My last project - a new customer web for Regionservice at Västra Götalandsregionen is up and running since a week. The traffic from old web has been moved over gradually. Today we reached over 3000 visitors and 8000 page loads. There will be even more tomorrow and next day.
We wanted to make it easier for our customer - that was our vision. What did it become?
- Information and access to services is tailored for the specific customer. It is based on their contract with Regionservice
- A brand new search interface based on tagged information
- A traditional hierarchical menu based on words/concepts/associations that will remain in time. No organisation and no names of services is found in the main menu. The reason is that these words will change in time.
The health care staff love A-Z, the usability study before the project started gave a very clear result. And since these users are very often of the type "not so very experienced" when it comes to internet we kept the A-Z. But I will try to convince them in time by make an appetizer at the A-Z menu showing them how search interface works. A kind of "did you know that you find what you want quicker with help of the search interface" in many different shapes. I have Google analytics showing me the most popular page and A-Z is number two - so it will take a while.
At new customer web you can search if you prefer that, you can click in hierarchical menus if you prefer and you can use A-Z if that is what you prefer. We satisfy all kinds of preferences. We want happy customers navigating the way the prefer!
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| The new hierarchical service menu hat will remain in time |
All editors are still working with editing old pages, writing information message and a redirecting to new website. Next week we will start to delete old pages. I presume there will be a flood of phone calls and angry customers since old favourites and bookmarks stops working then. But I can cheer them up since this time the bookmarks will remain for ever (we use aliases that can be redirected the day we do next change)
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| A tailored view of ordering patient food. |
Västra Götalandsregionen's main task is running health care. We are also working with making the region to an attractive place to live and run business in. My own department - Regionservice - is a huge facility management provider (or at least FMS provider to be). We are working hard with integrating our business processes so we efficiently can provide the health care with everything except for health care. We run the computers, restaurants, the logistics, the laundry, the cleaning, the administration of salaries, the conference centres, the receptions etc. We also provide the region with project leaders and different kinds of resources for rental. There are 56 000 employers totally and a lots of those are customers. We have about 42 000 PC and every single user is also a customer.
So now you perhaps understand why a user friendly is of greatest importance for us.
I hope they are happy with us!
My own part in the project was: project management, usability & graphical design
It has to be fun, or else we cannot make it
