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Mar 12 2020
Mar 12

Category 1: Web development

Government organizations want to modernize and build web applications that make it easier for constituents to access services and information. Vendors in this category might work on improving the functionality of search.mass.gov, creating benefits calculators using React, adding new React components to the Commonwealth’s design system, making changes to existing static sites, or building interactive data stories.

Category 2: Drupal

Mass.gov, the official website of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a Drupal 8 site that links hundreds of thousands of weekly visitors to key information, services, and other transactional applications. You’ll develop modules to enhance and stabilize the site; build out major new features; and iterate on content types so that content authors can more easily create innovative, constituent-centered services.

Category 3: Data architecture and engineering

State organizations need access to large amounts of data that’s been prepared and cleaned for decision-makers and analysts. You’ll take in data from web APIs and government organizations, move and transform it to meet agency requirements using technology such as Airflow and SQL, and store and manage it in PostgreSQL databases. Your work will be integral in helping agencies access and use data in their decision making.

Category 4: Data analytics

Increasingly, Commonwealth agencies are using data to inform their decisions and processes. You’ll analyze data with languages such as Python and R, visualize it for stakeholders in business intelligence tools like Tableau, and present your findings in reports for both technical and non-technical audiences. You’ll also contribute to the state’s use of web analytics to improve online applications and develop new performance metrics.

Category 5: Design, research, and content strategy

Government services can be complex, but we have a vision for making access to those services as easy as possible. Bidders for this category may work with partner agencies to envision improvements to digital services using journey mapping, user research, and design prototyping; reshape complex information architecture; help transform technical language into clear-public facing content, and translate constituent feedback into new and improved website and service designs.

Category 6: Operations

You’ll monitor the system health for our existing digital tools to maintain uptime and minimize time-to-recovery. Your DevOps work will also create automated tests and alerts so that technical interventions can happen before issues disrupt constituents and agencies. You’ll also provide expert site reliability engineering advice for keeping sites maintainable and building new infrastructure. Examples of applications you’ll work on include Mass.gov, search.mass.gov, our analytics dashboarding platform, and our logging tool.

Apr 19 2019
Apr 19

What we learned from our fellow Drupalists

Lisa MirabileMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

5 min read

Apr 19, 2019

On April 7th, our team packed up our bags and headed off to Seattle for one of the bigger can’t miss learning events of the year, DrupalCon.

“Whether you’re C-level, a developer, a content strategist, or a marketer — there’s something for you at DrupalCon.” -https://events.drupal.org/

As you may have read in one of our more recent posts, we had a lot of sessions that we couldn’t wait to attend! We were very excited to find new ideas that we could bring back to improve our services for constituents or the agencies we work with to make digital interactions with government fast, easy, and wicked awesome. DrupalCon surpassed our already high expectations.

At the Government Summit, we were excited to speak with other state employees who are interested in sharing knowledge, including collaborating on open-source projects. We wanted to see how other states are working on problems we’ve tried to solve and to learn from their solutions to improve constituents’ digital interactions with government.

One of the best outcomes of the Government Summit was an amazing “birds of a feather” (BOF) talk later in the week. North Carolina’s Digital Services Director Billy Hylton led the charge for digital teams across state governments to choose a concrete next step toward collaboration. At the BOF, more than a dozen Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Arizona digital team members discussed, debated, and chose a content type (“event”) to explore. Even better, we left with a meeting date to discuss specific next steps on what collaborating together could do for our constituents.

The learning experience did not stop at the GovSummit. Together, our team members attended dozens of sessions. For example, I attended a session called “Stanford and FFW — Defaulting to Open” since we are starting to explore what open-sourcing will look like for Mass.gov. The Stanford team’s main takeaway was the tremendous value they’ve found in building with and contributing to Drupal. Quirky fact: their team discovered during user testing among high-school students that “FAQ” is completely mysterious to younger people: they expect the much more straightforward “Questions” or “Help.”

