The hair-pulling rage of getting lost on a website

Jack Nicholson's character Jack Torrance met his demise in a snow-covered maze in "The Shining."

The City's Digital Team has already asked you to give us feedback on our pilot site and on how best we should categorize our new “Topic” pages. Now we’re asking for your input on a critical component of the new Boston.gov: the navigation and menus.

We've all been there, stumbling through web pages and sub-navigations like Jack Nicholson in a hedge maze. Our old website was certainly no exception and has possibly been the cause of some hatchet swinging.

On the pilot site, we’ve shown you a very simple version of our navigation and menus, but as we’ve told you before, our system is vast. The current City website has 10,000 URLs, 8,300 PDFs, and uses nearly one million words. Now that we’re building out the new Boston.gov, we want to cut down on what we don’t need and figure out the most useful way to organize the City’s content.

Please complete this quick survey and give us your opinion. You will be asked a series of questions and shown screenshots of the new Boston.gov. The questions will all ask the same basic idea: if you were searching for something on the new site, where would you click?

A large part of our development process involves hearing what you think and building based on your input. We appreciate you taking the time to give us your feedback. It ensures the new Boston.gov will be centered around residents' needs, and won't leave anyone out in the cold.