Web Technology, Community Building, and Visualization for Urban Planning

Finding information such as a city’s zoning ordinance on their web site is not even remotely enjoyable. Every municipality organizes information in a different way—some sites make sense while many do not. Since most cities have practically the same departments and offer the same services online, I believe it is reasonable to create guidelines for municipal web sites.

Guidelines will reduce the variability of navigation, information organization, and functionality of the sites. They can retain their unique identity while reducing the frustration of finding information for the site user.

There are 4 main ingredients on every municipal site. These are temporarily simplified for the purpose of creating a general overview. They include: Schedules and Events, Zoning Ordinance / Online Mapping,  Community Information, and Transactions. Across all 4 categories, accessibility, best-practice, and usability desperately need to be addressed.

Event Calendar, Schedules, Announcements and Meeting Minutes

It seems this is the only section on most municipal sites that actually gets updated! This section should appear on the home page, not a subsequent page the user has to search for. Recent meeting agendas and minutes should also be accessed on the home page. Highlight your announcements! Often the announcements blend in with all the other text on the page and can easily be overlooked.

Online Mapping

This is a sore spot for me. I have been conducting extensive research on how zoning ordinances are located on a municipal site and presented online. I have viewed at least 20 GIS based maps in the recent past. First, locating the online map can be difficult. You might look under Community Development, the Department of Building Code, or even Economic Development to find it. Unfortunately, when I finally do locate a GIS map (and I am web savvy) it is slow to load, cumbersome to navigate, and confusing. If no GIS is available, there usually is a PDF. Sometimes Acrobat crashes when I open it so I try to avoid large PDFs!

At the APA conference in Vegas in April 2008, an ESRI spokesman admitted to a room full of planners that ArcIMS is outdated and not a technology that will sustain itself in the marketplace of online mapping. They admitted Google Earth and others like it are much more user-friendly for community members to use. I’m so pleased they recognize the need for an intuitive mapping platform to present land use and zoning maps! This is their area of expertise, right?

Community Information

Community information is often generic on municipal sites. Sometimes they link directly to a community’s Chamber of Commerce or community organization site. Often they don’t. To find up-to-date information about a community requires a Google and sift technique.

There are so many ways to present community history, development opportunities, photographs, and data using Google Maps and other interactive tools. The opportunity to engage site users (make it interesting) and maintain a detailed database of information (make it useful) across departments is often lost.

Transactions

Transactions includes discussion forums, emailing a department contact, submitting applications, requesting additional information, paying for services, paying parking tickets, etc. Each of these items falls under a different department’s jurisdiction and are usually found throughout a site. This makes sense from an organizational point of view but not from an end-user’s perspective.

The question “What can I do on this site?” should be immediately answered on the home page. Municipal sites should address all the potential needs of site visitors on the home page. A home page is expensive real estate and is not the best place for history or the mayor’s biography.

The opposite problem is providing too much information on the home page. Consider the City of Chicago’s site (below).

Do you know where to look first on this page? Does the organization of this page make sense? It takes me a good 30 seconds to scan. The page is overwhelming; it is trying to do too much at once! I am a consistent user of the site to pay parking tickets (hey! I live in Chicago where there is something wrong with you if you don’t get a ticket at least once a month), look up information, contact departments, find out what is happening around town, find out about the Olympics bid, search the historic properties database, review the zoning map. There are a lot of things you can do here but it isn’t easy despite my familiarity with it.

I propose a packet of guidelines for municipal sites that should be Federally mandated. These guidelines would address how to handle Schedules and Events, Zoning Ordinance / Online Mapping, Community Information, and Transactions according to a basic site architecture, accessibility requirements, and best-practice design and usability standards.

It would also include standards for content management systems and support cross department communication and information sharing.

What if the by-product of these standards streamlined government processes? What if it saved citizens frustration? What if people could actually access and load the zoning map quickly? Then we just might be able to close in on the gap between public and private efficiency. 

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