Another session I really enjoyed was called “Pattern Lab: The Definitive How-to.” It was exciting to hear that Pattern Lab, a tool for creating design systems, has officially merged its two separate cores into a single one that supports all existing rendering engines. This means simplifying the technical foundation to allow more focus on extending Pattern Lab in new and useful ways (and less just keeping it up and running). We used Pattern Lab to build Mayflower, the design system created for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and implemented first on Mass.gov. We are now looking at the best ways to offer the benefits of Mayflower — user-centeredness, accessibility, and consistent look and feel — to more Commonwealth digital properties. Some team members had a chance to talk later to Evan Lovely, the speaker and one of the maintainers of Pattern Lab, and were excited by the possibility of further collaboration to implement Mayflower in more places.

There were a variety of other informative topics. Here are some that my peers and I enjoyed, just to name a few:

Our exhibit hall booth at DrupalCon 2019Talking to fellow Drupalists at our booth

On Thursday we started bright and early to unfurl our Massachusetts Digital Service banner and prepare to greet fellow Drupalists at our booth! We couldn’t have done it without our designer, who put all of our signs together for our first time exhibiting at DrupalCon (Thanks Eva!)

It was remarkable to be able to talk with so many bright minds in one day. Our one-on-one conversations took us on several deep dives into the work other organizations are doing to improve their digital assets. Meeting so many brilliant Drupalists made us all the more excited to share some opportunities we currently have to work with them, such as the ITS74 contract to work with us as a vendor, or our job opening for a technical architect.

We left our table briefly to attend Mass.gov: A Guide to Data-Informed Content Optimization, where team members Julia Gutierrez and Nathan James shared how government agencies in Massachusetts are now making data-driven content decisions. Watch their presentation to learn:

  1. How we define wicked awesome content
  2. How we translate indicators into actionable metrics
  3. The technology stack we use to empower content authors

To cap it off, Mass.gov, with partners Last Call Media and Mediacurrent, won Best Theme for our custom admin theme at the first-ever Global Splash awards (established to “recognize the best Drupal projects on the web”)! An admin theme is the look and feel that users see when they log in. The success of Mass.gov rests in the hands of all of its 600+ authors and editors. We’ve known from the start of the project that making it easy and efficient to add or edit content in Mass.gov was key to the ultimate goal: a site that serves constituents as well as possible. To accomplish this, we decided to create a custom admin theme, launched in May 2018.

A before-and-after view of our admin theme

Our goal was not just a nicer looker and feel (though it is that!), but a more usable experience. For example, we wanted authors to see help text before filling out a field, so we brought it up above the input box. And we wanted to help them keep their place when navigating complicated page types with multiple levels of nested information, so we added vertical lines to tie together items at each level.

Last Call Media founder Kelly Albrecht crosses the stage to accept the Splash award for Best Theme on behalf of the Mass.gov Team.All the Splash award winners!

It was a truly enriching experience to attend DrupalCon and learn from the work of other great minds. Our team has already started brainstorming how we can improve our products and services for our partner agencies and constituents. Come back to our blog weekly to check out updates on how we are putting our DrupalCon lessons to use for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!

Interested in a career in civic tech? Find job openings at Digital Service.
Follow us on Twitter | Collaborate with us on GitHub | Visit our site

Apr 04 2019
Apr 04
Julia GutierrezMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

4 min read

Apr 4, 2019

DrupalCon2019 is heading to Seattle this year and there’s no shortage of exciting sessions and great networking events on this year’s schedule. We can’t wait to hear from some of the experts out in the Drupalverse next week, and we wanted to share with you a few of the sessions we’re most excited about.

Adam is looking forward to:

Government Summit on Monday, April 8th

“I’m looking forward to hearing what other digital offices are doing to improve constituents’ interactions with government so that we can bring some of their insights to the work our agencies are doing. I’m also excited to present on some of the civic tech projects we have been doing at MassGovDigital so that we can get feedback and new ideas from our peers.”

