#184: Seattle's Human-Centric Approach to Digital Services [Seattle Learning Conference 2024]

Joe Toste: Welcome to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. Super excited to have you all here. We'll just kick off with a short intro about yourself. 

Jeff Beckstrom: Hi, I'm Jeff Beckstrom, and I am the manager for the development team for digital engagement for Seattle IT, information technology. I've been in this role for about seven years.

Jeff Beckstrom: Prior to that, I was the citywide web team manager. I've been with the [00:01:00] city for 24 years and during that time I've always worked with the the Seattle. gov website and and various other communication tools. I manage a team of six very capable developers and we do a lot of integrations with the web content management system and the WordPress blogs and other integrations.

Jeff Beckstrom: Fantastic. Michal? 

Michal Perlstein: I'm Michal Perlstein. I lead the digital engagement team. And I guess I should say what that means, because it could be different everywhere. We manage a suite of products like the website, blogs, and newsletters. But in parallel, we also manage the digital experience for the city, for all public facing web applications, through digital policies design requirements, and things like that.

Michal Perlstein: Before, I've been here about seven and a half years, and before that I was at managing Products in K 12 public education in Seattle and New York. And before that I was, started my career in management consulting, and then I was in a variety of product strategy and organizational development roles.

Michelle Ringgold: I'm Michelle [00:02:00] Ringgold and I lead the user experience team, which is three designers. And I have been in the design field for about 20 plus years. I've worked in small business. e commerce, enterprise and I've been with the government, this particular city of Seattle, almost six years.

Michelle Ringgold: The thing that I really like this compared to the other arenas of design is that being a public servant is really a powerful role. 

Joe Toste: Fantastic. 

Dennis McCoy: Hi, I'm Dennis McCoy. I'm the web, I'm sorry, I'm the product management team supervisor. I've been in this role for about seven years now and came from Seattle Center prior to consolidation.

Dennis McCoy: I was there for about 17 years. Total, I've got about 29 years with the city now. Love the role that I'm in. I work with four other product managers. And yeah, we what should I start [00:03:00] over? Okay. Thank you. All right. Breath. Hi, I'm Dennis McCoy. I'm the product management team supervisor in digital engagement.

Dennis McCoy: We are a team of four and sorry. All right. Let me start again. Yeah.

Joe Toste: So let's just pretend me and you were hanging out. Dennis, tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Dennis McCoy: Hi, my name is Dennis McCoy. I lead the product team in digital engagement. We've been together about seven years now, and we work with the communications leads from departments to help support their business needs.

Joe Toste: McCall, you were hired to build this team from scratch. What was the biggest challenge in creating a cross functional team?

Joe Toste: How did you leverage the diverse domain knowledge from across the various departments? 

Michal Perlstein: The challenge was that the planned vision didn't necessarily align with the resources available. Thank you. Instead of hiring to fulfill roles that were brand new to the city, like a user experience program there [00:04:00] were because we were as a result of IT consolidation, all of the employees already were tagged and what's the word?

Michal Perlstein: Were already assigned to our team. Basically, we had to figure out how to bring people up to speed because something like user experience people had a lot of interest in that, but not the deep skills that would be make someone a competitive candidate to be a UX designer. So it was a bit challenging, but on the other side the people in the team had deep institutional knowledge.

Michal Perlstein: They'd been here for a long time, but most importantly, they'd been in all different departments before all being consolidated into IT. They had this great perspective on people. Each department's programs, services, their customers. So we had all of that knowledge coming in and then that kind of gave us a higher level to start with.

Michal Perlstein: And then now we have we can still use that knowledge. And they have established relationships. And relationship building is a huge part of any new service or new team as well as existing teams. I was really grateful for all of that because my colleagues are the ones who helped me when I was new.

Joe Toste: That's great. So when you [00:05:00] started building this team from scratch I imagine you probably had to pitch the vision for UX to get the buy in. That might not be like a familiar term if I roll the clock back seven years ago. Can you just maybe lay the landscape of the vision that you had for the City of Seattle IT?

Michal Perlstein: First, it wasn't my idea it was already planned by others that might have been some of the people here so when I was hired, it was already mapped out what the digital services team would look like and which teams would be included, and so UX was already decided to be one of them, but you're right, it doesn't mean everyone bought in, or that everyone in the city was ready, and so it was part of shifting the culture it was painful sometimes for people There were also a lot of shifts, though, with consolidation even people having to manage web content through, easy tools, but having the technologist do the design and the development was a big shift for them.

