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Archive - Edition 3: Portals
Leading Article
What is a Portal?
- Portals – The All-In-One Web Supersites: Features, Functions, Definitions, Taxonomy
- Creating New Work Paradigms for the Enterprise Portal
- The Posture of Portals
- Ingredients of Portals – An Overview
- Generic Portal Pages – What Do Most Portals Need?
What's in a Portal: MiniApps, Generic MiniApps
User-Centered Portal Design
- Portal Usability – Is There Such A Thing?
- Do Traditional Design Processes Apply to Portal Design?
- The Budget Manager Portal Revisited – Putting User-Centered Methods to Action
- Creating an Interaction Design
- Information Architecture for Web Portals
Graphic Design and Branding
"Real" Portal Projects
- City Portal
- The Web Master Portal – Roles and Scenarios
- Employee Self-Service and Life and Work Events – Two Ideas for a New User-Centric Perspective
Links & More
City Portal
by Michael Ott, SAP AG – May 21, 2001
Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2001. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.
This document gives an overview of the city portal being developed by the IBS Public Services as part of the Portal Content Project (PCP).
As part of the preceding Greenfield project, an HTML prototype was developed for discussion purposes in cooperation with a large German city. This prototype was developed from the perspective of German cities. Since typical users are not necessarily city employees but are also - and in particular - the city's inhabitants, the Portal Content Project modeled the city portal from a citizen's perspective and then developed it further, taking the expectations of cities into consideration.
The city portal, unlike other PCP portals, is not an enterprise portal but rather an external portal.
User Groups/Roles in the City Portal
A city portal targets various user groups, who all have completely different expectations. To cater for all needs, the portal must be tailored to different groups by using a role-based concept and allowing users to personalize the portal's settings.
The following main roles were identified:
- Citizens
- Enterprises
- Visitors
- Investors
The roles were defined as follows:
Citizens
Citizens are people who live in a particular city. One way of telling whether a person is a citizen of a city is by checking whether he or she has an address there. This is appropriate only in countries where people are required to officially register their place of residence.
Needs:
Citizens are interested in up-to-date regional information. Content from the
city administration or from political organizations and bodies is not enough
to cater for these needs. As well as being interested in current general information,
citizens want to have information and services tailored to their particular
requirements.
Visitors
Visitor to a city do not live in that city but are interested in information or services, either once or over a period of time.
Needs:
Unlike citizens, visitors use the city portal on a sporadic basis only. They
are interested in, for example, tourist information and weather. In most cases,
they cannot use city services.
Enterprises
An enterprise is a city's business partner, but is not necessarily located in the city.
Investors
Investors are enterprises or people who are planning to move to the city and invest money there.
Others
Other groups of people also use city portals. For example, in cities with institutes of higher education, students are already one of the largest groups that access city portals.
In the PCP project, the focus was on developing Web applications that support the city portal from the citizen's perspective. Up to now, the other user roles have not been investigated in detail.
Personalization
Existing city portals often have a static structure and are not personalizable. This means that in many cases, the citizens' needs are not met.
With the city portal, you have the option of using registration to enable citizen-focused use. Personalization makes a registration process unavoidable. However, this is not discussed in detail in this document. When users register for the first time, they have the option of completing a one-page questionnaire.
Depending on the settings, the following Web applications can be selected and preconfigured. This enables you to, for instance, immediately access Web applications that you use daily, such as an events calendar or information about current radar speed checks, without having to click through the mayor's greeting on the first page.
Citizens can configure the first page, as well as all other Web applications, to suit their individual needs.
If citizens use a signature card, other Web applications can be used, including those that contain sensitive personal information.
Step-by-step personalization motivates citizens to adjust the city portal to suit themselves.
Web Applications for Citizens
The goal of the city portal is to cater for the interests of the city and of all user groups involved. As the groups do not have conflicting interests, the chances of reaching this goal are high.
In the development project described here, the main focus is on the needs of the citizens. The Web applications described below interact to a large extent with the various MiniApps.
Events
Figure 1: The "Veranstaltungen" (Events) MiniApp
This Web application is an events calendar that is maintained decentrally. The people responsible for each event maintain the entries using a Web front end and import them via an XML interface. If necessary, a city employee can be responsible for releasing events.
In the Web application, there is only one additional column apart from the date and time of the event. This contains all the relevant information about a particular event. This information is stored in a structured way at database level, but a concatenation rule is applied so that it can be clearly displayed on the screen.
You can personalize the event categories and regions displayed, so that when you use the calendar later, only relevant events are displayed, such as opera or theater performances in the current week.
