Yukon.ca enhancements: fall 2021

Since July, we've been working with our developer on packages 1 and 2 of the Phase 9 enhancements to Yukon.ca.

Enhancements

These are some enhancements we’ve recently deployed to the site.

Home page

User feedback indicated that people were not clear on how to access the government’s staff directory and forms. We also wanted to give users another way to directly access the government’s Events page. To create more visibility, we created 3 new category links on the home page for "Contact the government", "Forms" and "Events.” 

Menu

We’ve made improvements to Yukon.ca’s hamburger menu.

• The menu is now in alphabetical order.
• We’ve updated the styling and added new links for users to access the government’s staff directory, news, forms, documents, events and places.
• On campaign pages, we found that even if the site had only 1 page, the Yukon.ca hamburger menu would still display which confused users because it took them out of the campaign site and they thought something was broken when it was not. We’ve resolved this so the menu only appears if the campaign site has multiple pages.

Content types

Content types are templates we use to add content to Yukon.ca. They’re specific to the type of content we add. For example, news releases go in the “News” content type and if we add an office location we use the “Places” content type.

• When users searched for and clicked on a multistep page, the page jumped down to the content bypassing the page title and the bulleted list of links to other, related steps. This was causing issues as users did not then have the context they needed at a glance to do the thing they’d come to the page to do. We’ve now resolved this so the page title and bullet lists appear.
• Staff can now update and publish hours of operation on places records. Staff were encountering some publishing issues when they updated office hours. We’ve addressed this issue so they can publish reliably.
• We’ve added a new text field to landing pages that we’ll use to summarize the type of content users can expect to find in that section of the site. This will provide users with context that we hope will help them navigate the site.

Search

This summer we also began more formal, routine testing on search.

We used analytics keywords to identify some of the top things people search for on the site and then we searched multiple keywords and phrases on Yukon.ca and Google Chrome. We found the Google search results were very accurate and consistent while the site search on Yukon.ca was less consistent.

To address this, we’ve begun making adjustments to content and are re-testing every few months to confirm if the adjustments have improved the search results.

Get involved in user research and testing

We usually have a Yukon.ca user research project underway so we can continually learn from your experience and correct any barriers you encounter. If you’re interested in participating, email eservices@yukon.ca.