Happening At The Moment

Desktop and mobile App Design

A web application that facilitates access to city council meetings and empowers civil engagement.

ROLE
UX/UI Designer

RESPONSIBILITIES
Desktop and Mobile User Interface
Interactive Prototype
Style Guide
Usability Testing

Team
1 UX Designer

Client
San Jose City Council
Only in San Jose

Happening at the Moment on a laptop and mobile phone

Background and Challenge

There is a Need to Connect Residents with Local Government

In response to the Covid pandemic, the San Jose city council made the moved to virtual council meetings. However, these meetings can last up to 8 hours or more. Members of the community who want to attend currently do not have a way to know when the agenda items they are interested in will be discussed, which leads to disengagement, alienation, and frustration.

Solution

A Platform that Allows for Both Community Members and City Officials to Engage and Connect

And since city staff is overburdened with their time due to the pandemic, the application also has a service design component for the city’s administration, where they can easily upload and change the agenda items for a council meeting.

Design Process

Opportunity

How Might We...

How might we make city council meetings more accessible to all community members?

Design Library

Friendly, Warm and Welcoming

Design Iterations

3+
iterations with engineering and stakeholder feedback

8+
prototypes

10+
usability tests

The design team worked contiguously with engineering and the project manager to make sure the designs and flows that we created could be implemented and that we covered all the use cases and user stories that was outline by research.

Iterations

Modify Community Member Interface for Administrator Use

Due to the time constraints and MVP deadlines, the project manager and engineering team realized that it would not be feasible to develop both a community member interface as well as an administrator interface. In order to reduce the time required for the engineering team to implement, the design team adapted the community member interface so that it worked as an administrator interface as well.

Original admin interface

Admin components on community member interface

Usability testing

Users Needed a Way to Reorient

Users wanted a homepage, a place they could go to when they needed to reorient themselves or to look for a different meeting. After a couple of iterations, we found that added a home button in the navigation menu provided the clearest direction for the user.

Insight:

Provide a Way Home

Users wanted a homepage, a place they could go to when they needed to reorient themselves or to look for a different meeting. After a couple usability tests with users, we found that added a home button in the navigation menu provided the clearest direction for the user.

Left: 1st design of home button, Right: Final design

Final DESIGN

One Interface, Two Functions

Community Members:

Consistent use of icons and labels to make the interface easy to learn
Utilizes mobile pattern library
Mobile-first approach

City Staff:

Desktop only
Builds off Community Member interface to aid developer implementation
Uses language and structure that city administrators are familiar with

Desktop Designs

Mobile Designs

Next Steps and KPIs

We want to explore features like automation of tasks to help keep repetitive city staff duties at a minimum and also implementing additional desirable features for community members, such as accessing information about past meetings. We would also like to explore opportunities to expand the application to other cities.

Our Key Performance Indicators would be:

Increased community member participation in City Council meetings
Increased community members confidence in their ability to provide spoken comment
Reduction in community members' negative feelings after participating in City Council meetings
Rate of use/adoption of the web application by city staff
Rate of city staff satisfaction with web application and new procedures
Expansion of web application by other cities