Feb 17

Feb 17 Seattle.gov: A Journey to Centralized Navigation

Beverly Slabosky

UX Writing, User Research

Transforming Seattle.gov navigation from departmentally organized to a data-driven and human-centered

My Role: Vision driver, organizer, coach, mentor

Led discovery, facilitated workshops, information architecture SME, delegated chunks of design and research to my designers and completed some myself.
Created a roadmap for design, research, and build time.
Due to COVID, a 3-4 month project has turned into 2 years.

What signals indicated wayfinding was a problem?

Web metrics showed that the global navigation was being used 3 times the rate as our internal search function.
Tasks that had the highest traffic were scattered across multiple department websites and departments had shared responsibilities in fulfilling services like permitting, and applying for assistance.
Qualitative data from user research studies were clear: our customers did not know or care about our organizational structure. They thought of accomplishing their goal with "the City" and not a specific department.

What was the goal?

Create a long-term roadmap towards overarching navigation that connects our content by how Seattleites think (mental models) rather than how our city is organizationally structured.

Initial Hypothesis

We believe people will understand how to find city services better and faster if we use plain language and organize by our customer’s goals and needs. This will result in lower time-on-task scores (metric used in usability testing).

Similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, our previous persona research indicated people thought of their own basic needs first before broadening outwards.

The Approach

I aligned my team around a process modeled after a Google Venture's design sprint where I facilitated a series of initial working sessions to collaborate with our interdisciplinary team members and subject matter experts (SMEs).

We took notes on competitive analysis across government, education, and e-commerce.

Understand / Empathize:

Competitive analysis (government, e-commerce, education)

Navigation best practices
Personas review
Customer service top requests
Usability studies output
Content audit themes
Search term analysis
Google analytics seasonal trends

We conducted a content audit sampling across all 40 department websites to find common themes.

We brainstormed using "How Might We" triggers, and prioritized our ideas based on solution criteria:

Most valuable to the customer
Most feasible
Game changer

Using our ideas, team members across development, production, and UX sketched solutions on paper.

There were many ideas beyond traditional navigation that I put in the backlog to explore later.

Usability Testing with our Customers

We focused on the groups that needed the most assistance
Some usability tests were in-person and some were online.

We have 9 personas that represent our customers that need the most help obtaining city services.

Iterative User Testing

We employed several testing methods as we iterated to a final concept. Online methods were all fairly quick because we could recruit people using online software.