Agency – Edina, Minnesota

Interviewee –Jennifer Bennerotte, Communication & Technology Services Director

Interview Date – 12/2/16 (conducted by John K. and Adam)

Outcome – Lost

Proposal Bid – $74,999

RSM - Adam

Proposal - originally dated August 2016

Background

• Edina is a city of 50,000 in the western suburbs of Minneapolis
• Their current website is on Wordpress
• This project was unique because Edina currently spends $15k per year on Usability Testing and research.  They believe in UX so much they bought it before looking for a website redesign.
• Internally they had gone through pages with less than 500 hits per year and streamlined their content, so they loved our content strategy and usability message
• Vision was in the top 3 with CivicLive and CivicPlus
• Adam met with the communications team and did a remote demo with the CMS users in different departments

Why did we lose?

• While Jennifer appreciated our approach and process to developing websites, the end users thought the CMS from CivicPlus and CivicLive were easier to use
• They have not picked a final vendor yet

What could we improve?

• Add in-line editing to the CMS (their users have been using Wordpress, so they are used to the ease of use with that platform)
• Explain our design process and results
  • Jennifer said that after having shown them designs and why we created the designs we did for clients and how that tracked to their goals that made the communications group more comfortable with our designs. Possibly continue to communicate this message to clients – how our design meets those goals. 
• Show examples of how heatmapping impact the wireframe and improve user experience for the customers
• Have two versions of demo - one for power users and one for basic users
  • Power users - more concerned about control and flexibility
  • Basic users - focus on performing quick and easy tasks (example in the least amount of steps show how to edit a page)

Other points

• Communication's Department pros for us - Jennifer said we had the most powerful CMS of the 3
  • Lots of Research
  • Content Strategy
  • Strong search with flexible tie-ins (to Granicus etc)
  • Search Synonymn function
  • Custom user Dashboard in CMS
  • Better Calendars than other CMS’s
  • Social Media functionality
• The CMS users from the various departments liked the other CMS's better
  • Some thought our CMS would be a huge learning curve
  • Some thought we had awful design
  • All responders mentioned we did not have an in-line photo editing tool
  • Backend CMS seemed too time consuming
  • Seemed like users had to configure mobile set-up
• Edina liked the 100% satisfaction guarantee from CivicLive and the design guarantee from CivicPlus

Takeaways

• Edina thought we had the strongest UX process, but we could do a better job of demonstrating how we use that information to make wireframe and design choices
• Jennifer also recommended that we stay on the same track with flexible search and integrated search with 3rd party tools (like Granicus, etc.)
• Need a better way to show that our CMS is easy to use - yet offers the most flexibility and control 
• Explore adding in-line editing to our CMS to offset the CivicLive and CivicPlus advantage of easier editing for basic users
• Explore adding a guarantee to our marketing materials and proposal