The main strategic goal was to allow access to information as quickly to the widest audience possible. I organized a series of user research opportunities to learn how and why the community used SFSD's current website and identify pain points.
Overall we analyzed 2,841+ community responses that came from an internal survey, heat map analysis, an 8-person stakeholder workshop that included the current San Francisco Sheriff, and 20 one-on-one interviews conducted in County Jail, City Hall, and their Programs offices.
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The main organizing principal, service type, did not change from their old iteration but we added additional avenues to reach specific pieces of information. Knowing that many of the site's users come in a state of agitation and anxiety, we wanted to make their experience as effortless as possible.
I directed a lot of energy towards understanding and improving the site's content strategy, which we identified as our main value add. I identified ten page types and broke each page into a story outline. At the heart of the website are the service information and facility pages which provide information about specific duties performed by the Sheriff Deputies and the locations they are responsible for.
During our engagement with the SFSD, we were contacted by San Francisco City Hall's digital services team who had been undergoing a process to roll out a large scale initiative that would bring all San Francisco government entities under one website experience that catered to the average San Francisco citizen.
As part of our consultation, we were provided user-tested page layouts already deployed by a few agencies to assist in our wireframe and design process. Wanting to maintain similar experiences between SFSD site and SF.gov we used many of the layouts provided by the digital services team and added a few new features, notably the profile layout and calendar function.
The new pages are richer with more content and ways to dig deeper into the topic user is most interested in.
From our user research we discovered that over 60% of the SFSD's total user base viewed their website on their phone. Furthermore our internal survey identified that internal staff viewed the site on their computer. These two data points led us to believe that the average SFSD citizen viewed the site on their mobile device while staff and potentially other Sheriff's Departments viewed the site on a desktop or laptop. Therefore we tailored the content on the desktop and mobile experience to fulfill each of these audience's needs.
On the desktop experience we wanted to create a sense of pride for the hardworking Sheriff's Deputies so we are using the space to include images of deputies, highlighting statistics of the department's activities, and defining the department's mission which is laid out by the elected Sheriff.
On the mobile experience we strip all the storytelling away to cater to the most popular user tasks which were defined during our user interviews and heat mapping research.
On the mobile experience we featured the 4 most popular user tasks in the bottom navigation, easily accessible with a user's thumb.
The chat bot is a feature that will be built out in a future phase due to launch expectations.
Most of the branding was already defined for us so my approach was to enhance the elements we already had at our disposal to make it a more interesting and visually pleasing aesthetic.
I expanded the dark green and gold color of their current branding to include two background colors, evergreen and taupe a blue action colors, that matches the action color of the SF.gov website. We used Rubik as our main font which was tested as an accessible font by the SF.gov team.
The overall feeling I was trying to achieve was approachable, dignified, and professional.
