The Massachusetts Digital Services is nine months into rebuilding mass.gov with Drupal 8. This session will share our approach and look under the hood of pilot.mass.gov in our ninth month of development.

In our first three months we stood up a proof-of-concept site. By six months we implemented our first round of improvements based on user testing and our data scientists launched an analytics dashboard to begin tracking and analyzing government service delivery as conversions. Now new-and-improved content is live and discoverable by Google, we’re collecting real data and unguided user feedback, and we’re beginning to scale content production.

Here’s a quick run down of data we’re grappling with and some of the tools and tech we’ll discuss in this session:

Data

As of 2016, 10% of mass.gov’s content serves 90% of our traffic. We can have a huge impact by focusing on this small fraction of high-value content!
76% of constituents interact with the government online. At 55% phone is a distant second. In-person and email are both under 40%. Constituents expectations are accelerating and technology is constantly changing. We need to catch up and keep up.
User research

Treejack’s “pie trees” are a delightful for visualizing information architecture tests.
Validately is a remote usability testing tool we’re using to help us recruit users and execute tests.
Tech

Drupal 8 for CMS behind mass.gov
Drupal 7 DKAN to power our document repository and provide embeddable data visualizations
Pattern Lab for CMS agnostic atomic design to promote consistent UX across a diverse technology ecosystem
Google Tag Manager for collecting web statistics
Shiny for visualizing our data scientists' R analyses in a dashboard that’s easy and intuitive for business stakeholders
AWS API Gateway to provide a unified facade for RESTful web services
We’re eager to share our experiences, learn from the Drupal community, and invite others to collaborate with us.