Michal Perlstein: But I think that I think that when we want to educate people the UX team that Michelle's leading now, and was part of for years before [00:06:00] that did a lot of great things in addition to our actual work and the initiatives with just education awareness. Totally self generated, just decided to put on workshops and just invite people.

Michal Perlstein: Learn about design thinking. Let's do hands on exercises or let's even talk to other IT colleagues and teach them what journey mapping is. And I think it really helped because there were a lot of low stakes, like no urgency, no emotion attached kind of opportunities to learn about it. And then, of course, the team is fantastic.

Michal Perlstein: When people do work with them on an actual project. People seem to walk away like, wow, that was great. I see it now. I get it. And so then we build these these people who are championing this along in different departments. So I think it's worked out really well.

Joe Toste: I was thinking about this after I met with all of you, but there's a great study that McKinsey did on the S& P 500. For the companies and they had a design index and those who valued design within their companies, I think outperformed by 30 percent or something compared to companies who just didn't give a rat's tail about design.

Joe Toste: And have you seen that Michelle? Yeah. 

Michelle Ringgold: No, I don't remember the [00:07:00] statistics and I'm curious to see, cause it's a relatively older one that I saw. I wonder what it's like now, but absolutely. I remember When I was getting into user experience, because I had been a graphic designer, the person that I interviewed, because she was doing that sort of work, she said, whatever you do, get with a company that really appreciates design and not just development.

Michelle Ringgold: And now, that's a common thing. They realize that, oh my gosh, user experience design is, Could make us money, and also make our customers happy.

Joe Toste: I mentioned I forget who I mentioned it to, but I actually worked for a product strategy kind of boutique consulting company.

Joe Toste: Okay. A number of years ago I was much younger. Got super lucky. The CEO just hired me, but I worked for a guy who was a product manager, slash the COO of the company. And I would go around to Sony SpaceX, and we were making these pitches, and I'd work with the design team in Slack. This is before Slack was even popular.

Joe Toste: And it was it was such a great experience for me that even today, [00:08:00] one of the things, if you go on TechTables. com, You'll see that we care about design, I've got this very stickler presentation, like when we have decks or whatever the brand isn't just a bunch of nice colors you want to exude the emotion that what you want, right?

Joe Toste: And I could feel the same thing from the city, because the city has very strict brand guidelines, which, Tells you there's a specific story that the city really wants to tell its residents, right? Yeah Dennis you've been with the city and I love this and I had 29 years Yes, I'm 35 years old. That's true.

Joe Toste: But so you've seen just the evolution of services Firsthand how has the consolidation of the IT departments across the city You Change the way that you approach citywide digital initiatives. 

Dennis McCoy: Good question. So coming onto this team, we really took on the equitability, [00:09:00] accessibility, and consistency aspect in our business process.

Dennis McCoy: And I didn't really have that prior to consolidation. So my focus really was Developing web solutions for the client, for the customer in the department. And so mostly focusing on delivering whatever was needed there. And it wasn't really centered around the user experience, similar to the talk that you're just having.

Dennis McCoy: And so coming to this team, it was really we were really supported in that, and so we were able to anchor on these, federal laws and rules and guidelines, and so we. Post about this on our website that we commit to equitability, accessibility, consistency, and we follow that and that's, we leverage that partnership with our partners in departments, and for this project, for the major event pages, we took that trust that we had built [00:10:00] with them.

Dennis McCoy: And we looked across our Seattle. gov platform and noticed that there were some disconnects in the ways that departments were responding. And so we, we took that problem and we really wanted to hone in and solve that for all our users. And so the major change and difference is like developing these solutions that meet all public needs.

Dennis McCoy: Everybody who comes to visit Seattle. gov.

Joe Toste: Great, let's get a little more specific. Can you talk about the major events page? 

Dennis McCoy: So there, it's actually a set of pages that were developed in winter weather winter weather page was one of the first iterations of these major event pages that we tackled.

Dennis McCoy: And yeah, so working across city departments, especially with our office of emergency management and our, the partners there, partners in the mayor's office. We helped develop a central place now where the public can come, find [00:11:00] information about our utilities, or closures, or whatever type of information they're looking for as it relates to that major event.

