Owning Your Digital Spaces

When you think about your city’s brand, a few distinct factors likely come to mind. You may think of a logo, hashtag, or even traditional community events. You may reflect on your social media presence and the impressions you’re making online. But while all these factors contribute to your brand, they’re not actually the brand itself. Your city’s brand is its reputation: the way people think and feel about the city overall.

Every time current or prospective community members interact with the businesses, restaurants, parks, roads, or any other element of your city—their experiences contribute to their feelings about the city overall. At the end of the day, your city’s brand is an amalgamation of all the experiences people have had with your community and how those experiences made them feel. This means that your brand is a living, changing thing, constantly in flux.

You may be most concerned with the primary experiences your city provides, that is: actually being in the city—walking in the park, visiting shops, having a meal. However, in the digital age, many experiences with your city begin online. Think of it like this: With the rise of remote work, young people have their pick of where to live. They’re using YouTube videos, Zillow, and even just basic Google searches as part of their research process when deciding where to relocate. If a family is on a road trip, and they’re planning to drive through your city, they’re going to look at restaurants and hotels online ahead of time. Even your current community members are using social media and other online platforms to be in the know about what events are happening over the weekend or who they can reach out to with questions about how to pay their property taxes.

Like it or not, those digital experiences all contribute to your community’s feelings about your city, and therefore your brand—for better or worse.

The choices you make about your city’s website, apps and other digital platforms are crucial to building and safeguarding your brand. If the tools your current and prospective community members are using to learn more about the local area are unintuitive or difficult to use, they’ll reflect poorly on your city—even if they’re not branded with your logo­.

If you want to take control of your brand, you need to control as many of your audience’s experiences with your city as possible. That means giving your community members a great experience every single time they interact with your city, no matter where that experience is taking place.

The Apple Experience

If you want an example of a brand that goes far beyond a logo, look no further than Apple. When you think about iPads and MacBooks, you might picture the distinctive Apple logo, or even recall their slogan: “Think Different.” But those simple assets aren’t what make Apple such a strong, recognizable, popular brand. People love Apple because the company has perfectly calibrated every experience.

Just as your primary experiences take place in the shops, restaurants, and parks throughout your city, Apple’s happen when users swipe through their iPhones or open up their Macbooks. After all, that’s the product they’re selling. But their technology alone isn’t enough to make Apple a powerhouse brand. In the end, the computers and phones themselves aren’t that different than those of competitors—but the experience surrounding those products is unmatched.

The Apple Store—a pristine glass storefront outshining other retailers in shopping malls—is just as much a part of the brand as the iPhone. So is the easy self-checkout that allows you to scan a product with your phone, pay with Apple Pay, and leave without speaking to a single soul. Need to fix a problem with your product? Just set up an appointment at the Genius Bar—no waiting in line required.

It’s not iPhones and iPads that have made Apple the brand it is today. It’s that they’ve carefully engineered every experience to make things as easy and attractive as possible for their customers.

Good user experience strengthens your brand. You’re probably already somewhat aware of what we call “user experience,” often abbreviated “UX.” When it comes to the business of keeping a city afloat, you’re constantly focused on the “end user”—in this case, local consumers, as well as both current and potential constituents. As you’re making decisions, you put yourself in their shoes, asking what will work best for them. But while you’re worried about what happens on the streets and in the businesses throughout your city, you might be ignoring your community’s digital experiences.

So how do you ensure that those digital experiences are positive? In a study done by Google, the top three positive words used to describe digital brand experiences were “easy,” “helpful,” and “convenient.” Your community members want to minimize the amount of effort it takes to complete their tasks. Instead of thinking about where to go to find information, they want design to guide them there. In short, they want a good user experience.

When current residents are looking for upcoming community events, how easily can they find that info? If a constituent has a question about how to connect with the local government, is contact information readily available online? Those are both questions about user experience, and their answers are significant reflections of your city’s brand.

In the sections that follow, we’ll train you to look at your city’s digital experiences through your community’s eyes. By optimizing your user experiences across the board, you can impact how your community thinks and feels about your local area—and take control of your brand.