Bryan is looking forward to:

1. Introduction to Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby and React

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:45 pm to 2:15 pm

Room: 6B | Level 6

“We’re using Gatsby and React today on to power Search.mass.gov and the state’s budget website, and Drupal for Mass.gov. Can’t wait to learn about Decoupled Drupal with Gatsby. I wonder if this could be the right recipe to help us make the leap!”

2. Why Will JSON API go into Core?

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 2:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Room: 612 | Level 6

“Making data available in machine-readable formats via web services is critical to open data and to publish-once / single-source-of-truth editorial workflows. I’m grateful to Wim Leers and Mateu Aguilo Bosch for their important thought leadership and contributions in this space, and eager to learn how Mass.gov can best maximize our use of JSON API moving forward.”

I (Julia) am looking forward to:

1. Personalizing the Teach for America applicant journey

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:00 pm to 1:30 pm

Room: 607 | Level 6

“I am really interested in learning from Teach for America on how they implemented personalization and integrated across applications to bring applicants a consistent look, feel, and experience when applying for a Teach for America position. We have created Mayflower, Massachusetts government’s design system, and we want to learn what a single sign-on for different government services might look like and how we might use personalization to improve the experience constituents have when interacting with Massachusetts government digitally. ”

2. Devsigners and Unicorns

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 4:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Room: 612 | Level 6

“I’m hoping to hear if Chris Strahl has any ‘best-practices’ and ways for project managers to leverage the unique multi-skill abilities that Devsigners and unicorns possess while continuing to encourage a balanced workload for their team. This balancing act could lead towards better development and design products for Massachusetts constituents and I’d love to make that happen with his advice!”

Melissa is looking forward to:

1. DevOps: Why, How, and What

Time: Wednesday, April 10th from 1:45 pm to 2:15 pm

Room: 602–604 | Level 6

“Rob Bayliss and Kelly Albrecht will use a survey they released as well as some other important approaches to elaborate on why DevOps is so crucial to technological strategy. I took the survey back in November of 2018, and I want to see what those results from the survey. This presentation will help me identify if any changes should be made in our process to better serve constituents from these results.”

2. Advanced Automated Visual Testing

Time: Thursday, April 11th from 2:30 pm to 3:00 pm

Room: 608 | Level 6

“In this session Shweta Sharma will speak to what visual testings tools are currently out there and a comparison of the tools. I am excited to gain more insight into the automated visual testing in faster and quicker releases so we can identify any gotchas and improve our releases for Mass.gov users.

P.S. Watch a presentation I gave at this year’s NerdSummit in Boston, and stay tuned for a blog post on some automation tools we used at MassGovDigital coming out soon!”

We hope to see old friends and make new ones at DrupalCon2019, so be sure to say hi to Bryan, Adam, Melissa, Lisa, Moshe, or me when you see us. We will be at booth 321 (across from the VIP lounge) on Thursday giving interviews and chatting about technology in Massachusetts, we hope you’ll stop by!

Interested in a career in civic tech? Find job openings at Digital Services.
Follow us on Twitter | Collaborate with us on GitHub | Visit our site

Feb 06 2019
Feb 06

Mass.gov dev team releases open source project

Moshe WeitzmanMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

3 min read

Feb 6, 2019

The Mass.gov development team is proud to release a new open source project, Drupal Test Traits (DTT). DTT enables you to run PHPUnit tests against your Drupal web site, without wiping your database after each test class. That is, you test with your usual content-filled database, not an empty one. We hope lots of Drupal sites will use DTT and contribute back their improvements. Thanks to PreviousNext and Phase2 for being early adopters.

Mass.gov is a large, content-centric site. Most of our tests click around and assert that content is laid out properly, the corresponding icons are showing, etc. In order to best verify this, we need the Mass.gov database; testing on an empty site won’t suffice. The traditional tool for testing a site using an existing database is Behat. So we used Behat for over a year and found it getting more and more awkward. Behat is great for facilitating conversations between business managers and developers. Those are useful conversations, but many organizations are like ours — we don’t write product specs in Gherkin. In fact, we don’t do anything in Gherkin beside Behat.