Joe Toste: Fantastic. Jeff, building on what Dennis just shared about the major event pages, Walk us through, we talked about the evergreen content. Yeah. Can you tell us how this approach has helped the city respond more effectively and prepare for future events? 

Jeff Beckstrom: Yeah so on our major events pages Dennis had mentioned winter weather.

Jeff Beckstrom: A lot of the times the content that you'll find on our winter weather pages is what we would term evergreen content, which is applicable at any time of the year. Earthquakes is probably a better example just because we have lots of tips on earthquake preparedness, what to do during an earthquake.

Jeff Beckstrom: Also tips and tricks like building having a plan for your family having emergency kits. Thanks. Things that you can do right now to prepare for an earthquake. But on the, on our side of the of the shop, and we have the major events pages that [00:12:00] are published out to the public right now that has a lot of that helpful content.

Jeff Beckstrom: But if there were to be an earthquake or a major event, we would be able to spin up another version of that also has a lot of placeholder content. So we're not scrambling during the event or right after the event to come up with content and trying to get that message out. Especially, as the Emergency Operations Center is spun up, and the Joint Information Communications staff.

Jeff Beckstrom: We'd be involved with some of that messaging. And the permissions are also shared on those templates so The subject matter experts and and people out in the departments can also directly contribute to those pages. Also placeholder content for things that we'd be anticipating such as GIS maps for earthquake and other things like that.

Jeff Beckstrom: So we, we have stuff in the can ready to pull out if necessary. But during most of the time of the year, it's more focused on tips and tricks. Thanks. Evergreen [00:13:00] content that's appropriate now. 

Joe Toste: Yeah, that's great. What's been your kind of favorite project to, to work on? Especially like just in the CMS structure.

Joe Toste: Is there something that kind of spoke to you? 

Jeff Beckstrom: Yeah, this was definitely a fun project with a lot of challenges because we had a lot of stakeholders from a lot of different departments. And so we had to figure out What is that permission model going to look like? And how are we gonna make sure that that people have access to the right content inside of the content management system?

Jeff Beckstrom: So that was definitely posed a bit of a challenge based on the content management system that we had and some of the roles and things. So we had to rethink some of that stuff. So that's been definitely a fun project. There, there was a project that I was working on early on. It was interesting we were talking about AI earlier today.

Jeff Beckstrom: And we were doing kind of a pilot project with Microsoft Azure. And we were actually doing analysis of council member videos. And translating them using AI [00:14:00] technology and facial recognition. And. And that got shut down real quick but we had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

Joe Toste: Oh no, that's, I can imagine it got shut down quick. No, I love the CMS structure. It's such a small level, but you guys have much larger scale, obviously. But I run a content business, right? So I totally get just even, the back end of 200 podcast episodes and each of those pages, and then.

Joe Toste: Even with internal, I've got my own internal system and there are tens of thousands of pages from intro calls, podcasts keeping stuff like, a slide of the S& P 500 Design Index, and keeping all that and then just figuring out actually just on the side random note, but just on the permission level when I hired my assistant.

Joe Toste: Even for that, I have different team spaces, but I didn't want to expose every team space. New challenge. So I was like, oh, I need to upgrade to like the business enterprise version of this so that I can hide some team spaces, so that not everyone is exposed to, everything I have going [00:15:00] on. And anyways, I, thank you for sharing.

Joe Toste: Michelle, you emphasized the importance of human centered design. We were just briefly talking about this. Can you talk about a specific example? of how user testing or feedback significantly improved a city service, a website feature or anything in particular related to the major event pages?

Michelle Ringgold: Yeah as Jeff had pointed out we we and Dennis too, we, the pilot was the winter weather web page. And, the reason we were doing that was to be efficient, when these emergencies hit and have something ready. Okay. instead of scrambling, internally and then also, meeting the needs of people who might be dealing with it.

Michelle Ringgold: In terms of the major, so then we had, we did the winter weather pilot. As Jeff had pointed out, that included we started with subject matter experts, across the city. So there were at least 25 interviews 16 departments or so involved, all the major, players in infrastructure, the utilities, Department of Transportation, all of that. So we, we had to figure out what is it we're [00:16:00] trying to do here? We don't just test. We have, what is the problem we're trying to solve? So that's the problem we were trying to solve. And out of that, we learned, from user behavior we were understanding what was the critical information that people need?

