Removing Barriers to Civic Engagement

Company: City of Fremont

My Role: UX/Visual Designer

Selected Projects 2018-2021

People Do Not Know Their District

During usability testing, participants were asked how to contact their elected City Council member. There are 6 council members distinguished by the district they serve. Residents must first identify their district to know who their representative is (unless they already know).

Findings

• 5 out of 5 participants did not know what district they lived in

• 4 out of 5 users scanned through the City Council Members' pages to try to find their district within the descriptive text. They searched for neighborhood names and zip codes.

• 2 out of 5 participants could not identify their Council Member because they could not interpret the map

Recommendations

I worked with GIS Maps and the City Manager's office to make improvements.

• Improve the clarity of the District Locator Tool

• Add a link to the locator tool from all Council Member's webpages

The Problem

Waste streams are contaminated with items that are placed in incorrect bins. This reduces the potential value of the waste and makes it more expensive to process. How might we help people sort their waste better?

Gathering Information on a Shoestring

Because there was no budget for user interviews and testing I had to make do with what I had.

• I used site metrics to determine what pages were most visited.

• I contacted a nearby municipality whose waste guide I liked and planned to base my design on. They also serve residents with many languages. They shared this insight from their user testing:

People who visit a recycling site want to clear up ambiguities, they want the how, not the why.

The Solution

Make the home page more usable, develop a waste guide to clear up ambiguities, and have all the information in one place.

Switching to a digital form resulted in a 64% increase in permit submissions in the first year.