Gone But Not Forgotten



Hello, you've landed on DATA eh? - Open Data Toronto's original blog space for data discussions. This is not an active blog at the moment but legacy posts are still here. Have a read ... you can still provide comments.



Monday, April 26, 2010

Navigation

This is segmented part 3 of the Lucky 7 ... the major areas we intend to address for improving toronto.ca.

Our testing indicates 65% of respondents chose “Links to services/information on other government websites”

 Some user comments:
 “Take away the organizational structure and concentrate on the functions".
"Information should be organized by subject/service such as: taxes, water, trees, parks, parking, roads, transportation, etc, to make it easier to find, (and NOT under the name of the department that provides the services."
 “Organize current events for specific groups - parents, teens, cultural, community events like children festivals, etc.”
This goes to providing easier access to information, grouping relevant information in one place and organizing content around topics and functions.

Tell us what you think ...


Bookmark and Share
14/2010

3 comments:

Patrick Connolly said...

Hmmm... I'm just thinking out loud here, but is there any foreseeable tool or library that would allow users to actively create their own custom navigation menus or link lists (perhaps editable by anyone interested), then tag it with a title and share it. So someone could create a menu titled "Dog Owners", and populate it with relevant links. This would seem to be a great way to deal with the reams of content and diverse usergroups -- let your users organize your content. It would be like a huge, never-ending card-sorting sessions.

I'm not sure how much reign they're giving you in terms of making the website truly social, but what about implementing one of big social bookmarking APIs? Could that work? Also, Diigo is looking very promising... their API is supposed to get much better, adding calls for "lists" soon, and this might fit the bill. Great area for partnership, and I'm sure it would make you guys look very innovative :)

I suppose this could just as easily fit under "User Engagement", huh?

Mind if I ask what CMS you're using? Hopefully not Open Text still, right? Boooo enterprise software...

Open Data - Toronto said...

Pat, we are using Open Text as our CMS - we haven't ruled out use of open source in some contexts - in fact there is a lot of discussion about that at the moment.

Unknown said...

Ooooo... exciting! Thanks Keith.

Also, found this and thought of you guys as you're designing navigation:
http://informationandvisualization.de/blog/your-website-optimized-horizontal-attention-pattern