From 2014-2015 at Code for America, our team focused on municipal websites. We partnered closely with the city of Oakland to understand and address community needs from a main city website. We pursued multiple efforts to do this.

We developed a dashboard to make web visits visible to city staff and interested visitors, used online research techniques to understand user priorities for municipal sites for cities of similar size, and surveyed 1,000 Oakland residents (about 0.2% of the population).

We conducted user research sessions with staff responsible for maintaining the website and developed a task-based information architecture for city services. We built an Alpha website and we helped the city procure the services of a modern design-and-build firm to build the Beta version and production site, and we supported city staff in securing the Oaklandca.gov URL to replace Oaklandnet.com, their old address.

You can download our report to the city from our first stage of the engagement: