Skövde Municipality Improves Services with New Website in Optimizely

“The user journey on our website has become clearer, faster, and easier! Navigation, search, and the information structure are now entirely based on the visitor's needs and preferences. This makes it significantly easier for citizens to get answers to their questions and find the right information, service function, or e-service. In the long run, it will reduce the pressure on our contact center, case officers, and other municipal staff. This will free up time for more forward-looking work,” says Linus Petersén, Business Developer at Skövde Municipality's Communications Unit.

A Transformation and Platform for the Future of Skövde

Skövde Municipality is a dynamic and growing municipality in Västra Götaland County, known for its innovation and progressive mindset. About 58,000 people live in the municipality, which employs around 5,000 people in healthcare, education, urban development, infrastructure, and other municipal services.

The municipality’s website recently underwent a major facelift, introducing a more service-oriented approach by replacing the outdated site with a fresher version built on new technology. The previous website had become obsolete and was built on an outdated technical platform that limited the municipality’s capabilities.

“About a year ago, we decided to upgrade the web platform and, at the same time, redesign the entire site—both visually and structurally. Our previous site was based on outdated technology that lacked proper information security and prevented us from developing the site effectively. Visitors also found it confusing, slow, and difficult to navigate,” explains Linus.

Precio Fishbone, who has worked with Skövde for several years, carried out the platform upgrade and the implementation of the new website. Technically, the upgrade meant moving from an older version of Optimizely to the latest, and the website was built using the React-based framework Next.js.

“This is a major technical leap for Skovde.se and the municipality's other sites, which will soon run on the same platform. Unlike the previous version, the new solution is cloud-based and hosted by Optimizely in the Microsoft Azure environment with 99.9% operational reliability,” says Mathias Mothander, Project Manager & UX Lead at Precio Fishbone. He adds:

“The website has been built as a so-called 'headless solution,' where the front-end and back-end environments are separated to achieve optimal flexibility and agility. With the extensive technical improvements and the redesign of the architecture, navigation, and content, Skövde now has a much faster, more secure, and more user- and future-oriented site!”

Linus confirms that usability has been significantly enhanced and mentions that a major focus has also been placed on improving and adapting accessibility. In addition to the new interface offering a high-quality user experience across all types of devices and screens, all content has been rewritten in plain language in accordance with the Swedish Language Act.

As evidence of the quality and performance improvements, the website testing agency Webperf noted that the launch of the new Skovde.se immediately improved the municipality’s ranking by 100 positions in the municipal list.

New Logic Guides Visitors Directly

The municipality’s overall goal with the new solution is both to improve external communication and citizen service and to free up internal resources and time.

“One leads to the other. By making it easier for citizens to find information and complete tasks on the website—especially via e-services—we reduce the load on our internal resources. This saves us time and money and allows us to accelerate improvement efforts in other areas,” Linus emphasizes.

To create a more intuitive and easy-to-navigate user journey on the website, Skövde, together with Precio Fishbone, developed a new user logic. Linus explains:

“We’ve designed a comprehensive, need-oriented user logic. Previously, the information and navigation structure were based on how the municipality is organized. That required a lot from visitors—they had to figure out where in the organization the answers were. Now, we start from their needs and gather information from different parts of the organization around those. In practice, it means we adapt to the visitors instead of the other way around.”

The goal is for citizens to be able to solve as much as possible on their own via the website and get help only when they’re stuck or need to contact the municipality. A key part of the solution is to have clear call-to-action buttons that guide users to the next step, no matter where they are on the site. These buttons stand out visually to make them easy to identify and understand.

AI and the Contact Center Continuously Optimize the Customer Journey

Skövde strives, as far as possible, to automate both its service and communication, as well as internal administration. One simple yet highly useful automation is the listing of the municipality’s most popular e-services. Previously done manually, this is now managed by a script that dynamically displays the most requested services based on where on the site the visitor is, making it easier to find the right one.

Using rich and flexible page templates and approval workflows, much of the content creation and publishing can be automated. According to Linus, this leads to more consistent, secure, and clear communication:

“We’ve also chosen to reduce the number of editors and provide them with better support and training. All new content—except news, service disruptions, notices, and documents—must be approved by the communications unit before being published. The process is fully automated. Editors send new content or changes for approval. We ensure it makes contextual sense and meets requirements for accessibility and plain language. Then we approve or discuss it with the editor. This ensures our communication complies with legal requirements and maintains consistent quality across the site.”

Linus also shares that several external services and systems have been integrated, including case management, media banks, maps, job listings, events, and opening hours. The idea is that as much content as possible is fetched dynamically from other sources, sparing users from needing to navigate to other websites.

One exciting feature is the integration with an external service that links a geographic location to information about a facility and its opening hours. This means that any change in the source information automatically updates the website and all major search and map services. By integrating the external AI service Rek.ai with Optimizely’s search engine, the municipality also sharpens the site’s search capabilities.

“The AI-powered search engine adapts results based on how visitors interact with the website, providing more accurate search outcomes. The solution also automatically generates Q&A content based on the site’s content and user behavior. This, combined with the questions and feedback received daily from citizens via our organization and contact center, helps us continuously optimize the customer journey,” concludes Linus.