This blog post is an excerpt from GovLoop’s recent report with Liferay, Jumpstart Your Digital Transformation With a Digital Experience Platform. To read the full report, head here.
1. Use open source technology: By making your DXP open source, you gain several benefits; flexibility for improvements, lower costs of use, a community of developers that is always refining the product and freedom from vendor lock-in.
2. Go omnichannel: An exceptional digital experience must follow the principle of omnichannel engagement, meaning offering a single user-friendly platform experience to citizens with continuity of their past actions and information as they move from computer to tablet to any other touchpoint. By providing omnichannel access to your agency, you also have the opportunity to capture data at each point, which can be analyzed for deeper insight into processes.
3. Make it mobile-friendly: More citizens than ever before are accessing government services and websites through their phones. Your portal must function just as well on a smartphone as on a desktop browser, otherwise you will be turning off a large section of citizens who need to access your information.
4. Design it right: The interface of your DXP should have the same look and feel throughout the site, whether it is on the parent agency site or a sub agency. Make sure your design is consistent throughout platforms and wherever it lives for branding and recognition purposes.
5. Consider ease-of-use for all government employees: IT shouldn’t need to be a core expertise for most government workers. That is, a program director who is an expert at coordinating housing services in Los Angeles shouldn’t need to waste her time figuring out how to update the website. It should be so intuitive that she can do whatever needs to be done quickly.
6. Update content and information regularly: For any website, information should be well-organized and not duplicated, which can lead to confusion. Check your portal and site regularly for broken URLs, outdated content and poor functionality
I didn’t know what “omnichannel” meant before reading this. It’s now on my list of favorite tech words!
Definitely going to read the full report after reading this list. Some of these feel like no-brainers!