Michelle Ringgold: How do we consolidate that information across, 40 some departments? And where are the gaps? And where are people actually Getting the information, and you talked about, but trust is the main thing with government, we have to make sure that the content's trustworthy and it's current and yeah, we tested our web, all I just want to back up and say, winter weather is one page, we've done heat, 

Joe Toste: Give me all the pages.

Joe Toste: Yeah, the heat Give me all the pages. 

Michelle Ringgold: Smoke flooding. So we do earthquake preparation, which is what you would see now. But we also have responses, as Jeff had pointed out. That was major. So I learned a lot about emergency management. A tiny bit in the whole spectrum of things. But yeah, understanding what the users [00:17:00] need, needed.

Michelle Ringgold: So we learned what content was missing. For instance, believe it or not, In the winter weather, they're like, we want to know the weather. They're not going to come to our page for the weather, but if they land on our page, they want to look at the weather map. I'm like, okay. And then pet safety, like that was a really important thing for people.

Michelle Ringgold: We learned that. And so as a result of that pilot, like I said, we ended up with all these other major event pages. And the next phase, working with emergency management team, is to have a landing page, because there are other emergencies. Like today, we have to Calls any hysteria, but, like cyber security threat is a big thing.

Michelle Ringgold: I imagine we'll have a page for that at some point, hopefully never have to, bring the response page into view. But, up, in terms of, like what Dennis was saying, we used to just do what stakeholders want, but now we're listening to the users. And as a result, we have, really good content.

Michelle Ringgold: And it's iterative, so it's not just like we put this page up and it's [00:18:00] done. We have to, we could potentially go back to more user testing, 

Joe Toste: I love the distinction that you made between there are the end users, people who are actually consuming the content, and there are the executives.

Joe Toste: And those are often two different perspectives. But figuring out when you're asking the question, what problem am I trying to solve. It often is, we'll go back down to the end user, that then you can then tie into whatever the executive is asking, but a lot of times it's, you get such great insight from the people on the ground, on the streets, right?

Joe Toste: And there's a level 

Michal Perlstein: in the middle, there's our internal users, because we have this decentralized content management model, so as they said, we have people editing these pages who are the communications experts in their own department, so they have, they're subject matter experts, they're communications experts.

Michal Perlstein: And sometimes it's a matter of how can we build something that they can easily use. So we also have usability and that kind of lens that we're putting into that level of users as well. We want them to be able to successfully [00:19:00] and efficiently be able to use our products in order to get the things out to the end user.

Michal Perlstein: So it's interesting, but it does, we do recognize that they are a user and we don't want them to think we're overlooking them. 

Joe Toste: Yeah no, that's, no, that's going through, I don't know what you would call this. I want to say full stack, but I just don't like that. But yeah, going through like the whole process of even when I delegate things to my assistant.

Joe Toste: Simple examples like, what's the vision? But even what are the resources and tools? What are the roles and responsibilities assigned for this? So even as simple as I am the podcast host, she is the assistant, and but also I can also play another role, right? But so when you understand the roles, it makes it like, oh, okay, so here's the entire organization.

Joe Toste: We're not missing roles. Everyone's included in, into the fold. Super smart. McCall, you mentioned that public sector product management is distinct from private sector approaches, and I was very curious, like, how do you balance the need for innovation within the public sector [00:20:00] to serve all residents regardless of the tech savviness?

Michal Perlstein: I think public and private sector, we both aim, our aim is to have a product that users love and that they can use easily. I think the difference there is that while important metrics on that end might be related to profits and adoption. For us, we have a captive audience, but we owe them a lot.

Michal Perlstein: So we can't take that for granted. And I think, so I really think our key metric is inclusivity. And I think, oh, the things we've been saying is it's really what drives us to making sure are we successful in what we're delivering. I think the ethical and legal responsibility to serve everyone, it's exciting, but it's also challenging.

Michal Perlstein: So we on one hand, there can be. A new leader who comes in and wants us to chase a shiny object. But that could delay things that we've already committed to. I'm not saying that's happening right now. It is not. But at the same time, innovation isn't just the big shiny thing, right? Innovation can be basic product management, which is constantly [00:21:00] refining and evaluating what you're doing and improving on it.

