Improving discoverability of online public hearings

As use of the platform continues, we’ve seen some growing pains of our initial design. Instead of the site needing to present just a few cases, there’s now dozens and dozens to handle. Instead of one body, there are now two with the flexibility to support an unlimited number.  This has resulted in a number of challenges:

• How do we make it easier for people to find current cases on site?

• How do we make it easier for people to find past cases and reduce the noise when they first arrive at the site?

• How do we better organize the list of cases that are upcoming and recently ended to make it easier to find what one is looking for?

• How do we condense all of the information on the page to make it easier to scan and find content that is relevant to them?

• How do we do all of this on mobile-sized screens all the way to cinema-sized screens?

To address these challenges, we’ve updated the presentation of cases on the homepage, including adding a filter by body, introducing a new visual hierarchy for grouping cases by public hearing, and adding better handling of archived cases. 

We also made some slight refinements on case detail pages, including optimizing the presentation of video on different viewports, for example on a desktop computer versus a mobile device or a tablet device. We’ve also improved the presentation of supplementary materials (typically PDFs) on case detail pages.

You can see these new design changes up on lakewoodspeaks.org. Or ask us for a demo.

Coming up next!

We’re now working on increasing the efficiency of publishing public hearing information, trying to automate what currently is an overly manual and very time consuming process. Stay tuned for an exciting update!