Connecting People
to their Communities
UX | Brand Integration | Responsive Design
The Product
Revize is a Govtech CMS (B2C-SaaS) that specializes in connecting people to their local government and community resources through custom web experiences tailored to their specific demographics and community initiatives.
The Problem
With our country being comprised of diverse communities, "one-size-fits-all" experiences often fail to provide true value when the people using them are not considered. Additionally, many .gov websites (at the time) were less concerned about accessibility or UX- meaning many (most) web pages we encountered were non-compliant and unusable for both users and administrators.
The Projects
Projects varied and were dependent upon the specific needs of the each community. However, our team at Revize always tried to fulfill the following goals for every community we collaborated with:
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Unique experiences
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Champion accessibility
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Responsive design
Tools | Adobe Suite (Photoshop/XD)
Timeline | Nov 2016 - Dec 2020
My Role | Senior Web/UX Designer
Background
Problems We Solved
Design Process
Project Kickoff & Discovery
Research & Info Architecture
Wireframing & User Experience
Visual Design & Accessibility
Reveal, Review, Revize
Notable Impacts & Outcomes
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My Takeaways
The Process |
Background
At Revize, our team connected remotely with diverse clients and committees from coast to coast to deliver specialized, digital/web solutions for communities and their governments. Our clientele and their users encompassed a wide range of differing regional cultures, population sizes, and socioeconomic backgrounds - making understanding their user's needs and accessibility challenges critical in producing successful, human-centered solutions. Not only did we serve municipal entities - we also provided design, UX, and CMS services to public/private school districts, public libraries, non-profits, economic development authorities, tourism boards, and more.
Our team collaborated with many of the elected officials, administrators, and volunteers that kept their communities operating for their residents; meaning - we were also able mitigate hundreds of UX issues and web problems impacting these communities. Each community presented unique UX challenges- from growing tourism initiatives, making utility services easier to access, connecting community members with their elected officials, or looking up activities at the Parks & Rec department, etc. Yet through close collaboration with our stakeholders we were able to use best-practice design and UX principles to create meaningful digital experiences.
Problems We Solved
Keeping users at the forefront of our decision-making, my project manager and I guided our clients through a consistent design and development process that would help ensure user-centered design outcomes and promote accessibility where the community needed it most. While we did regularly run into common UX issues (ex: "Users can't find their tax bill easily"), we would also encounter more complex UX problems that would require a holistic restructuring and design of their site architecture and branding. Additionally, if ever our Revize supported communities experienced crisis or disaster, our team would work quickly to implement important features to aid affected residents. Here are a few examples of those more challenging cases:
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A New England public school system sought Revize's services for a full rebranding initiative and to address user issues brought forward by parents and students. Their main complaint - users found it difficult to find and access specific school's resources across forty-four districted schools. After completing an initial UX audit, it was discovered that their existing site's data architecture and site map were completely disorganized and unusable (redundancies aplenty/paths to nowhere). Furthermore, their out-of-date design had many accessibility flaws and confusing layouts that made discerning the goal of each page challenging. All of these factors combined contributed to a bounce rate of over 80% from users who visited their main page.
Solution/Impact: Along with producing a new brand strategy and logo - our team reconstructed their backend data by utilizing our CMS service and restructured their site map to optimize searching and eliminate unnecessary pages. I paired this new site architecture with a new UX and design strategy by introducing a parent-child page hierarchy between the main school system page (parent) and each individual school page (44 children). This allowed each school to maintain it's own school branding and feature customizations while aligning to streamlined design elements that fostered a cohesive user experience across the school system's domains. 90 days after launch, their new site exhibited a bounce rate of 33%. The new branding and logo is still utilized today.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, communities and health departments everywhere were met with an onslaught of web traffic from users searching for disease data, business closures, and vaccine information. Moreover, with many government departments shut down to the public - most, if not all, government services and information needed to become available digitally.
Solutions/Impact: In an effort to aid all Revize communities in disseminating rapidly changing CDC information to their residents - myself and our dev team worked quickly to deploy a universal navigation component that could be easily applied across all navigation layouts and webpages. After delivery, this quick feature served the business by maintaining/improving our customer retention rate, aided local government officials with organizing and circulating daily closures and policy changes, and supported resident-users across their communities as they navigated local lifestyle changes.