What makes a good user experience?

Even for experts, the concept of user experience can be difficult to understand. That’s why Peter Morville, one of today’s leading minds in information architecture and UX, created the user experience honeycomb, now a central tenet in the field of UX design.

According to Morville, a good user experience is composed of seven interlocking factors: useful, usable, findable, accessible, credible, desirable, and valuable. The idea of value lies at the very center of the honeycomb, and for good reason: the other six factors work together to create value.

You can evaluate your city’s apps, websites, programs, and platforms using a rubric based on Morville’s honeycomb:

• Useful: Does it have a reason to exist? Does it fill a need?
• Usable: Does it work well? Can community members use it easily and intuitively?
• Findable: Can community members find it easily? Once there, can they quickly find what they’re looking for?
• Accessible: Is it ADA compliant? Can people with disabilities use it just as easily as anyone else?
• Credible: Is the content here up-to-date? Is it free of misspellings and grammatical errors?
• Desirable: Does it look good?

If even one of these factors is missing in your app, website, program, or experience, it’s not going to provide value to your audience. You may as well not waste your time—or theirs.

Let’s look at a simple example: a digital newsletter. Maybe it’s beautifully designed, full of useful information, and completely credible and compliant. The sign-up is easy to find, and the subject lines indicate exactly what your audience should expect. There’s just one hitch: it’s extremely long, and most of your readers never make it to the end. Your audience wants digestible updates they can consume quickly—so the length of your newsletter is negatively impacting its usability.

Without that usability piece in place, your newsletter has lost all its value. It doesn’t matter how good it looks or how many worthwhile updates it contains. If your community members aren’t actually reading the crucial information you’re sending out, why send it at all? In fact, this negative user experience could be hurting your brand. Annoyed by what they perceive as useless emails, your audience will miss the important updates you included in that newsletter—and they’ll still have questions.

In short, a good user experience is one that provides value, and every other cell in the honeycomb is just another step toward that goal.

Usefulness

In 2016, entrepreneur Doug Evans introduced the world to Juicero. The high-tech juicer, which cost a staggering $700, required that users buy packets of diced fruits and vegetables from its parent company, which the machine would then scan via QR code. If the packets weren’t fresh, the juicer wouldn’t work. If they were deemed worthy of juicing, the packets would be squeezed by internal machinery with 8,000 pounds of force.

There was just one problem: Juicero wasn’t any more efficient than good old-fashioned elbow grease. A Bloomberg video published in 2017 showed a side-by-side comparison: the Juicero versus a person using both hands to squeeze one of the juice packets. As it turned out, the machine wasn’t any faster than the person. Juicero shut down completely just a few months after the Bloomberg video, brought down by their product’s total lack of usefulness.

When it comes to rolling out apps, platforms, or software for your city, you don’t want to end up like Juicero. Much like a Wifi-enabled juicer, a high-tech city app sounds very cool, but coolness alone isn’t enough. To be worth implementing, your app—or anything else—also needs to make life easier for your stakeholders.

Your technology should center around your end-users: your current and prospective community members. Instead of finding a reason to implement a certain platform or tool, work backwards from your audience’s needs and wants. What problems or inconveniences are your stakeholders facing? (If you’re not sure, ask!) Once you know, work to find the best solutions.

There’s nothing wrong with a high-tech city app—in fact, we think you should have one—but it shouldn’t exist just to check a box on some arbitrary technology checklist. It should serve a defined purpose and serve it well.

Usability

To foster a good user experience, your platforms must be easy and convenient to use. As you might imagine, usability goes hand in hand with usefulness; a platform that’s too difficult to use can’t accomplish its intended purpose. Usability comes down to two factors: speed and simplicity.

Speed

How quickly does your app, website, or platform load? While it might seem like a small detail, speed has a large impact on your audience’s user experience. After all, people are impatient. According to research from Google, when a mobile page takes just five seconds to load, the bounce rate (or rate at which your users leave your page) is 90%. Around 32% of users bounce if it takes just three seconds.