Meanwhile, the test framework inside Drupal core improved a lot in the last couple of years (mea culpa). Before Drupal Test Traits, this framework was impossible to use without wiping the site’s database after each test. DTT lets you keep your database and still test using the features of Drupal’s BrowserTestBase and friends. See DrupalTrait::setUp() for details (the bootstrap is inspired by Drush, a different open source project that I maintain).

Zakim Bridge at Night, North End Boston. Photo by David Fox.
  • Our test cases extend ExistingSiteBase, a convenience class from DTT that imports all the test traits. We will eventually create our own base class and import the traits there.
  • Notice calls to $this->createNode(). This convenience method wraps Drupal’s method of the same name. DTT deletes each created node during tearDown().
  • Note how we call Vocabulary::load(). This is an important point — the full Drupal and Mink APIs are available during a test. The abstraction of Behat is happily removed. Writing test classes more resembles writing module code.
  • See the DTT repo for details on how to install and run tests
  • Typically, one does not run tests against a live web site. Tests can fail and leave sites in a “dirty” state so it’s helpful to occasionally refresh to a pristine database.

If you have questions or comments about DTT, please comment below or submit issues/PRs in our repository.

More from Moshe: Our modern development environment at Mass.gov

Interested in a career in civic tech? Find job openings at Digital Services.
Follow us on Twitter | Collaborate with us on GitHub | Visit our site

Oct 19 2018
Oct 19
Deirdre Habershaw2 min read

Oct 19, 2018

Today, more than 80% of people’s interactions with government take place online. Whether it’s starting a business or filing for unemployment, too many of these experiences are slow, confusing, or frustrating. That’s why the Commonwealth created Massachusetts Digital Service (Mass Digital) in the Executive Office of Technology and Security Services. Mass Digital is at the forefront of the state’s digital transformation. Its mission is to leverage the best technology and information available to make people’s interactions with state government fast, easy, and wicked awesome. There’s a lot of work to do, but we’re making quick progress.

Mass Digital worked with the new Department of Family and Medical Leave (DFML) to launch the Commonwealth’s first digitally native service: Paid Family and Medical Leave and PaidLeave.mass.gov. We’ve been on the front lines of the pandemic response, supporting the Department of Unemployment Assistance to create capabilities for multilingual unemployment claims (Unemployment.mass.gov) and doing content design to keep up with rapidly evolving pandemic unemployment benefits, and supporting the Department of Public Health and Command Center to launch the state’s vaccine preregistration system (VaccineSignUp.mass.gov).

If you want to work in a fast-paced agile environment, with a good work life balance, solving hard problems, working with cutting-edge technology, and making a difference in people’s lives, you should join Massachusetts Digital Service.

We are currently recruiting designers, researchers, and product managers. Here are links to open job postings:

If you are interested in working with us, please submit your resume here.

Check out more about hiring at the Executive Office of Technology and Security Services and submit your resume in order to be informed on roles as they become available.

Oct 10 2018
Oct 10

Authors are eager to learn, and a content-focused community is forming. But there’s still work to do.

Julia GutierrezMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

6 min read

Oct 10, 2018
Video showing highlights of speakers, presenters, and attendees interacting at ConCon 2018.

When you spend most of your time focused on how to serve constituents on digital channels, it can be good to simply get some face time with peers. It’s an interesting paradox of the work we do alongside our partners at organizations across the state. Getting in a room and discussing content strategy is always productive.

That was one of the main reasons behind organizing the first ever Massachusetts Content Conference (ConCon). More than 100 attendees from 35 organizations came together for a day of learning and networking at District Hall in Boston. There were 15 sessions on everything from how to use Mayflower — the Commonwealth’s design system — to what it takes to create an awesome service.

Graphic showing more than 100 attendees from 50 organizations attended 15 sessions from 14 presenters at ConCon 2018.

