Indy.gov Redesign

11/8/2022

2016

The Challenge

The Indy.gov redesign was a complete overhaul and re-branding of the enterprise website. Preliminary work included a five month long project of streamlining their pages from the thousands down to a few hundred. I wrote the Indy.gov Font Styleguide to help agencies clean up their content ahead of any page migration. I also trained hundreds of city employees and interns in the SharePoint environment, as well as taught them web best practices, ADA, and section 508 compliance. This was done with the goal of site wide consistency. I was the SharePoint Team Lead and Senior designer, and we had a small team of 3 people.

Getting Started

.Using a combination of analytic tools, as well as feedback from the City of Indianapolis and its users, it was clear the site was not friendly to the people it was intended to reach. The main purpose of the site was to share information about the city, its agencies and services, and to drive people to use the online services to interface with the city government.

Designing the Site

In order to meet those needs, we developed nine flexible categories all of the city’s content could fit into. This metadata could then be used to tag all items within the site for ease of search.

This search, then, would be the focal point of the entire site where users could use natural language in order to find what they’re looking for. This natural language would also be used as metadata to further tag content within the site to make it relevant.

On agency pages within the site, the metadata reflected on the page would change based on content that existed for that agency. This would help users intelligently filter the content they are trying to find.

We developed several sketches and wireframes to understand the choices that people would likely make based on the information presented to them. From that, we developed a streamlined workflow and UX design that would work for Indy.gov.

Indianapolis Portal