If users do stick around to wait, they’ll start to feel stressed. According to a study from Ericsson, a leading Information and Communication Technology provider, when mobile users are pressed for time waiting for a website to load, their heart rates increase by 38%. Their stress levels are comparable to those of someone watching a horror movie alone in a dark room.

In addition to site speed’s effect on user experience, it’s also a key ranking factor for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. According to Search Engine Journal, a resource for SEO best practices, “Pages that meet a certain threshold for speed are said to benefit from a ranking boost in Google’s search results…These claims also stem from the knowledge that Google aims to serve pages that provide a superior user experience.” In other words, by prioritizing load speed, you’ll be improving your UX and your site’s overall searchability.

Simplicity

In 2000, a study at Columbia University sought to answer a deceptively complex question: Do consumers really want more choices? Researchers set up two tables at a high-end grocery store, each displaying gourmet jam. While one boasted a selection of 24 different jams, the other offered only six choices.

The results were astonishing. Only 3% of customers at the more extensive display actually made a purchase, but 30% bought from the smaller one. As it turns out, people facing a multitude of options get what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls “choice paralysis”—they’re so overwhelmed that they avoid decisions altogether. With a simplified set of options, people are better able to make a decision and move forward. In fact, in his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz argues that while options aren’t fundamentally bad, an abundance of choices actually makes us stressed and unsatisfied.

What does all this have to do with UX? Well, think about your website, your city app, your social media presence, or any other digital space your audience has to navigate. As they try to find information, how many links, pages, or buttons are they presented with? How many apps and platforms do they have to search through to pay for their parking spot downtown? If they’re faced with too many choices, they’re likely to get overwhelmed and abandon their task in frustration. Needless to say, that’s a bad user experience.

One step toward a good experience is simplifying your audience’s decision-making as much as possible, removing choice altogether if you can. This means reducing buttons and links on your websites and apps—and cutting down the number of platforms you use. The more essential tasks your community members can accomplish on a single platform, the better.

Findability

For your audience to have a positive experience with your websites, apps, and platforms, they must be able to easily find what they’re looking for. When your community members open your city app, visit your website, or follow your city’s Instagram profile, how is the content organized? Is it immediately clear where users can find answers to their questions?

Much of findability goes back to the idea of simplicity: reducing the number of decisions your audience needs to make to find information. Having fewer links, tabs, and buttons increases the speed and ease with which your community members can get where they’re going.

As you think about findability, keep in mind a crucial segment of your audience: prospective tourists or community members who aren’t yet acquainted with your city. They’re searching the internet, trying to find information about the local area. Creating a good user experience includes making that process easy as well.

That’s where SEO steps in. While SEO helps draw people to your site, it also contributes to a positive user experience; it helps your audience find what they’re looking for.

Accessibility

To build a great user experience for everyone, you have to ensure that those with hearing, visual, or mobility impairments can access your content just as easily as anyone else. It’s not just good UX; it’s required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA.

Maybe you’re already familiar with issues of accessibility and believe you have the issue covered. But you may be surprised to learn that in our 2019 study, of the school district websites we analyzed, a startling majority—91%—had critical errors that made their websites inaccessible. What’s more, a whopping 67% lacked accessibility forms where users could report issues.

And cities probably have this problem, too. When was the last time you conducted an accessibility audit of your website? What do you suspect you’d find? Any compliance issues are problems that are worth your attention—especially considering the fact that the ADA applies not only to school districts, but to state and local governments as well.

What’s more, according to the CDC, one in four Americans live with disabilities. If your websites, apps, software, and other digital tools aren’t accessible, you’re alienating more than a quarter of your potential audience.

Credibility

Imagine a prospective resident is viewing your district website for the first time, trying to decide whether or not your city might be right for their family. The outcome of their decision depends, at least in part, on whether or not their user experience on your site engenders trust. If you want to strengthen your brand, you need to build credibility with your audience.

