Two recent department website redesigns — the San Diego Police Department and the Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department — were aimed at improving the user experience and access to critical service information.
The city of San Diego has redesigned the Homelessness Strategies and Solutions Department (HSSD) and the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) websites, both of which aim to make critical services easier for residents to find.
As state and local government agencies look to make digital services more inclusive and websites more user friendly, a big push is to make government websites simpler to use.
The city announced the launch of the HSSD website in July, just months after the April announcement of the SDPD site.
“I think both of these websites show how the city is really putting residents and their needs first,” said Ashley Bailey, the city’s strategic communications officer. “Because police and homelessness, those are two topics where someone might be in crisis.”
As Bailey further explained, both websites may be used by people in crises or otherwise traumatic situations, and they can be supported in those situations by making the information they need available.
Both website redesigns were created through collaborative efforts between HSSD or SDPD and the city’s Communications Department and Department of Information Technology Web Team.
An important measure of a successful government website is that visitation times are short, according to Ron Vazquez, the web services manager for San Diego. As he put it, if a visitor is spending 10-15 minutes on the website, it indicates that they are not able to find what they’re looking for in an efficient manner.
In the case of the SDPD website, a big part of the redesign centered on trimming excess information and making the product more service-oriented for visitors, Vazquez said. Bailey said the city applied a similar collaborative process for HSSD’s site, using lessons learned for a smoother workflow.
That workflow started with HSSD and ended with the web team. HSSD acted as the subject matter expert to provide the information that needed to be on the page. The information then went to the Communications Department, where staff would ensure that the information is digestible to the public who aren’t familiar with subject jargon. Finally, the web team handled the actual web development piece, making sure the site’s content is easily scannable and mobile friendly.
Once the website content was designed, there was a back-and-forth, iterative process to make it as easy as possible for users to understand.
“I know for a fact that police ranking has improved since we launched the site,” Bailey said.
Both websites are service-oriented, meaning that information about the services available to residents is prioritized.
“We know that what [users] are looking for are the services offered, and where they are, and who you call,” Vazquez said. “So we just made sure to emphasize that type of information.”
This article first appeared in Government Technology, a sister publication to Industry Insider — California.
