In 2019, a need was identified for a smoother citizen experience in interacting with multiple City of Sacramento departments. Since interactions with each department were often siloed, delivery of quality service could be needlessly cumbersome. This led to a year-long project to implement a new CRM system.
Our 311 Customer Service portal was identified as critical to this system, as it was many citizens' initial point of engagement with City services.
Since our existing portal was built with technology specific to our old system and had become outdated, we decided to begin a ground-up redesign and replacement.
The proportion of our site users on mobile devices had surpassed 50% and continued to rise, so a mobile-first approach was taken with the design. It also was beneficial to initially design within the most constraining interface format due to the potentially complex, branching nature of the user flows.
We decided on a simple, minimalist look and feel to ensure that the request process would be clear and straightforward for any potential user.
Adobe's products proved instrumental in the development of this project.
Adobe XD allowed us to develop our wireframes rapidly and provide the development team with exact design specifications despite our tight timeframe. Since the wireframes could still be updated after being shared, we were able to continue collaborating with them in realtime during the development process. The measurements included with each component allowed us to maintain a level of consistency and quality that would have been difficult to achieve otherwise.
Adobe products used:
Adobe XD: All wireframing
Adobe Illustrator: All vector graphics
Adobe Photoshop: All raster graphics
Adobe Campaign: Citizens are given the option to sign up to receive email updates from us via Campaign
Adobe Experience Manager Forms: Used to generate tickets for complex request types
The weeks following our launch saw a notable increase in case traffic from the online portal vs. other channels. The prior portal accounted for roughly 20% of our cases, whereas the new portal generated nearly 50%.
The project has been a great success and has been a dramatic improvement to our user experience. We continue to plan new features and improvements for future development.
