Site audit, redesign, and migration — City and County
of San Francisco

The problem

The San Francisco County Clerk needed a website that made it easier for San Franciscans to get services. And a site that’s easier for the County Clerk staff to keep up to date. 

They were getting frequent questions from San Franciscans who came to their office. The staff wanted users to understand the process and answer some questions and concerns online before residents came to City Hall. 

Moving their content from SFGOV.org to SF.gov —the City’s new website— would make it easier for the County Clerk to help San Franciscans. 

Clear start pages for services help people understand what they need to do to get married, get a birth or death certificate, and get a City ID card.

For context, the Digital Services team is moving different city websites to the new City of San Francisco website: SF.gov.Residents, workers, and business owners in San Francisco perceive the City as one entity. The San Francisco website for the city should reflect that.

What I did

• User needs workshops. Decision-makers and staff came together to agree on who would be using the site, what those users needed to do, and how we would measure success in the long term. 

• Run a full audit of their current pages and decide what to keep and what can go

• Define user journeys

• Draft new pages that meet user needs

• Have subject matter experts at County Clerk check new content to make sure it’s factually and
  legally acceptable

• User testing for new transaction pages to make sure users can understand what they need to do and pages are meeting agreed criteria

• Publish!

User needs workshop

In the public sector, we write user needs in the following way:

As a… (ex. ‘self-employed person’)
I want to… (ex. ‘file my tax return)
So that I can… (ex. ‘avoid fines’)

During these workshops we work out who the audience is for this service, then we look at what they want to do and why.

This is similar to the private sector approach, only we’re not trying to sell anything. We’re simply meeting the need - as quickly and effectively as possible.

If the user doesn’t want to do something, they aren’t looking for it, so there’s little demand. A page that doesn’t meet an actual user need, will show up in your data.

Audit

During the audit, I analyzed qualitative and quantitative data to determine what should we migrate to the new website.

Quantitative data

I looked at things like:

• Pages that receive the least amount of web traffic

• Content that’s not been edited or modified in a long period of time

• Pages that do not have an owner

This data told me there might be problems with this content.

Qualitative data

Once I had ranking scores for the qualitative aspects of the content, it was easier to analyze. However, there are always hidden assumptions behind these scores, so I wanted to bring back the findings to our stakeholders. We discussed whether we agreed with what the data was telling us about their content. By the end of this meet-up, we had a group consensus on what needed to go.

User journeys

I mapped user journeys for each of the County Clerk’s services. The clerks had to add new workflows to their existing service delivery as the coronavirus pandemic force them to offer some of their services online.

Before drafting or designing, we need to clarify the user journey with our stakeholders to make sure we are not missing anything. The service pages I designed based on these maps show users all the steps they need to do – and in what order – to achieve the thing they want to do.

Results

• Content is in grade 6 reading level and accessible to all San Franciscans

• Content is presented in structured content types that help readability and follow accessibility
  best practices

• County Clerk has a presence in SF.gov

• County Clerk staff can update and edit most content on SF.gov without the need for developers

After auditing, rewriting and moving to SF.gov, their pages now look like this

People I worked with

• UX designers

• Service designers

• SF.gov product manager

• City and County Clerk staff