Research Inspires Design and Award-Winning Results
Client
City of GreshamAbout
Gresham, Oregon is a city located minutes from Mount Hood, Multnomah Falls and the city of Portland. With more than a century of history and heritage, the City wanted a website redesign that celebrated community and connected with stakeholders via user experience and website design.
Align, Organize and Engage
The goal for this project was to align what residents needed to accomplish on the website (aka user needs) with the goals of the City of Gresham. After identifying user needs, our team leveraged insights to organize information on the website, reduce citizen call volume and provide data-driven requirements for the future redesign.
Research and Testing
Our GearLab team hosted focus groups with City employees which included spending afternoons at a local farmers’ market to talk to residents about their website needs. They also conducted additional research including:
- Card-Sorting – How do residents intuitively group pieces of information?
- Tree-testing – Can residents find information by looking at just the navigation labels?
- Top-task analysis – How successful are residents at completing a series of tasks?
In addition to our research findings, we created high-fidelity designs complete with style guides and polished prototypes. The website launched and users were able to locate the information they needed. Data demonstrated the impact of the homepage redesign with 26% improvement in usability.
And the Award Goes to
The City of Gresham received the National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW) 2017 Pinnacle Award and NAGW 2017 Members’ Choice Award.
To the Intranet and Beyond
Using our proven results and insights as our foundation we also helped the City of Gresham enhance its intranet experience by providing a user needs assessment.