Maryland updates website with eye toward personalization
Maryland is the latest state to update its official website, focusing on personalization and citizen engagement, according to NIC Maryland.
“This updated design shows the commitment to our tech-savvy citizens who access services and information at home and on the go,” said Isabel FitzGerald, secretary of the state’s Department of Information Technology. “With nearly a 200 percent increase in mobile users over the past year, the new design ensures a user experience that adapts to deliver all of the same interactive features and content on any device.”
The new design features a personalization feature called MyMARYLAND Clipboard, which allows users to save important links on Maryland.gov without registering for an account. Visitors can click and drag any of the portal content links, including top stories, meetings and online services, to save on the clipboard panel for a future visit. The site will also suggest clips based on the section they are browsing.
Another first is Maryland’s new visually engaging social media hub accessed from the “Social” button on the jump menu.
Visitors can engage with the government directly from the portal with the real-time trends feed and share content. The hub visually aggregates more than 200 agencies’ social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Plus, RSS and YouTube.
Maryland.gov’s instant search interface has been enhanced to provide more predictive and contextual search results. Those results are indexed from all state agency websites and have been organized into different topics, such as pages, online services, publications, maps, tweets, jobs, counties, news and open data, using the power of Google’s Site Search API and the most up-to-date algorithms to match Google proper’s results.
Additional features in the new Maryland.gov also include:
- Enterprise public meetings calendar and news feeds: New calendar functionality provides greater transparency to state government operations and delivers the most up-to-date news and public meetings.
- Explore Maryland near you: Nearby geo-location functionality now includes Maryland state jobs in users’ area, in addition to motor vehicle office locations with up-to-the minute wait times, state parks and government office locations.
- eGov services activity tracker: The tracker displays usage statistics for online transactions driving the use of eGov services.
- Fluid and flexible parallax design: The overall site has been visually improved and enhanced with a more streamlined and mobile-friendly design that provides depth, better usability and an updated mobile-friendly Maryland.gov logo.
The Maryland.gov website was redesigned at no cost to taxpayers through NIC Maryland’s partnership with the state’s Department of Information Technology via a competitive contract, which enables the company to provide e-government applications and services to state and local government agencies.