ConCon is and will always be about our authors, and we’re encouraged by the feedback we’ve received from them so far. Of the attendees who responded to a survey, 93% said they learned about new tools or techniques to help them create better content. More so, 96% said they would return to the next ConCon. The average grade attendees gave to the first ever ConCon on a scale of 1 to 10 — with 1 being the worst and 10 the best — was 8.3.

Our authors were engaged and ready to share their experiences, which made for an educational environment, for their peers as well as our own team at Digital Services. In fact, it was an eye opening experience, and we took a lot away from the event. Here are some of our team’s reflections on what they learned about our authors and our content needs moving forward.

“The way we show feedback and scores per page is great but it doesn’t help authors prioritize their efforts to get the biggest gain for their constituents. We’re working hard to increase visibility of this data in Drupal.”

— Joe Galluccio

Katie Rahhal, Content Strategist
“I learned we’re moving in the right direction with our analysis and Mass.gov feedback tools. In the breakout sessions, I heard over and over that our content authors really like the ones we have and they want more. More ways to review their feedback, more tools to improve their content quality, and they’re open to learning new ways to improve their content.”

Christine Bath, Designer
“It was so interesting and helpful to see how our authors use and respond to user feedback on Mass.gov. It gives us a lot of ideas for how we can make it easier to get user feedback to our authors in more actionable ways. We want to make it easy to share constituent feedback within agencies to power changes on Mass.gov.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting a lesson on good design practices from ConCon 2018.

Joe Galluccio, Product Manager
“I learned how important it is for our authors to get performance data integrated into the Drupal authoring experience. The way we show feedback and scores per page is great but it doesn’t help authors prioritize their efforts to get the biggest gain for their constituents. We’re working hard to increase visibility of this data in Drupal.”

Bryan Hirsch, Deputy Chief Digital Officer
“Having Dana Chisnell, co-founder of the Center for Civic Design, present her work on mapping and improving the journey of American voters was the perfect lesson at the perfect time. The page-level analytics dashboards are a good foundation we want to build on. In the next year, we’re going to research, test, and build Mass.gov journey analytics dashboards. We’re also spending this year working with partner organizations on mapping end-to-end user journeys for different services. Dana’s experience on how to map a journey, identify challenges, and then improve the process was relevant to everyone in the room. It was eye-opening, enlightening, and exciting. There are a lot of opportunities to improve the lives of our constituents.”

Want to know how we created our page-level data dashboards? Read Custom dashboards: Surfacing data where Mass.gov authors need it

Embedded tweet from @epubpupil highlighting her positive thoughts on Dana Chisnell’s keynote presentation on mapping and improving the journey of American voters.

“It’s great to see there’s a Mayflower community forming among stakeholders in different roles across state government. ”

— Minghua Sun

Sienna Svob, Developer and Data Analyst
“We need to work harder to build a Mayflower community that will support the diversity of print, web, and applications across the Commonwealth. Agencies are willing and excited to use Mayflower and we need to harness this and involve them more to make it a better product.”

Minghua Sun, Mayflower Product Owner
“I’m super excited to see that so many of the content authors came to the Mayflower breakout session. They were not only interested in using the Mayflower Design System to create a single face of government but also raised constructive questions and were willing to collaborate on making it better! After the conference we followed up with more information and invited them to the Mayflower public Slack channel. It’s great to see there’s a Mayflower community forming among stakeholders in different roles across state government. ”

Sam Mathius, Digital Communications Strategist
“It was great to see how many of our authors rely on digital newsletters to connect with constituents, which came up during a breakout session on the topic. Most of them feel like they need some help integrating them into their overall content strategy, and they were particularly excited about using tools and software to help them collect better data. In fact, attendees from some organizations mentioned how they’ve used newsletter data to uncover seasonal trends that help them inform the rest of their content strategy. I think that use case got the analytics gears turning for a lot of folks, which is exciting.”

“I’d like to see us create more opportunities for authors to get together in informal sessions. They’re such a diverse group, but they share a desire to get it right.”

