Captain Quackenbush's
Visions of a More Mobile-Friendly World
RECEIVED Sun., March 3, 2024
Dear Editor,
Re: "The City Tries to Fix Its Website – Again," [News, March 1]:
One of the primary goals of the new website is to have it work well on mobile devices. The best way to accomplish this objective is to have the entire city staff do their jobs using only their cellphones for a month so that they learn to express themselves in that format.
Most city residents only use the city website for basic customer service functions: paying bills, looking up who to call and a phone number for problems with their services or bills, and basic informational FAQs on various topics. Certainly those should be simple and accessible. The biggest challenge most developers have is in trying to hide the phone number by providing enough information to the customers so that none of them ever need to call the phone number. The developers are likely to spend considerable effort to get an AI that doesn't work in the first place to work on a cellphone in an accessible manner.
If it's necessary for the city to have a college-level staff, it is appropriate for the city website to have college-level content. The people who are truly interested in a topic will take the time and make the effort to figure it out, and it's helpful and valuable for the website to link to resources to help them do so.
Re: "The City Tries to Fix Its Website – Again," [News, March 1]:
One of the primary goals of the new website is to have it work well on mobile devices. The best way to accomplish this objective is to have the entire city staff do their jobs using only their cellphones for a month so that they learn to express themselves in that format.
Most city residents only use the city website for basic customer service functions: paying bills, looking up who to call and a phone number for problems with their services or bills, and basic informational FAQs on various topics. Certainly those should be simple and accessible. The biggest challenge most developers have is in trying to hide the phone number by providing enough information to the customers so that none of them ever need to call the phone number. The developers are likely to spend considerable effort to get an AI that doesn't work in the first place to work on a cellphone in an accessible manner.
If it's necessary for the city to have a college-level staff, it is appropriate for the city website to have college-level content. The people who are truly interested in a topic will take the time and make the effort to figure it out, and it's helpful and valuable for the website to link to resources to help them do so.
Kirk Becker
