Delivering a Cross-Platform UX that Enables Local Municipalities to Provide Critical Services to Millions

Industry: Information Services

Challenge: Deliver a modern, cross-platform User Experience for a white-label solution that enables local municipalities to provide critical services to millions of people in the US

Offering: UX Assessment

Highlights:

• Delivered a total UI overhaul of the company’s application to improve usability and overall UX
• Helped the company go from a nonexistent mobile experience to a fully-responsive experience
• Improved the solution’s accessibility rating from non-ADA compliant to AA ADA compliant
• Removed reliance on third-party payment providers to reduce friction in the payments process and increase revenue

A leading information services company provides a cloud-based solution used by towns and municipalities to manage a wide range of public services for their citizens. This proprietary, one-of-a-kind software enables citizens to do everything from pay property taxes and search public records to apply for permits and request property inspections. More than 2,100 organizations rely on the solution to provide vital everyday services to millions of citizens in the US.

Challenge:

The company realized that the product’s existing UX was in need of a refresh. They were seeking not just an updated look and feel, but guidance on how to create a more seamless experience for users that would help them more easily accomplish what they set out to do. Their frontline support staff of 4 people was inundated each day with hundreds of customer support calls from frustrated customers. Only around a quarter of these calls were tied to issues the support team could actually help troubleshoot. The remaining 75% had to be re-routed to municipalities for support.

Among the array of challenges we helped the company address were:

• Reliance on multiple third-party payment providers, which led to disjointed experiences and either left revenue on the table when users didn’t complete the payment process or required users to call in with payment information
• Reliance on third-party data/data from municipalities, which was one of the key reasons why their staff routinely had to reroute customer service calls to municipalities for additional troubleshooting
• The software was only designed for use on desktop, which meant the increasing number of users who wanted to accomplish tasks on mobile were unable to do so or could only do so with great difficulty
• The existing application wasn’t ADA compliant, which created potential liability issues for the municipalities who use their software

Solution:

We got to work with the client by conducting an initial round of user research. The user research entailed interviewing the company’s internal front desk workers, who were responsible for providing customer support and fielding hundreds of calls a day, as well as their IT team. Our conversations with their team helped us gain a deeper understanding of customer and application pain points and issues, which we addressed with a set of low-fidelity designs.

A second round of user research followed, during which we interviewed existing customers to test the effectiveness of the proposed design solutions. The insights we were able to glean through two rounds of user research gave us a unique view into the most common problems users had with the system and a distinct picture of where there were opportunities to reduce friction by providing a more intuitive UX.

From there, our visual design team worked to develop updated branding for the product, along with a new, responsive UI for key screens and workflows on both desktop and mobile that’s in line with users’ expectations of a modern web experience. The visual design and information architecture work we provided included:

• Updates of key pages and flows that were tied to users’ primary objectives when using the site, in areas like payments, property lookup, and applying for permits, as well as home page redesigns for the company’s website and for municipalities
• Integration with Stripe for payments to remove the reliance on third-party payment processors, keeping users in the product’s environment for the duration of their experience
• A unified User Interface via a component library and recognizable design patterns to provide visual continuity throughout the user journey
• A lightweight Design System, built on Material Bootstrap, that the company’s front-end developers can use to ensure future updates remain consistent with the new look and feel

Outcome:

The results of our work together are an updated white-label solution that’s user friendly, intuitive, and tailor-made to meet the wants and needs of both the citizens and city administrators who use it every day. As the solution is rolled out to more and more of the company’s users, they’re anticipating increased revenue, greater customer satisfaction, and dramatically reduced needs for customer support from their own employees.