Before
After
Design Process
Every new client or community brought with it a new set of UX challenges, making maintaining a consistent design process key in creating consistent and successful design outcomes. Fortunately, my project manager and I developed a process that was simple, yet effective in evaluating the user needs and concerns of the community we were focusing on.
01.
Project Kickoff & Discovery
02.
Research & Information Architecture
Wireframing &
User Experience
03.
04.
Visual Design &
Accessibility
01.
Project Kickoff & Discovery
Before beginning any new project, our client would have provided us a completed project kick-off questionnaire - this form would provide an introductory overview into the community's history/brand, their residents, their local initiatives, and how they thought we could help them (i.e. what were they looking to accomplish by partnering with us). It also included any known site analytics, performance metrics, or research our client had collected prior to kick-off.
Having a preliminary understanding of the client's needs, goals, and known pain-points allowed me to better facilitate our initial kick-off discussion, build trust with my client, and set the tone for continued collaboration going forward. During our kick-off, our team could learn directly from the client (or committee) about their vision for their community, how an improved web experience could help them achieve their goals, and how they would measure those outcomes (KPIs).
By the end of our kick-off meeting, I would have produced an initial outline/sketch that would help guide my design and our client's new user experience. Our groups would part ways with a shared understanding of the project's objectives, timeline, and new design direction - and our team would get to work.
02.
Research & Information Architecture
The next step in my design process was to continue to research the community while compiling everything learned during initial conversations. Our clients entrusted us in creating the best experience for their users - so with every client I took into upon myself to become a "mini-community historian" to discover their unique selling point and tailor their experience based upon their performance data and kick-off feedback. The performance data available to analyze varied from client to client and included data from sources like:
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User surveys & recordings collected by the community,
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Heatmap analysis,
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Third-party marketing partners/consultants,
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Google Analytics & SEO evaluations,
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Additional stakeholder interviews.
Along with my own accessibility analysis, this data guided our understanding of users within their communities and the digital services they sought most often. From here, I was able to draft an updated site map focused on presenting content in an organized and intuitive architecture that would allows users to access information within 1-2 clicks from the home page. This new model would help our content team and client integrate any previously existing content from their old site over, and provided me end points so I could being creating wireframes and user flows.
For this sitemap reorganization we collaborated with our client to organize and streamline their data while eliminating redundant child pages. Utilizing user data and community usage patterns, we brought the most used elements forward and re-nested less used elements to create a consolidated information architecture
03.
Wireframes & Flows
With enough research gathered, a new site map optimized, and my sketches in hand - I had all the information I needed to complete initial, digital wireframes for our client's new homepage and accompanying child/interior page layouts. I would also produce any custom user flows our development team would need to consider when integrating our new UX and architecture onto the Revize Content Management System. At this point in the process, my goal was to apply the functionality that was technically feasible within our CMS to the needs of our user group with a "revized" design and experience.
04.
Visual Design & Accessibility
The last step in the process was implementing visual design elements to our new user experience. Keep in mind - if we were tasked with completing a new logo/rebrand, all of that additional design work would be completed concurrently with the UX production. Our rebrand design would focus on building logos and brands that could be easily reused and parsed down for multiple marketing mediums, as well as UI systems and design that adhered to WCAG compliance standards.
This stage is also where Revize designers were encouraged to be as creative as possible with their visual design. It was here as an artist that I was able to develop adept skills in producing creative variations for user interfaces while also becoming knowledgable of accessibility best-practices. At the end, we would be ready to showcase a newly designed homepage and interior/child page experiences for initial consideration and client review.
Reveal, Review, Revize
Following our preliminary design reveal, our clients (whom were often in the form of committees) would typically take a few business days to compile and return initial feedback. All Revize clients were contractually granted three rounds of revisions, though we often only need one or two to get their design perfected for their community. While our designers were happy to provide variations for our clients, we were not "order takers" and would pushback on any requests that would break the experience or jeopardize accessibility.
By maintaining a consistent design and UX process, our team was able to provide successful user-centered design outcomes for communities across all types of communities and territories.
Notable Impacts & Outcomes
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Provided design and accessibility solutions for over 150 communities and municipalities across 32 states.
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2018 TAMI Award Winner (Texas Association of Municipal Information) for Best Website Statewide for cities with populations up to 100,000 citizens.
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2019 Gold & Silver Horizon Interactive Awards for outstanding interactive media production in Oswego County, NY & Yuba County, CA - enhancing company reputation and attracting new clients.