CASE STUDY: Albuquerque Public Schools Goes Open Source

PROJECT: www.aps.edu

TIMELINE: September 2008 - January 2010

TEAM: Albuquerque Public Schools, FosterMilo, Joel Burton

Although it's hardly official like San Francisco, Albuquerque is actively considering -- and frequently converting to -- open source web systems. First the City of Albuquerque and now Albuquerque Public Schools whose new site launched last month. (See: Welcome to the new APS.edu)

In its first week live, the new aps.edu was already deemed a success. The site received 292,619 page views and automated approximately 400 transfer requests, a function that was previously handled manually in person (ouch!) at the APS Central Office -- at great expense to APS and at great inconvenience to parents.

Built with a cross-departmental team of nearly a dozen people, the new site was almost two years in the planning.

This case study is designed to share some of the detailed planning and strategy that enables a public project of this magnitude to be successful.

OBJECTIVES

The original APS website

The old Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) website was disorganized, dysfunctional, and downright ugly. As Communications Executive Director, Monica Armenta put it in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal, the old site "should have been overhauled about 10 years ago." Arcane technology not only frustrated parents but even worse, it prevented APS staff from meeting its legal requirements.

Problems included:

• There was no ability to search the website.
• The website used frames, prohibiting deep-linking and reducing usability.
• The website used a proprietary system supported by a single vendor, meaning that APS was locked-in for over 10 years and could not support the site in-house if needed during a budget crisis.
• Information architecture and content were often a navel-gazing affair, more focused on headshots and mission statements than the needs of parents and employees.
• Subdomain WWW pointed to an Exchange server login.
• Most links on the website opened in new windows, which our usability testers found extremely confusing.
• APS had no staff devoted to publishing, maintaining, or evolving one of their most important communication mediums.

SOLUTION

FosterMilo was brought in to help. Not only were we asked to discern what taxpayers wanted on the new site and to create a web team to support it, but we were also tasked with ensuring the new website was a cost-effective and successful project. Essentially we were asked, as part of our other work on a district-wide technology strategy, to be advocates for APS.

Here's how we did it.

Build a Project Plan

First things first, APS stakeholders wanted to know what to expect. Using Basecamp and simple visualization tools, we crafted a project plan with a timeline clarifying the steps required. Though planning seems like an obvious component of any project, we found high-level visualizations like the one below to be particularly helpful in building confidence and momentum for a very public project with dozens of stakeholders.

Interview Users & Stakeholders

Early on, we met with everyone from the Board of Education to Human Resources to the amazing team of people who answer the Service Center phone lines.

With each group, we asked essentially the same thing:

• What do most people contact APS for? How does this change throughout the year?
• What are the biggest difficulties people have with APS forms/paperwork?
• What ideas do you have to help make dealing with APS easier for people and cheaper for APS?

Interviews like this are critical. Not only because they bring stakeholders on board for the project in a focused and task-oriented way, but more importantly because these interviewees are the folks who have regular contact with parents, teachers, and community members. These are the people, rather than the technology team, who know what website visitors want.

Card Sorting to Determine Information Architecture

Once you know which important questions your website is designed to answer, it's important to find out HOW and WHERE those questions should be answered. That's where card-sorting can help.

Volunteers from Valley High working on card-sorting exercises during their lunch break.

For APS, we conducted a series of card-sorting exercises designed to discern how information should be organized on the new site.

Over pizza at Valley High and after work at coffeeshops, we met with teachers, parents, students, community members and members of the media. Using a series of index cards representing web pages and topics, volunteers helped us learn how to cluster information on the new site in a way that made sense to people outside the bureaucracy. As typically happens in a card-sorting exercise, patterns quickly became discernible.

Though the new site will likely soon need a secondary top navigation, the current IA is the direct result of these card-sorting exercises. The bureaucracy didn't decide how information should be organized, the community did.

Learn More: How does card-sorting work?

Usability Testing

A couple months before launching the new site, we decided to use usability testing on the old site to identify existing problem-areas and establish a baseline for future improvement.

FosterMilo helped APS craft its first-ever web usability test together with the web team (more on the web team below) and volunteers from the community outside APS. The exercise was designed to understand:

• How people find information about district boundaries and schools assigned to their address (the most common question for APS)
• How easy or difficult is the task of applying for a job with APS
• How do people find contact information for a school

The results were illuminating to say the least.

Hardly surprising, APS found it was impossible for all testers (yes, every single one of them) to complete a job application. Searching for contacts was easier, but district boundaries were tricky to find. As part of the process, we also gained valuable insight into user behavior. For example, evidence strongly supported deprecating the use of new windows for offsite links.

Though the new site was unable to address all of these issues immediately (the process of handling job applications, for example, is currently outside the web team's control), we accomplished two things with the usability exercises:

• Identifying trouble-spots to address on the new site.
• Teaching APS a valid and low-cost process for better understanding their users.

Learn More: How to create a usability test and 24 website usability tools

Define Technology, Requirements, Design

APS knew they wanted to use the Plone content management system, based upon positive feedback from technology leadership at the City of Albuquerque where Plone has been in use since 2007.

