The main purpose of this project was to revamp the existing REACH website. REACH was setup to gather public feedback, and to become the lead agency for engaging and connecting with our citizens. The challenge how to 'connect' with the public.
Most people would agree that we hardly browse government websites unless searching for specific information. As statistics have shown, only LTA and CPF websites have a significant number of monthly hits amongst government websites.The challenge in designing the new REACH was how to reach out to more people, as the name implies.
Our solution? Incorporating Information Architecture (IA), intuitive multi-media design and adding more features.
The rationale:
Relying on current social media tools and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Youtube to provide marketing and promotions to have people coming to REACH, the new REACH portal leverages on current Internet trends to connect to our online Singapore users. Marketing can be very costly with very low guarantee for success. Why not ride on the existing 150 million active users of Facebook? Twitter itself has 4 billion tweets posted just in the 1st quarter of 2010! The idea here is to ride on existing users of REACH, having them arouse the interest of their friends and the influence continues on like a tidal wave. It is proven that relying on a friend’s recommendations work better than advertisements. For Facebook users, the “Like” button is used commonly and many times, such topics are being spread around through social networking. Other features include, flicker, YouTube, send SMS and many more.
During the Project Development phase we ran an Information Architecture drive to not only re-structure the content but also derive a taxonomy dictionary to tag all of REACH’s content.
It would make it easier for citizens to search and retrieve related, existing and past articles.
To find out more about Information Architecture (IA) and Usability Engineering (UE), click here.