Michal Perlstein: And we always are. I think re imagining ways to do things like the major event pages, re imagining what's another way to share this information that's going to be more successful and received to make other people's lives easier because that's our job as a government. How can we consolidate it and just get it for them?

Jeff Beckstrom: I think while providing efficiencies too because we don't want to be scrambling during an emergency and if we have, worked with our partners to, to have some of that messaging in place. It gives us time to, to get the content in place while still having something there for somebody to react to.

Michal Perlstein: Yeah. And we're reimagining our solutions. We're always looking at those. We actually, even our product operations, right? The way that we work internally, if someone has an idea and sees a gap, and some other people buy in and say, that makes sense, we try it. And we've actually even created a lot of very structured processes and systems based on that continuous improvement.

Michal Perlstein: So I think Some people think of innovation as something like new and [00:22:00] lofty, but innovation can be constantly examining something and then being curious and open to, to change and growth. And I think that said, we do pay a lot of attention to what's going on in the market and new technology concepts.

Michal Perlstein: So I can say like Jeff and his team, there's always at least one major strategic technology investment going on at one time. So while we're doing a lot of the I don't want to say basic, while we're doing our regular work, And improving even our internal product operations. We're also thinking bigger in terms of design concepts, and we're thinking bigger in terms of technology strategy.

Michal Perlstein: It's just more low key. It's behind the scenes, so people don't hear about it until it's done. 

Joe Toste: It's a lot like the iPhone, right? So I'm an Apple user. You go back all the way, let's just go back 10 years, 12 years, or however long this thing's been around, right?

Joe Toste: The first iteration, you have the first version of that, and then Apple starts to iterate. And I get a lot of companies do this, but I'm just gonna use Apple. Iterate. Small changes, right? And sometimes you hear in the marketplace Apple never makes these large jumps, right? You'll often hear that. But they're [00:23:00] constantly tweaking and refining and compounding all of those little changes.

Michal Perlstein: It's a great analogy. 

Joe Toste: Thank you and on the content side, I think about it the same way too. A lot of people think an episode is just done, but I'm constantly tweaking. What the episode pages look like, and then at scale, I can deploy certain changes, and which are, I'm trying to make the experience phenomenal.

Joe Toste: And it doesn't seem like there's these huge jumps, but they just keep building and keep building. One day you look up and you're like, wow, we created something that's it didn't get here overnight. It was just a million of these changes that no one saw behind the scenes. It's really the reality, right?

Joe Toste: There's just so much work that goes in behind that just doesn't often get noticed. Dennis, so you played a key role in developing the major event pages, which we've been talking about, and several of them. Walk us through the process of creating these pages from kind of initial idea to collaboration across the various departments.

Joe Toste: You can just [00:24:00] talk about the lifecycle of that. 

Dennis McCoy: We noticed Departments were responding to their major events in their own way on their channel and on their channels. And it was somewhat disconnected from what other departments were doing. Sometimes there were a couple departments working together, but for the most part they were doing what they wanted on their platforms.

Dennis McCoy: And so we needed a way to bring this all together in one sort of central hub. And and that's what we decided to do when we took that task on internally, we met and we decided who our subject matter experts would be. Our, the web leads from those departments. We called them all together. And at that point we started our UX process.

Dennis McCoy: That's typically where the production team hands off to, the product team hands off to the UX team. And they work their magic [00:25:00] of, could take a week, several weeks. And then they'll come back to us. Our internal team with some prototypes, some designs, we look at those designs as a group, see what's feasible, what needs tweaking.

Dennis McCoy: We have our feature development process that we alluded to recently, or just here recently, but we adapted that so that we could work on this larger project. So yeah, handing UX team. They came back with prototypes. We iterated on those prototypes for a while. Once we had something solid we took those back to the subject matter experts for sign off.

Dennis McCoy: Once they bought in to that, our team took that back and started to build those pages out. We build them out with certain sections that we make accessible to content editors. This allows for us to have our guardrails so we can provide the consistency, [00:26:00] equitability making sure that we're still holding true to what our commitment is.

Dennis McCoy: And once we've established the guardrails and we've, implemented those on these pages, we brought the subject matter experts back together, and They've looked at the pages and satisfied with the pages. We set our own internal launch date. Once we launch the pages, we publish them out to production and they're out there live for the public to see.