— Fiona Molloy

Shannon Desmond, Content Strategist
“I learned that the Mass.gov authors are energetic about the new content types that have been implemented over the past 8 months and are even more eager to learn about the new enhancements to the content management system (CMS) that continue to roll out. Furthermore, as a lifelong Massachusetts resident and a dedicated member of the Mass.gov team, it was enlightening to see how passionate the authors are about translating government language and regulations for constituents in a way that can be easily and quickly understood by the constituents of the State.”

Fiona Molloy, Content Strategist
“Talking to people who came to ConCon and sitting in on various sessions, it really struck me how eager our content authors are to learn — whether from us here at Digital Services or from each other. I’d like to see us create more opportunities for authors to get together in informal sessions. They’re such a diverse group, but they share a desire to get it right and that’s really encouraging as we work together to build a better Mass.gov.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting a session from ConCon 2018 in which content authors offered tips for using authoring tools on Mass.gov.

Adam Cogbill, Content Strategist
“I was reminded that one of the biggest challenges that government content authors face is communicating lots of complex information. We need to make sure we understand our audience’s relationships to our content, both through data about their online behavior and through user testing.”

Greg Derosiers, Content Strategist
“I learned we need to do a better job of offering help and support. There were a number of authors in attendance that didn’t know about readily-available resources that we had assumed people just weren’t interested in. We need to re-evaluate how we’re marketing these services and make sure everyone knows what’s available.”

Embedded tweet from @MassGovDigital highlighting the start of ConCon 2018.

Thinking about hosting your own content conference? Reach out to us! We’d love to share lessons and collaborate with others in the civic tech community.

Oct 04 2018
Oct 04

Variety of content and the need for empathy drive our effort to simplify language across Mass.gov

Massachusetts Digital ServiceMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

3 min read

Oct 4, 2018

Nearly 7 million people live in Massachusetts, and millions more visit the state each year. These people come from different backgrounds and interact with the Commonwealth for various reasons.

Graphic showing more than 3 million visitors go to Mass.gov each month.

We need to write for everyone while empathizing with each individual. That’s why we write at a 6th grade reading level. Let’s dig into the reasons why.

The Commonwealth has a high literacy rate and a world-renowned education network. From elementary school to college and beyond, you can get a great education here.

We’re proud of our education environment, but it doesn’t affect our readability standards. Navigating the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Nutrition Program might be challenging for everyone.

People searching for nutrition services are doing so out of necessity. They’re probably frustrated, worried, and scared. That affects how people read and retain information.

Learn about our content strategy. Read the 2017 content team review.

This is the case for many other scenarios. Government services can be complicated to navigate. Our job is to simplify language. We get rid of the white noise and focus on essential details.

You don’t browse Mass.gov in your free time. It’s a resource you use when you have to. Think of it as a speedboat, not a cruise ship. They’ll both get you across the water, just at different speeds.

Graphic showing desktop visitors to Mass.gov look at more pages and have longer sessions than mobile and tablet visitors.

Mass.gov visitors on mobile devices spend less time on the site and read fewer pages. The 44% share of mobile and tablet traffic will only increase over time. These visitors need information boiled down to essential details. Simplifying language is key here.

A 6th-grade reading level doesn’t work all the time. We noticed this when we conducted power-user testing. Lawyers, accountants, and other groups who frequently use Mass.gov were involved in the tests.

These groups want jargon and industry language. It taught us that readability is relative.

We use the Flesch-Kincaid model to determine reading level in our dashboards. It accounts for factors like sentence length and the number of syllables in words.

This is a good foundation to ensure we consistently hit the mark. However, time is the most important tool we have. The more content we write, the better we’ll get.

Writing is a skill refined over time, and adjusting writing styles isn’t simple. Even so, we’re making progress. In fact, this post is written at a 6th grade reading level.

