last function is based on a dedicated thesaurus made up by the users themselves: the more a term is searched the easier its entry in the controlled terms list (thesaurus).