Friday 27 February 2009

Can a map make a valid website navigation tool?

After recent discussions about site structure and navigation, it hit me that we are possibly missing a trick with one of our apps, with the potential to be as valid a navigation tool as a menu, A-Z or search box.

Im talking about our online map. Its a tasty bit of kit, where we can easily add layers of information based on a type of service, building, facility, sport - whatever is useful really. You can view the map at http://www.redbridge.gov.uk/Pages/IMap.aspx

Now, this might be going out on a limb but could the map be used as a way to search for service information, things you find useful - with the added bonus of showing you where they are in relation to transport links, your home, and providing some sort of direction about how local to you the services are.

By linking map entries to service pages, and visa versa, you are providing people with the ability to find whats close to them (using common headings) and then providing them with a one click way of getting more details about the service.

It's unlikely that this would be as popular, or well used as a search box. Especially without some major changes in user habits and major promotion of the tool in itself. But i think there is (at least some limited) potential there. Giving people something visual to look at, a map, a picture, you are providing them with a greater connection to where services are locally, and how to access them, instead of just words they scan on a page.

In addition, the map itself should not be limited to services in our council. It should provide details of things like hospitals, pharmacies, leisure facilities etc in neighbouring councils. Service users dont care which is run by their council and which isn't. They aren't going to go to a different park becuase it's the right side of an imaginary line, they just wnat to see what is close to where they live. This is doubly true for the hospitals list where people will get sent to regardless of its proximity to home location.

Anyway, I havent thought too in depth about this, just thought it might be something for you to chew on....comments and ideas as always please :) just avoid puns about maps and navigation (i know, i know).

Thursday 12 February 2009

Yammer….internal social media in the workplace.

I got an invite today to yammer from work colleagues. It’s basically an internally networked twitter. If you have the same email extension (eg dan@localauthority.gov.uk) then it will hook you up and give you somewhere to communicate.

To quote yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making your organization more productive through the exchange of status updates and group messages.

You can use Yammer to:

  • Stay connected with co-workers
  • Start a discussion
  • Share news, documents and links
  • Ask or answer questions
  • Create a group mailing list
  • Look up a co-worker's contact info
  • Search for a topic
  • See what's popular and who's influential

This is particularly relevant as I had a brief tweet with the SDCDevTeam team guys about internal social media. It’s a brilliant concept, and could be really useful for internal comms on a more “friendly and social” level. Who knows – information sharing throughout the authority without “just ticking the boxes” could promote best practise and allow services to actually communicate in an effective manner.

However, its early days and I have reservations. This isn’t a Wayne’s world environment where “if you book them they will come”. As already discussed with SDCDevTeam – you can lead a horse to water, but not force them to drink. I believe a tool like this could really work but only if there is an effective internal marketing campaign to promote it, and a reason to ACTUALLY use it.

Wednesday 11 February 2009

Is your contingency in place

This first post came about because of the recent severe weather events that much of the UK has encountered.
At work, some of us struggled in and managed to get the site updated, messages out to press etc etc. But what if we couldnt access the work network? what if we couldnt update the LA website?

I sat and thought about this for a while and then realised there was a whole heap of freely available tools that we could use to get information out and update free of the constraints of being logged into a particular network. Becuase of this we set the following up:

A windows live mail address so that we had an email address we can access from anywhere and that service areas can send information to. I chose hotmail because on signing up we also 25GB of secure online storage in their "skydrive" that we can keep emergency contact information for press/web staff, service area contacts and lists of schools etc. One person can access this and distribute the information as it comes in to whoever else needs it (we have a handy list of phone numbers and personal email addresses of comms staff to work from).

We also set up a blog: http://redbridgeupdates.blogspot.com/ to place service disruption updates and emergency messages on. Again, having this independant of the council's main website makes updating it easy and free of the constraints of the council network.

As long as we can get a link to this blog on the LA homepage (be it through a static permanent link or an element that can be updated freely from anywhere) then we can still provide information.

Problem solved?

Feel free to comment or give any alternative ideas


Hi all

Set a blog up for work and decided to set one up for myself aswell. Lets see if i have anything interesting to say