Aug 20 2018
Aug 20

Helping content creators make data-driven decisions with custom data dashboards

Greg DesrosiersMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

4 min read

Aug 20, 2018

Our analytics dashboards help Mass.gov content authors make data-driven decisions to improve their content. All content has a purpose, and these tools help make sure each page on Mass.gov fulfills its purpose.

Before the dashboards were developed, performance data was scattered among multiple tools and databases, including Google Analytics, Siteimprove, and Superset. These required additional logins, permissions, and advanced understanding of how to interpret what you were seeing. Our dashboards take all of this data and compile it into something that’s focused and easy to understand.

We made the decision to embed dashboards directly into our content management system (CMS), so authors can simply click a tab when they’re editing content.

GIF showing how a content author navigates to the analytics dashboard in the Mass.gov CMS.

The content performance team spent more than 8 months diving into web data and analytics to develop and test data-driven indicators. Over the testing period, we looked at a dozen different indicators, from pageviews and exit rates to scroll-depth and reading grade levels. We tested as many potential indicators as we could to see what was most useful. Fortunately, our data team helped us content folks through the process and provided valuable insight.

Love data? Check out our 2017 data and machine learning recap.

We chose a sample set of more than 100 of the most visited pages on Mass.gov. We made predictions about what certain indicators said about performance, and then made content changes to see how it impacted data related to each indicator.

We reached out to 5 partner agencies to help us validate the indicators we thought would be effective. These partners worked to implement our suggestions and we monitored how these changes affected the indicators. This led us to discover the nuances of creating a custom, yet scalable, scoring system.

Line chart showing test results validating user feedback data as a performance indicator.

For example, we learned that a number of indicators we were testing behaved differently depending on the type of page we were analyzing. It’s easy to tell if somebody completed the desired action on a transactional page by tracking their click to an off-site application. It’s much more difficult to know if a user got the information they were looking for when there’s no action to take. This is why we’re planning to continually explore, iterate on, and test indicators until we find the right recipe.

Using the strategies developed with our partners, we watched, and over time, saw the metrics move. At that point, we knew we had a formula that would work.

We rolled indicators up into 4 simple categories:

  • Findability — Is it easy for users to find a page?
  • Outcomes — If the page is transactional, are users taking the intended action? If the page is focused on directing users to other pages, are they following the right links?
  • Content quality — Does the page have any broken links? Is the content written at an appropriate reading level?
  • User satisfaction — How many people didn’t find what they were looking for?
Screenshot of dashboard results as they appear in the Mass.gov CMS.

Each category receives a score on a scale of 0–4. These scores are then averaged to produce an overall score. Scoring a 4 means a page is checking all the boxes and performing as expected, while a 0 means there are some improvements to be made to increase the page’s overall performance.

All dashboards include general recommendations on how authors can improve pages by category. If these suggestions aren’t enough to produce the boost they were looking for, authors can meet with a content strategist from Digital Services to dive deeper into their content and create a more nuanced strategy.

GIF showing how a user navigates to the “Improve Your Content” tab in a Mass.gov analytics dashboard.

We realize we can’t totally measure everything through quantitative data, so these scores aren’t the be-all, end-all when it comes to measuring content performance. We’re a long way off from automating the work a good editor or content strategist can do.

Also, it’s important to note these dashboards are still in the beta phase. We’re fortunate to work with partner organizations who understand the bumps in the proverbial development road. There are bugs to work out and usability enhancements to make. As we learn more, we’ll continue to refine them. We plan to add dashboards to more content types each quarter, eventually offering a dashboard and specific recommendations for the 20+ content types in our CMS.

Jul 23 2018
Jul 23
Moshe WeitzmanMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

4 min read

Jul 23, 2018

I recently worked with the Mass.gov team to transition its development environment from Vagrant to Docker. We went with “vanilla Docker,” as opposed to one of the fine tools like DDev, Drupal VM, Docker4Drupal, etc. We are thankful to those teams for educating and showing us how to do Docker right. A big benefit of vanilla Docker is that skills learned there are generally applicable to any stack, not just LAMP+Drupal. We are super happy with how this environment turned out. We are especially proud of our MySQL Content Sync image — read on for details!

