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Service:
Web Design, Flash, Custom Programming
Description:
The Minnesota Secretary of State, a statewide elected official, is the keeper of the great seal of the State of Minnesota, and performs a wide variety of duties. These services include registration of a variety of business organizations, administration of the open appointments process, and filing and certifying the authenticity of a wide variety of official documents.
The Challenge:
The Minnesota Secretary of State's office selected abbott & abbott to redesign their main site, develop a separate student site, and meet ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) requirements. The goal of the project was to enhance the usefulness of the SOS website and reflect the professional manner in which the office meets its obligation as a public institution to provide good customer service.
Our Solution:
The Secretary of State's site needed a new layout to make accessing information easier and less time-consuming. The site was made up of long pages that were inconsistent in design and lacked a cohesive user interface. We addressed these issues by creating an attractive design incorporating state symbol elements that provided consistency and ease of navigation for users.
The Office wanted to continue its goal of being a resource of state information by providing a separate student site. In an effort to evaluate the content and usefulness of the student site and to determine the desires of the student audience, two focus group meetings were conducted. Students from around the state attended the meetings and helped shape the student section of the web site into the valuable resource it is. Using feedback from the students, we created a fun, interactive site that helped turn rather mundane information into an exciting resource.
The Secretary of State's Office was dedicated to providing a web site that could be used by the sight-impaired community. We met this challenge by creating a script that would emulate a browser and spider through the SOS website creating text-only version of the entire site. The script would run nightly to update any changes made to the site.
Minnesota Secretary of State - Students Site
The Challenge:
The Secretary of State's office wanted to provide an exciting alternative for learning about Minnesota's state economy and government. The SEC's staff hosted two student focus group meetings involving high-school students of surrounding Minnesota schools. The result was that the students rated trivia games to be a fun way to learn dull, text-book information. Our goal was to create two interactive games that would appeal to an elementary and high school age audience.
Our Solution:
abbott & abbott set our multi-media specialist, April Ripka to the task of creating the games. Using vivid, colorful graphics and a storyline that would appeal to a younger age group, April produced two Shockwave games. The Government trivia game was designed around a storyline involving a young girl who has lost her study notes for an upcoming test. The visitor is encouraged to help the girl search for the notes by clicking on various objects in the "rooms" of her house. When a note is discovered, important bits of information are revealed. The student is then presented with the option of taking a quiz. The State Economy game plot revolves around aliens who take over the world. A young boy is dismayed to find the cost of pop has risen due to an alian who now has control of the economy. He seeks out the alian who agrees to relinquish the hold if the boy correctly answers some questions regarding the State's economy. Through a question and answer sequence, the visitor is able to learn some very valuable facts.
We were pleased to receive enthusiastic responses from students of various ages around the state. Have to say we had fun playing the games as well!
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