According to the Chicago Tribune, user experience expert Jakob Nielsen “knows more about what makes websites work than anyone else on the planet.” Way back in 1999, Nielsen determined a few factors that contribute to a website’s credibility—and more than 20 years later, they still ring true. Here, we’ll go over just a couple: transparency and current content.

Transparency

Consider your own digital experiences with brands. Have you ever abandoned a site when you couldn’t find information about payment or return policies? Your audience, especially those yet to be involved with your community, are evaluating your digital presence the same way. If prospective residents can’t easily find information about affordable housing or local job openings, they may assume there are few opportunities in your area—and continue their search somewhere else.

As you work toward greater transparency, start by asking what information is most useful to your audience’s interests. After all, transparency isn’t about overloading your audience with information—that will actually overwhelm them, making the information they need harder to find and producing a negative user experience. Focus on the questions you typically get about what life is like in your community. That way, you’ll know you’re providing the info people actually want.

Once you’ve considered all the information prospective community members might need, build out pages detailing that information. Then, link to those pages prominently from your homepage. The more relevant info your audience has at their fingertips, the easier their user experience will be—and, most importantly, the more they’ll trust your brand.

Current content

There’s a reason popular social media apps heavily favor recent posts in their timeline algorithms. We don’t want to know what happened two weeks ago; we want to know what’s happening right now.

The same is true for your community members. When they open your mobile app or check your website—whether for the first time or the 500th—they want to see up-to-date, relevant information. Imagine visiting the website of a town you’re hoping to visit soon and seeing information about an event that happened over a month ago. Odds are, you wouldn’t bother perusing the website for further information.

Refreshing your content frequently doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. It can be as simple as announcing the grand opening of a new business or posting pictures from a communitywide fourth of July celebration. Just remember that you can’t keep new people coming in unless you’re keeping your content up-to-date.

Desirability

One of the factors Nielsen cites in his list of credibility factors is design quality—in other words, how a site or platform looks and feels. Morville refers to this same concept in his user experience honeycomb, deeming it “desirability.” Believe it or not, the aesthetics of your community’s digital spaces contribute to the way your audience engages with—and even trusts—your brand.

While we may think we make judgments based on logic and reason, we form first impressions incredibly quickly. According to a study published in Behavior & Information Technology, it takes about 50 milliseconds—one-twentieth of a second—for us to form an opinion about a website. To build your brand and provide a good user experience, you need your digital spaces to look great, right from the get-go.

So what’s the relationship between the aesthetics of a digital space and how much people trust it? A study from the Stanford Web Credibility Project determined that 46.1% of consumers judge credibility, at least in part, on “the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size, and color schemes.”

In another study, researchers from Northumbria University and the University of Sussex followed 15 women while they browsed various medical sites, looking for advice and answers as they faced stressful medical decisions. Researchers found that when the women rejected a site, they usually did so because of weak design elements such as boring web design, small print, too much text, and a corporate look and feel.

However, when the women described the sites they trusted, they didn’t actually say much about looks. Instead, they pointed to informative content, relevant illustrations, and unbiased information.

A well-designed website isn’t always the flashiest or the prettiest; in fact, flashiness can sometimes distract or even put off your audience. Here’s the thing about design: when something looks bad, we notice. But when something looks aesthetically appealing, we don’t think about the design much at all. Good design frees up space in your audience’s minds to focus on the info they’re looking for—and that provides a good user experience.

Tying it back to your brand

In the aftermath of COVID-19, the role of technology is only going to grow. That means the role of user experience in your brand’s strength is more crucial than ever. Consistently bad user experiences aren’t just a miserable slog for your community members; these days, they may be deal breakers. Rather than suffer through the hassle of your technology, they might choose to research a different community with a savvier digital presence.

Good user experience, on the other hand, drives your community members back to your digital spaces again and again. When they need something, they’ll know where to find it; when they use a piece of software, they’ll know it will work. When they’re making big decisions about where to live, visit, or work—they’ll trust the information they find on your website. They’ll trust your community—and that may be what makes the difference when it comes to deciding where to take their next trip or even buy their first home.