CA.Gov Web Portal Consulting

The Office of Technology Services, under the State CIO’s office, provides enterprise level support for the California Web Portal. Over the past few years, considerable effort has been made to improve the State’s web presence in order to better serve the 37 million constituents and millions of businesses in the State. As a result of these efforts, California has received national recognition and worldwide exposure of such resources as the California Web Template and the WebTools website. Even with these efforts, however, there exists a gap in California’s portal offerings and efforts to move work and public services from "in-line” to online.

SymSoft Solutions was chosen by DTS to provide consulting services to analyze the state portal and the websites under the ca.gov domain and identify the issues and opportunities, for improving the Portal Offerings. SymSoft team has extensive knowledge of state portal best practices and first hand experience of working with several state portals within the US. SymSoft conducted review of, and benchmarked the services provided through websites in ca.gov domain against the best practice service delivery standards followed by national award winning portals. A detailed gap analysis report was created.

The team also provided specific recommendations for improving portal's visual design. The new visual design is based on following guiding principles:

• The way people perceive information is changing. The portal needs to adjust to this new perception in presenting its information and services.
• User Experience is the key differentiator, Improving User Experience is the key to increased adoption.
• Universal Access is the underlying theme, so every improvement should maintain the accessibility.