Making mass.gov data-driven and constituent-centric

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is reinventing our digital ecosystem. If we’re successful, mass.gov will be the “amazon.com” of government services in MA. Structured information will be provided by a diverse constellation of providers (government agencies). This content will be dynamically organized and reorganized to help users find what they need; zero knowledge of agencies, acronyms, or bureaucratic processes required. Everything is being reimagined as a path to a funnel to a “conversion". A conversion gets tracked when a constituent’s need is met or a service is delivered. At the center is a new, Drupal-based, mass.gov.

This session will share our approach and look under the hood of pilot.mass.gov in our ninth month of development at the end of April. In our first three months we stood up a proof-of-concept site. By six months we implemented our first round of improvements based on user testing and our data scientists launched an analytics dashboard to begin tracking and analyzing government service delivery as conversions. In April, new-and-improved content will be live and discoverable by Google, collecting real data and unguided user feedback; and we will be nearing the end of our push to refine authoring experience and scale content production.

Here’s a quick run down of data we’re grappling with and some of the tools and tech we’ll discuss in this session:

Data

• As of 2016, 10% of mass.gov’s content serves 90% of our traffic. We can have a huge impact by focusing on this small fraction of high-value content!

• 76% of constituents interact with the government online. At 55% phone is a distant second. In-person and email are both under 40%. Constituents expectations are accelerating and technology is constantly changing. We need to catch up and keep up.

User research

• Treejack’s “pie trees” are a delightful for visualizing information architecture tests.

• Validately is a remote usability testing tool we’re using to help us recruit users and execute tests.

Tech

• Drupal 8 for CMS behind mass.gov

• Drupal 7 DKAN to power our document repository and provide embeddable data visualizations

• Pattern Lab for CMS agnostic atomic design to promote consistent UX across a diverse technology ecosystem

• Google Tag Manager for collecting web statistics

• Shiny for visualizing our data scientists' R analyses in a dashboard that’s easy and intuitive for business stakeholders

• AWS API Gateway to provide a unified facade for RESTful web services

We’re eager to share our experiences, learn from the Drupal community, and invite other government organizations to collaborate with us.