Searching Descriptions
If you know exactly what you are looking for on a map, search is often the fastest way to get the information you need. To help users who are looking to answer specific questions, in addition to searching by the place (or address), pin number, or the region, you can now allow your users to search by description.
Through the Tickets Mapping section, you can select any number of fields that make the most sense for how your users will likely want to search. By enabling this type of search, users can quickly filter down the map to things that are important to them, such as all open 311 ticket requests, a crime type, or even all permits that are related to flood work.
Read the Knowledge Base articles for more details on how Citizen Connect works.
Advanced Trends
In addition to seeing trends visually on a map, one of the most valuable uses of Citizen Connect is the ability to analyze and understand the demand for public services, the status of different services or programs, and how those programs are performing.
Now, Citizen Connect automatically provides an advanced trends view into the Tickets datasets, breaking down the data by status (such as Open, In Progress, or Closed for a 311 ticket, Attempted or Completed for a police incident, for example) and providing a view into when services are requested from the community by time of day and day of week. This is especially powerful for managers of 311 call centers or other citizen-facing roles, who can use this data to align staffing and resource allocation to fluctuations in demand for services.
More Configurability
Your Citizen Connect site is a powerful and valuable tool for citizens to answer questions like “Which houses near me have new building permits?” or “How many police incidents have occurred near my new apartment?” These questions will only be easy to answer if the data is presented in a way that makes sense given the context of your city, county, state, or other jurisdiction.
To help you, as an Administrator, best configure your site for your users, we’ve added a number of new admin features. First, you can now determine if you want the right hand sidebar on the homepage, or the overview, to default to open or closed when someone first comes to your site. If you want to provide some relevant context about the site, defaulting to open might be preferable, but if you want to let people dive straight into the map, defaulting to closed may be best.
Second, each row of data defaults to a “pin” on the map. However, those pins may represent an “incident” for your data, or perhaps a “ticket.” If that’s the case, you can now set the term used for “pin” and that term will then be used throughout the site experience for your users.
Third, for those users who really just want to get the downloaded data to explore on their own, you can now set the name of the datasets listed on the download page, making it easier for the user to find what they need.
And finally, the geographic size of your jurisdiction, as well as the density of the pins on the map, will be unique to you and your data. To help your users find the most relevant information when the search “near me,” you can now set the default radius for that search to best fit your data. Users will still be able to adjust it on their own to get exactly what they are looking for.
Read this Knowledge Base article for more details on how Citizen Connect works.
Recent Searches and Alerts
When logged in, frequent users of your Citizen Connect site can save their favorite searches and set up alerts for changes based on the information in the search. To make it easier for those users to find and configure alerts for their common searches, any search a user performs while logged in will be saved under their “Recent Searches” in the Alerts section. These searches can be easily saved into Alerts if desired, or simply used as a reference to come back to.
Read this Knowledge Base article for more details on how configuring alerts works.
Small Updates & Bug Fixes
- Users can now easily print and download the data from the application through the print icon in the “pins” sidebar.
- When you filter by a shape, the area selected now appears as a one of the filter options above the map, making it easy to remove the filter later on if desired.
- Two new feature for embeds are now available: 1) when embedding, you can now select whether or not to have the outer branding chrome; 2) you can now determine if you want dates to be relative or absolute, meaning you can choose to have “this week” mean the current week for now and in the future, or relative to the date that it currently is for the user.
Check out our other Product News, and give us a shout at datainsights-support@tylertech.com with questions or ideas.
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