Fulton County was stuck. How do you provide an underserved community with a modern website and a user experience that serves different needs across six districts when you have a lot of technical debt and very little support from leadership?
Fulton County had reached out to the community and knew the problems they faced:
- Nearly impossible to find vital information
- The community had lost faith in them
- Ill-equipped to manage the site as a whole
- Under-funded and under-staffed
- Poor to non-existent mobile experience
- Suffered from a legacy mindset, prioritizing Commissioners rather than the public
Fulton County started well before bringing in a design team. Marketing and IT leadership championed the cause, converted mindsets, and appropriated funds long overdue.
The overarching goal was simple: people-first.
- Make it intuitive for everyone to find information without technical know-how
- Provide a search experience that returns relevant results and builds confidence
- Use a disarming tone that helps neutralize government preconceptions
- Design a scalable solution with content management
It was apparent from our research that Fulton County needed a completely new take on content so we overhauled the information architecture to “help users understand where they are, what they’ve found, what’s around, and what to expect,” as Peter Morville put it.
We focused heavily on a mobile-first approach, especially considering there was none at the time, to ensure the site experience maintained its integrity across all devices.
Ultimately, we settled on task-based navigation, and action-oriented CTAs, that aligned well with our people-first goal.
By early 2020, Fulton County had a website offering practical answers to common questions, directions to the courthouse, bill-pay, and nearby events.