One-year anniversary

On June 25, 2020, we launched the new City of Minneapolis website. It was an unsettled time: the country was in the middle of a pandemic, and Minneapolis was reeling from the killing of George Floyd.

Our new website helped us provide crucial information and services to residents, businesses, city visitors and the media.

We have continued to improve our content to meet your needs. In the past year, we have added nearly 1,000 pages, including:

• A central area for our data dashboards
• COVID-19 vaccine, testing and support resources
• Community safety resources
• Police policy reform plans
• Trial support and safety updates
• New Public Service Building information
• City of Minneapolis Service Center services

We continue to:

• Organize content in a way that makes it easy to find
• Create content that’s easier to read and scan
• Write inclusively, with the diversity of our residents in mind
• Improve the accessibility of our content

Moving forward

This year brings us hope. Hope for a better tomorrow for everyone who lives, works and plays in Minneapolis.

The City website team:

• Is dedicated to helping Minneapolis move forward
• Will continue to improve the quality of the City website
• Looks forward to serving you

Focus on people's needs

• Worked diligently with City departments to transform their content
• Asked people who use the current website every day for their input

• Help people find the critical and day-to-day information they seek
• Meet the needs of residents, business owners and visitors

Reach for ambitious goals

When you browse the new site, you'll soon see that we've done much more than a facelift.

The team wanted to:

• Improve the look and feel
  The site has more visuals, a cleaner design and content that looks great on mobile devices.
• Reorganize the content by topic area
  Now people can find the information they need with greater ease.
• Rewrite the copy
  Our users can scan and understand the content and quickly access City services.
• Improve accessibility
  The site is inclusive, and we have removed barriers to using it.
• Improve search
  We've included more pull-down options for easier access to content.
• Put a robust web publishing system in place
  This helps us improve the user experience and meet our goals.

Start with content strategy

We developed our content strategy early on:

We want to help all website visitors access the information and services they need to live, work and play in Minneapolis. We do this by creating clear, consistent content.

Follow content principles

After we developed our strategy, we created our principles:

• Be consistent
• Be concise, simple and clear
• Write for the web
• Communicate with empathy and purpose
• Build for accessibility and inclusion
• Be human-centered and data-driven
• Have one place for each piece of content
• Tell our story

These principles:

• Guide us as we write, edit and retire content
• Serve as an experienced team member, providing guidance for all our content work

View our content creation guidelines

Design for a great city

The new website represents the city we aspire to be:

• Actively engaged 
• Vibrant 
• Inclusive 
• Welcoming 
• Modern 

Talk with our users

To reach our goals, the Digital Services team wanted to understand:

• Who our residents, business owners and visitors are
• What they are looking for
• What tasks they want to do

Our best research? We asked. 

Our research included

• Interviews with residents and business owners
• Conversations with seniors
• Design reviews with people who have accessibility issues
• User testing
• Persona development

We also analyzed

• Current site data, including the most visited pages
• Comparable sites
• Website industry standards and best practices
• Human-centered design

Organize content by topic

People come to the City’s public website to find information or complete a task.

We reorganized our content by topic so people can get to the content they want with ease:

• Resident services
• Business services
• Things to do
• Getting around
• Government

Include relevant, timely information

Scannable.
Findable.
Grab-and-go.
Quickly understood.
One source of truth.
One city, one voice.

These phrases became the team’s mantra. We used them when sharing our story and working with departments to transform their content.

With this outlook, we created:  

• “I want to” tiles for quick access to tasks people want to complete
• 311 help button that appears on every page of the website — help is one click away
• Report an issue pages that are accessible from a topic area, from search and from a central listing
• “Before you begin” directions that explain what you need to know before completing a form or viewing a PDF
• City data and maps that display content visually so users can scan and interact with it
• City official and department contact information so people can connect with our City government

Navigate the site

As you navigate the new website:

• The site will direct you to pages on our original public website at www2.minneapolismn.gov. Over time, we will add all content to the new website.
• If you can't find what you’re looking for on our new site, please search our original public website. 

Thank you for exploring the new website. We hope you find it welcoming and useful.

Continually improve

With this initial website launch, the Digital Services team realizes that we haven't reached all our ambitious goals.

The process of getting here wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies. There were bumps in the road, and chances are there will be more in the future. We will continue to fine-tune our work while being true to our content strategy, principles and goals.

We know that our work never ends. We have an ongoing responsibility to deliver a great website experience to everyone who lives, works and plays in Minneapolis.