But APS itself had never used Plone. So our job at FosterMilo was to craft an RFP that was airtight in its functionality requirements and to create a visual design that would work with Plone. As the folks who implemented Plone at the City of Albuquerque, we were able to leverage our experience with the system in writing a RFP that defined exactly:

• What was needed
• How it should work
• How it should look
  

Fortunately, bids were competitively low and APS was able to select Joel Burton, one of the founders of the Plone Foundation, to develop the new site according to the needs expressed by the APS community.

Craft an Integration Plan

For complex organizations like APS, their public site rarely stands alone. In fact, the new aps.edu is merely the tip of the iceberg that is the district-wide set of web systems. Part of our job was to craft a long-term plan for integrating their new Plone website with:

• Department sites
• School sites
• Intranet
• Online learning

Based upon experience with the City of Albuquerque and excellent usability research by the Nielsen Norman Group, we were able to propose a three-phase, long-term integration strategy that reduces manual content maintenance and limits proprietary vendor cost.

Here's one way of solving this challenge.

Thinking about scalability and interoperability now will help APS avoid critical (and frequently costly) technology integrations in the future.

Over the next three years, APS will continue to implement and evolve this plan to meet their needs.

Build a Web Team

Though aps.edu is one of the most highly visited sites in the state, APS needed a lean web team due to budgetary constraints. But they also needed a team that could maintain the site in a professional manner and continue to improve the site as technology and community expectations evolve.

The good folks on the new APS Web Team

So we recommended a team of 3:

• Web Editor who would manage all user requests for the site, define information architecture, manage technology deliverables, improve stakeholder communication, write and edit website content, conduct usability testing, as well as plan for and manage the future evolution of the site.
• Technical Writer who would research and write website content, post news and events, create usable online forms, monitor web traffic data and adjust timely content accordingly.
• Graphic Designer who would design and produce all web graphics, video and animation for the site, secure and select photography, edit the site design, and publish content as needed.

Though other school districts of a similar size manage their sites with larger teams, APS is staffed well-enough to keep up for now with the ever-expanding number of website visitors.

To optimize timeliness and relevancy of communication, all team members (except for the web developer) live within the Communications Department. This ensures that the internet, APS's most cost-effective communication medium, is considered at the start of any project rather than being an afterthought. It also ensures that the team is physically present where communication flows into and out of the organization.

Before the new team arrived, FosterMilo worked with the IT department to:

• Set up space on a web server for testing.
• Set up a wiki for internal documentation. We uploaded existing project materials prior to the team starting.
  
• Set up Trac, a bug-tracking system, so the web team can organize user requests and report on throughput.
  

Build the Site

Once the web team was in place, FosterMilo was able to transition day-to-day management of the site buildout to their talented new web editor, Lesley Molecke, with minimal support. This allowed us to devote attention to:

• Go live launch plan
• Go live talking points
  
• Cross-browser functionality testing and debugging
• Content audit and editing

In the meantime, a small team of specialized web developers under Joel Burton, an innovative Plone architect and trainer, worked to build the site according to APS' approved specifications from the RFP. On a regular basis, FosterMilo and APS held detailed functionality reviews to ensure the technology matched our requirements.

It's worth noting that the entire site was tested and debugged on a variety of browsers. These were prioritized based on existing web traffic analysis from APS and the City of Albuquerque.

• Internet Explorer 8, 7, and 6
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari
• iPhone

For a highly-trafficked government website like aps.edu, it's hard to overstate the importance of budgeting time and resources for cross-browser testing and debugging. Ensuring performance for nearly all website visitors, regardless of their web browser, is key to meeting expectations.

Create Usable Content

Readability was a significant problem with the existing website content. As part of content creation and editing, FosterMilo recommended that APS reduce its language complexity to a level comprehensible to most people.

Throughout the site, this meant a shift from the 16th grade reading level to something closer to the 6th grade reading level as recommended by various government agencies.

We taught the web team how to use a readability tool based on the Flesch-Kincaid index to analyze and alter the content. However, reducing language complexity is quite time-consuming and the team was unable to alter a significant portion of the content by launch date. This tedious work remains for the APS web team and will require a district-wide commitment to using clear, simplified language.

POSITIVE OUTCOME

After years of negative press, the Albuquerque Public Schools finally received complementary reviews... and this time, for its website.

Revamped APS Web Site Just a Click Away 

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Bells, Whistles. Interaction.

The revamped Albuquerque Public Schools Web site, www.aps.edu, went live Monday. Within hours parents were logged in using and submitting forms requesting transfers to others schools for their students. Previously the form could only be turned in by driving to the district's City Centre headquarters. On Tuesday, a two-hour weather delay in the East Mountains was posted on the site, along with a legislative first day update.

More than two years in the making, the new site is a vast improvement over the old, user-unfriendly one that frustrated even online savvy parents and students.

Read more reaction:

• APS Web Site Gets a Makeover
• APS Redesigns Website

More importantly, though, are the throngs of people visiting the new website and the fact that now, they can find what they need. Not only that, but they can find it quickly and easily with only minimal cost to taxpayers.

Interested in learning more? Contact info@fostermilo.com.