Leading a city government through a digital transformation
We led the strategy and design for the largest digital undertaking the City of Grand Rapids had ever attempted. A passionate internal team, championed by the mayor, envisioned a new website that could be a "digital City Hall" for residents. The City's website needed to be clear, concise, and friendly to a wide variety of users. In 2016, it was none of those things. In 2018, it won the National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW) Pinnacle Award for the best large city website!
How do we ever start to thanks?! We have tried to stay true to everything the Mighty team taught us. We have been fortunate, blessed, and just so incredibly changed forever because of your team and the support and learning we were the beneficiary of over the last months.
—Becky Jo Glover, Chief Customer Service & Innovations OfficerWe began this project from a citizen's perspective—a perspective we shared, as many of us are Grand Rapidians—to lead content and make decisions based on user experience. Our main goal was to make it easier to find what you needed and enable self-service on any device, on any browser, at any time, from any place.
The site was already receiving an average of 10K pageviews per day. Our content inventory and analytics audits revealed that of the more than 44,000 unique URLs that received traffic in the previous year, 279 pages accounted for more than 90% of all pageviews and 95% of all site entrances. We used these insights to completely reimagine the information architecture and navigation system to prioritize what people actually needed from the City.
By consolidating the top services and streamlining processes, we created a more focused website that was easy-to-use for both citizens and employees. We contributed user experience and content strategy, analytics, verbal branding, copywriting, content governance planning, training on writing for the web, visual design, and project management, while working alongside developers at OpenCities to create an accessible website, free from barriers.
Just 30 days after soft-launching the beta site alongside the legacy site, not only was more than 70% of beta site traffic coming from organic search already, but users were landing directly on the service pages and forms they needed—just like we planned. Engagement rates were 29% higher than the legacy site, and the rate of returning users for the beta site was 19% higher than the legacy site after just one month.
Less than a year later, based on its content, organization, design, performance, flexibility, accessibility, standards, and interactivity, the City of Grand Rapids' new website won the NAGW Pinnacle Award for Excellence in Government Web Design.