Pretty docks at Boston Harbor. Photo credit.

The heart of our environment is the docker-compose.yml. Here it is, then read on for a discussion about it.

Developers use .env files to customize aspects of their containers (e.g. VOLUME_FLAGS, PRIVATE_KEY, etc.). This built-in feature of Docker is very convenient. See our .env.example file:

The most innovative part of our stack is the mysql container. The Mass.gov Drupal database is gigantic. We have tens of thousands of nodes and 500,000 revisions, each with an unholy number of paragraphs, reference fields, etc. Developers used to drush sql:sync the database from Prod as needed. The transfer and import took many minutes, and had some security risk in the event that sanitization failed on the developer’s machine. The question soon became, “how can we distribute a mysql database that’s already imported and sanitized?” It turns out that Docker is a great way to do just this.

Today, our mysql container builds on CircleCI every night. The build fetches, imports, and sanitizes our Prod database. Next, the build does:

That is, we commit and push the refreshed image to a private repository on Docker Cloud. Our mysql image is 9GB uncompressed but thanks to Docker, it compresses to 1GB. This image is really convenient to use. Developers fetch a newer image with docker-compose pull mysql. Developers can work on a PR and then when switching to a new PR, do a simple ahoy down && ahoy up. This quickly restores the local Drupal database to a pristine state.

In order for this to work, you have to store MySQL data *inside* the container, instead of using a Docker Volume. Here is the Dockerfile for the mysql image.

Our Drupal container is open source — you can see exactly how it’s built. We start from the official PHP image, then add PHP extensions, Apache config, etc.

An interesting innovation in this container is the use of Docker Secrets in order to safely share an SSH key from host to the container. See this answer and mass_id_rsa in the docker-compose.yml above. Also note the two files below which are mounted into the container:

Configure SSH to use the secrets file as private keyAutomatically run ssh-add when logging into the container

Traefik is a “cloud edge router” that integrates really well with docker-compose. Just add one or two labels to a service and its web site is served through Traefik. We use Traefik to provide nice local URLs for each of our services (www.mass.local, portainer.mass.local, mailhog.mass.local, …). Without Traefik, all these services would usually live at the same URL with differing ports.

In the future, we hope to upgrade our local sites to SSL. Traefik makes this easy as it can terminate SSL. No web server fiddling required.

Our repository features a .ahoy.yml file that defines helpful aliases (see below). In order to use these aliases, developers download Ahoy to their host machine. This helps us match one of the main attractions of tools like DDev/Lando — their brief and useful CLI commands. Ahoy is a convenience feature and developers who prefer to use docker-compose (or their own bash aliases) are free to do so.

Our development environment comes with 3 fine extras:

  • Blackfire is ready to go — just run ahoy blackfire [URL|DrushCommand] and you’ll get back a URL for the profiling report
  • Xdebug is easily enabled by setting the XDEBUG_ENABLE environment variable in a developer’s .env file. Once that’s in place, the PHP in the container will automatically connect to the host’s PHPStorm or other Xdebug client
  • A chrome-headless container is used by our suite which incorporates Drupal Test Traits — a new open source project we published. We will blog about DTT soon

Of course, we are never satisfied. Here are a couple issues to tackle:

Apr 06 2018
Apr 06
Massachusetts Digital ServiceMassachusetts Digital ServicePublished in

1 min read

Apr 6, 2018

A straightforward mission doesn’t always mean there’s a simple path. When we kicked off the Mass.gov redesign, we knew what we wanted to create: A site where users could find what they needed without having to know which agency or bureaucratic process to navigate. At DrupalCon Baltimore in 2017, we shared our experience with the first nine months of the project building a pilot website with Drupal 8, getting our feet wet with human-centered (AKA “constituent-centric”) design, and beginning to transform the Mass.gov into a data-driven product.

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web