Creuna was given the task of helping the City of Stockholm to produce “The Best Public Services Website in Northern Europe”. The result was a modern, user-friendly and much-noted website with the greatest possible accessibility, which supports the city’s objectives with regard to freedom of choice and Vision 2030 for a Stockholm that is world-class.
About the City of Stockholm
The City of Stockholm is a large organisation and is regarded as Sweden’s biggest employer with 42,500 employees. Divided into different district departments and technical departments, the City is responsible for matters such as schools, geriatric care, consumer issues, cleaning, the environment and traffic issues that affect the City of Stockholm’s almost 800,000 inhabitants.
Creuna has been working with the City of Stockholm since 2005 on both the Intranet and the external website.
The city’s new website www.stockholm.se was launched as a beta version in January 2008 and, since its major launch in May 2008, it has been continually further developed. Creuna has produced the concept, interaction design and graphical design as well as carrying out the technical implementation.
The challenge
Creuna was given the task of helping the City of Stockholm to produce “The Best Public Services Website in Northern Europe”. A modern, user-friendly and effective website that can be accessed by everyone. A website that supports the City’s objective with regard to freedom of choice, Vision 2030 and acts as a basis for its citizens to access all those e-services the City is investing in its role as a 24-hour authority.
The solution
Creuna’s assignment began with a pilot study in the spring of 2007. The study led to an overall concept for the new website and was based on priority target groups, the City’s business targets, the graphical profile and the existing web strategy. Creuna carried out user studies and held workshops with operational representatives from the City’s departments.
The new website was launched as a beta version at an early stage so that the City’s citizens could become involved in influencing and providing points of view and suggestions for changes. A blog was launched where the project was able to publish posts on new functionality and different choices of direction that inhabitants could comment on and vote on.
The City was involved throughout the development work in order to ensure that the way of working for the almost 400 editors and the solutions for the different functions would be the best ones possible.
Technical solution
Stockholm.se is based on EPiServer CMS 5, Microsoft .NET C#, and MS SQL. The website has been developed using the absolutely latest web technology and follows the (WCAG, XHTML Strict, WAI) web standards and also complies with Verva’s guidelines for accessibility of public service websites.
RSS flows are exposed everywhere; in all listings and search results. There is also a microformat for all calendar events (vCard, vEvent, vCalendar), units (Geo). Microsummaries are used for the bookmarks. The listen function is implemented using ReadSpeaker and FlashPlayer on each page, but with a complete fallback solution adapted to accessibility. An Open Search plug-in has been implemented.
Creuna has implemented the map function on the basis of the Starcus map engine, and mapping information from the Stockholm Town-Building Office and the Traffic Office has been input into the solution. When caseworkers going about the City’s business enter information in the Compare Service database, they add the Geo Microformat.
The results
At stockholm.se, the citizens can easily find the City’s range of services and service units. The ”Compare Service” function allows the citizens to easily find out about the City of Stockholm’s range of services – from nurseries, schools and children’s holiday camps to services designed for elderly people in their homes. Through various key figures, the citizens can, for example, see the staffing levels and area of focus of a nursery school – quality figures that help the citizens of Stockholm to make their choice of nursery school. And the map function at stockholm.se is probably the world’s most accessible map. The map has complete functionality, even in a web browser without javascript.
In Verva’s mid-year measurement in October 2008, stockholm.se is one of the few Swedish public service websites that receive top points and no comments on the code quality. And with its great number of noteworthy functions – such as Compare Service and the map function – stockholm.se has reached the position of being a world-class public service website. The site also won first prize in the category of Best Public Web, awarded by EPiServer.