The government website for the state of Arkansas took User Centered Design (UCD) to another level with its Best of the Web award winning website. This is what I like about Arkansas.gov:
- They clearly identified and segmented their target audiences: Parents & Families, Citizens, Business Owners, State Employees
- They created a modern, visually pleasing, aesthetic design that features an Arkansas landscape panorama
- They featured a search box with suggestions and trending searches
- They produced a mobile app for self-serving citizens and feature that app on their website
- They provide a feedback suggestion box so they can continue to seek improvement
- They have an interactive map to help people find jobs, services, offices, parks, and meetings near them
- They integrate social media such as tweets and flickr images
The web designers did a bang up job with Arkansas.gov.
This is the technology stack and spec profile for Arkansas.gov according to builtwith.com:
- Apache web server (Apache 2.2)
- IIS web server (IS 6)
- SPF email service
- Comodo SSL certificate
- Expression engine content management system (yuck!)
- iAPPS (integrated CMS, analytics, and eCommerce solution)
- PHP
- Microsoft Office SharePoint (probably for the State Employee Intranet)
- ASP.NET
- ASP.NET Ajax
- Pingdom
- CrazyEgg
- Google Analytics
- jQuery
- HTML5
- Modernizr (targets specific browser functionality)
- Facebook for Websites (for social media integration)
- Facebook SDK (enables Graph API via JavaScript)
- Twitter page embeds
- jQuery (jQuery 1.8.3)
- jQuery Cycle
- Skrollr (paralass scrolling library)
- Google hosted libraries (jQuery UI)
- DataTables (jQuery plugin to extend tables)
- BootstrapCDN (content delivery network)
- GStatic Google Static Content (offloads static content to reduce bandwidth, increase performance)
- jQueryCDN (Amazon S3 content delivery network)
- AJAX Libraries API
- Twitter CDN (content sourced from Twitter)
- CloudFrount (integrates with Amazon Web Services to distribute content for users with low latency for high data transfer speeds)
- RawGit (serves RAW files from GitHub with the right Content Type headers)
- AddThis
- Feedbackify
- Font Awesome
- Imgix
- GetSiteControl
- Viewport Meta
- Apple Mobile Web Clips
- Twitter Bootstrap
- CSS
- Conditional Comments
- WAI-ARIA
- Ubuntu operating system
- CentOS
- Min Width
- Max Width