Dennis McCoy: And it's at that point where we start adding security and pass those off to the content editors so that they can start managing the content on those going forward. At that time of launch, we provide the users with help documents so that they can manage those the components on the pages themselves.

Dennis McCoy: We also run them through a training on that call so they know exactly how to update those pages. [00:27:00] Once we've finished all of that, we send a follow up email to everybody involved thanking them for participating in the process. And at that point it's handed back off to them for future maintenance.

Dennis McCoy: And if we need to jump in to put up a response page then we work with them on that. And we communicate closely with their, with the web leads and subject matter experts on that. Yeah, we repeated that process then for the other pages we created. Smoke, heat, flooding, fire. 

Michal Perlstein: I just want to add one thing is that what I love is when.

Michal Perlstein: Even though we use the words like hand off, it's not really like hand off, go do that over there. It sounds so simple, but actually it's from my perspective, sometimes I'll jump in mid conversation and see everyone's talking to everyone. So there's a developer who's asking a question to a UX designer, and so everyone's involved.

Michal Perlstein: So we benefit from all these perspectives, even if someone's not just doing like their piece of the puzzle, right? And so [00:28:00] these are really open conversations. These are Teams chats. They're just filled with everyone. And everyone's. It's welcome to say something whether they have a more serious role on the project or not, but these handoffs are like very quick, I should say and very quick and very like open discussions.

Michal Perlstein: They're not really like handing to another team. 

Joe Toste: I do want to jump to accessibility. Accessibility is super important.

Joe Toste: I think Seattle, if I had to put it, is ahead of the curve on this because there are some upcoming ruling guidelines on digital accessibility from the DOJ. We actually just, we just had a podcast in Bellevue on this. Yep, all on accessibility. Won't be out for months, but that's okay. So we'll still have a link to that episode in the show notes of this episode.

Joe Toste: But I'd love to hear from you. What advice would you give to other cities looking to build or grow their own UX teams, especially around the digital accessibility and the DOJ? 

Jeff Beckstrom: Probably my first piece of advice is get started now. Cause it's a lot of work. We've been at this for quite some time.

Jeff Beckstrom: We probably [00:29:00] got really serious about accessibility for the Seattle. gov website about maybe six, seven years ago. It's always been something that we've tried to do. But until we had like a dedicated team to, to actually really focus on accessibility. It's it was important, but it wasn't something that we focused on as much as we probably should have been at that time.

Jeff Beckstrom: But we've been at it for the last six, seven years, and so we're in pretty good shape for the DOJ ruling but it's the right thing to do. Whether or not the DOJ is enforcing this our standards are WCAG 2. 1. And have been for a very long time so it's really no surprise to our organization.

Jeff Beckstrom: Or it shouldn't be a surprise to our organization that the DOJ ruling. I would also say that in addition to making sure your website, and your PDFs and documents are accessible, your applications, it's a lot of maintenance. It [00:30:00] doesn't Just go away once you've, once you've completed a WCAG and you're passing all of it, it's constant maintenance.

Jeff Beckstrom: So getting started now and is really critical because there's two years and the clock is ticking. It'll be interesting to see how that's enforced from a federal level. But again, it's the right thing to do. The other thing I would add is that training is a really big part of it.

Jeff Beckstrom: A lot of people don't have the necessary training, particularly developers web content providers. Training is really critical, especially from an early stage in order to make sure that your digital content 

Joe Toste: is compliant. I love that. We're going to be wrapping up. Right now, but I'd love to hear from each and every one of you looking ahead What's the next kind of big challenge or opportunity for the team?

Joe Toste: What are you tackling?

Joe Toste: I'm looking at you I'll call out names

Dennis McCoy: I'm

Dennis McCoy: curious about AI and how we can use that. How can AI be a [00:31:00] benefit to us, yeah, I know for content editing. It's going to be widely used But in terms of product management Curious how we can implement it, how we can take advantage of the technology to more benefit our products.

Dennis McCoy: What would you want to see? If you had a magic wand? Something that was able to evaluate content before it goes up provide recommendation give alerts and warnings before it Provide accessibility checks. Yeah. 

Group: I'm getting excited, it sounds great. Plain language is really important.

Dennis McCoy: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, before, before things get up and out there to the public, having some sort of check, quality assurance check, would be ideal. 

Joe Toste: Okay, so some AIQA? Yes. We have tools 

Michal Perlstein: for after the fact, not before. 