You can select certain events and then add them to the Web application My Appointments. It does not matter whether the My Appointments Web application is in the same work set as the Events Web application. In the table of events, a link to more detailed information about each event is also available.
If you press the City map button, an appropriate section of the city map is displayed, showing the route from your place of residence to the location of the event. This is possible because the required address data is available in the background.
If you press the Contacts button, details of contact persons for the selected event are displayed.
The Delete appointments function enables citizens to delete events from their general events calendar. All other citizens can still see the event in their calendar.
My Appointments
The My Appointments Web application contains important personal and general appointments.
Figure 2: The "Termine" (My Appointments) MiniApp
Each entry can be created
- automatically or
- manually
Automatically created entries are usually imported from external systems and are often alerts, such as Your ID card is about to expire. The administrator can control which appointments are imported.
Manual entries are created by the user. The user takes them from other Web applications.
Through personalization, you can define what period of time you would like see as default.
The functions Delete appointment, City map, and Contacts are implemented as they are in the Events Web application.
Club News
Figure 3: "Vereinsnachrichten" (Club News) MiniApp
In the Web application Club News, news from local clubs is displayed.
Through personalization, news from certain clubs can be set as default.
If appropriate, you can add an appointment from Club News to My Appointments.
The functions Delete appointment, City map, and Contacts are implemented as they are in the Events Web application.
People responsible at the various clubs can maintain club news using another Web application. Before publication at the appropriate place within Club News, there is the option of triggering an approval workflow. In such a case, a city employee must agree to publication before the news is made generally available. This is particularly important for new clubs, as they may not yet have proven themselves trustworthy.
Information on Waste Collection
Figure 4: First MiniApp for waste collection ("Müll")
Figure 5: Second MiniApp for waste collection ("Müll")
The topic of waste disposal is more important for citizens in Germany than was originally supposed. In many cases there is confusion about what kind of waste is collected when. This is why a Web application has been developed specially for waste collection.
The Information on Waste Collection Web application displays the current dates for the collection of the various types of waste, according to the citizen's place of residence.
The dates for weekly waste collection and for the collection of hazardous waste are shown on separate tabstrips. On the tabstrip for the collection of hazardous waste, there is a button that you can press to fill out a waste check (if the particular city uses such a procedure). If you fill out a waste check for a particular type of waste (for example, bulk waste), it is collected on a specific date. When you press the button, an appropriate citizen service is triggered.
Links to the different sorts of waste (for example, bulk waste and scrap electrical goods) provide information about the particular sort of waste. At the same time, you can also request a waste check, and add waste collection dates to My Appointments. If you fill out a waste check for a particular type of waste, the collection date is automatically added to My Appointments.
Dates for waste collection are imported via an XML interface.
Emergency Services
The Emergency Services Web application provides citizens with information about emergency services.
A shuffler enables you to select individual categories (for example, doctors or pharmacists) and regions (for example, city districts). Since there are two shufflers on this page, selection is started using a separate button. An alternative, which is not as effective, is automatic selection when you change one of the two shufflers.
When you press the City map button, the city map or route planner for the marked entry is displayed.
My Forms (CRM)
This Web application is being developed with the CRM group as part of the Citizen Service Project.
The Web application gives you an overview of all the forms a citizen has sent to a city. It is used to reduce the number of inquiries the city administration receives about the status of forms, while at the same time making the process clearer for citizens. For this reason, not only the status but also the planned completion date is published in the Web application.
Other Generic Web Applications
- Weather (generic - external content provider)
- Regional news (generic - external content provider)
- From the police report (generic - external content provider)
- Search (generic - based on the WCM search engine)
- Citizen account (FI-CA)
- Others
Portal Structure
Figure 6: Full view of the City Portal prototype; click image for larger view
At the moment, the following work sets are planned:
- Home
- Leisure time and tourism
- Citizens and city
- Life situation
- Buying
- Training and occupation
Integration of Citizen Services
The city portal allows not only the presentation of information but also the complete integration of citizen services. This is achieved using a life situation approach, which, in the form of Life and work events, is a fixed part of the Workplace (see also Employee Self-Service and Life and Work Events – Two Ideas for a New User-Centric Perspective in this edition).
Conclusion
Many opportunities for personalization, coupled with secure registration processes, create a city portal tailored to citizens' needs. This makes it possible to display personal information as well as general information, making the city portal much more useful for citizens.
The creation of the Greenfield prototype provided invaluable information about how to structure a city portal. The citizen survey conducted with usability experts as part of the PCP, and the creation of a paper prototype made it possible to take citizens' interests into account as appropriate and to make the city portal usable.