Joe Toste: Yeah. Rochelle? 

Michelle Ringgold: I'm gonna come from a user experience lens here.

Michelle Ringgold: For, I would say that we have a lot of work to do. When you were, you asked me previously [00:32:00] about what would I recommend for, government agencies that are wanting to start and create a user experience team is there's a lot of work to do. Because government experiences aren't always the greatest.

Michelle Ringgold: And to just be ready to be scrappy and be a generalist. And fir first and foremost is to understand your users, I know I talk about that a lot and I will continue to do that. And to check your bias, because we think we want to do something and again, going back to what's the problem that we're trying to solve and who are we solving it for is being is really important.

Michelle Ringgold: And what and the other thing I want to say is once people really get onto this user experience and this human centered design, You're going to be very popular, and you're going to have, everybody's going to want to do it. You know what I mean? And you can't say yes to everything. Being, in public sector environment, you're passionate about what you do.

Michelle Ringgold: You want to help everybody, and you can't. That could be a little disappointing for those who come in, Yeah we're going to tackle this and save the world. It's done slowly and [00:33:00] methodically. 

Joe Toste: That's great. Makah? 

Michal Perlstein: I'll go back to accessibility. I think achieving that accessibility compliance will be a huge challenge for all the departments.

Michal Perlstein: So while IT, our team is in good shape because we've put in the work for years, as Jeff said. But there's all the web content out there, right? Every time someone creates a presentation or puts some stuff on the website or a blog post or creates social media images they're going to need to focus on that.

Michal Perlstein: And so we're getting ready to create a network of digital accessibility champions throughout the city and hoping that those people can learn. And as they, that they'll learn and educate their colleagues, but as they are identifying all their content and evaluating it and possibly remediating it that's great, but that's for what's in the past.

Michal Perlstein: So similar to what Jeff said, this is an ongoing thing. So that initiative to meet that DOJ deadline won't be successful unless we're also creating a separate initiative to help departments change their business processes. [00:34:00] So they need to incorporate an IT as well in develop in software development life cycle, right?

Michal Perlstein: But we need everyone to look at their business processes, incorporate digital accessibility, so it becomes just part of the fabric of how you create things and how it works, whether it's procurement or creating documents or writing code. And so I think that's a huge challenge. It's exciting. I'm hoping that we can do a lot there.

Michal Perlstein: I don't think we're in a place to give advice on this topic right now to other cities, but I'd definitely be curious what other cities how they're tackling this without any dedicated budget. Everyone has full time jobs and is going to try their best, I'm sure, to really meet this need, but it's going to be a lot of work.

Joe Toste: That piece is fantastic. I'm going to clip that. Also, that's podcast episode on what you just said right there. Business process. Yes. I was 

Michal Perlstein: invited to your other podcast, but I couldn't make it. 

Joe Toste: She wants to come on virtual. Those are actually a lot easier, by the way, when it's [00:35:00] just one on one.

Joe Toste: Because you can go a lot deeper, you can ask more questions, you can probe a little bit more. Not that this isn't fun. Jeff, take us home. 

Jeff Beckstrom: Alright probably the thing I'm the most excited about is we're currently In progress of migrating the website to cloud. And so that's going to be a real big game changer for my team in the way that we're looking at innovation for the Seattle.

Jeff Beckstrom: gov website. Being able to leverage things like AI and other types of serverless compute to do things in more efficient ways. Also doing it securely. Like some of the DDoS protection that cloud providers offer is completely unparalleled, with anything that we can provide.

Jeff Beckstrom: So that's a big initiative for us right now and it's a lot of work to figure all that out. But but we're having fun getting there. And my developers are and my team are ramping up on, on cloud platform now. And are really excited about that. 

Joe Toste: Thank you all for coming on the Public Sector Show by TechTables.

Joe Toste: Thanks for having [00:36:00] us. Thanks for the invitation. 

Michelle Ringgold: It's

Hey, what's up, everybody? This is Joe Tossi from TechTables. com, and you're listening to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. This podcast features human centric stories from public sector CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights into current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events.

We offer you a behind the mic look at the opportunities top leaders are seeing today. And to make sure you never miss an Head over to Spotify and Apple Podcasts and hit that follow button and leave a quick rating. Just tap the number of stars that you think the show deserves.