[Case Study]
Accountability
Within Local
Governments
The OSA website, from a design and functionality standpoint, was very outdated and needed a major refresh. They wanted to create a new look for the website, including a color scheme, layout, icons, etc., and apply it to the current website that uses XML, XSLT, and CSS.
[The Story]
The Minnesota Office of the State Auditor
(OSA) oversees $40 billion dollars in local government spending. The Office of the State Auditor monitors local government financial activity in Minnesota by performing audits of local government financial statements and by reviewing documents, data, reports, and complaints reported to the Office. The financial information collected from local governments is analyzed and serves as the basis of statutory reports issued by the Office of the State Auditor.
THE
NEED
The OSA website, from a design and functionality standpoint, was very outdated and needed a major refresh. They wanted to create a new look for the website, including a color scheme, layout, icons, etc., and apply it to the current website that uses XML, XSLT, and CSS. The full development and redesign of the OSA’s website needed to be built on their current content management system running on an OSA server provided by the OSA.
THE
SOLUTION
Since it had been a long time since the last redesign, the project required comprehensive user experience research and testing to inform web page and information architecture designs. Overall project tasks required us to execute all visual design stages from concept to end, create wireframes, storyboards, user flows, process flows and site maps to communicate interaction and design ideas.
Our team analyzed user needs to implement site content, graphics, performance, and capacity; developed web site-maps, application models, image templates, & page templates that met project goals, user needs, & industry standards; established and designed guidelines, best practices and standards; provided clear, detailed descriptions of web site specifications such as product features, activities, software, communication protocols, programming languages, and operating systems software and hardware; developed and documented test plans, testing procedures, and test results; designed and implemented web site security measures; established backup and recovery standards; developed and implemented procedures for ongoing website revision; selected programming languages, design tools, and applications; developed databases that support web applications and websites; wrote supporting code for web applications websites; recommended and implemented performance improvements; created web models and prototypes that include physical, interface, logical, and data models; analyzed user needs to determine technical requirements; developed and documented style guidelines for web site content. Finally, we provided knowledge transfer to site editors at the end of the project.
[The Highlights]
Responsive Design.
The redesign required an updated, modern look and feel that was responsive to mobile use. The site was designed for all major mobile browsers and devices (iOS and Android). It was compatible with all major desktop/laptop browsers.
[The Highlights]
Highly Interactive Tables.
Interactive tables are very effective at communicating information accessibly on your website. For OSA, we created accessible, visual & interactive table assets to make their file heavy website more usable and concise for their site visitors.
[The Highlights]
Infrastructure Stress Transparency Tool.
Part of this project was to complete the successful migration of OSA's Infrastructure Stress Transparency Tool to their new Umbraco website. The map is fully interactive and responsive for all screen sizes and tested to work amongst the most popular browers. OSA's goal for creating this map was to better inform the decision making process at all levels of government to improve the long term financial planning for our civil infrastructure needs. Minnesota has a vast amount of aging infrastructure. This infrastructure protects public health and provides vital services to residents throughout the State. Maintaining, rehabilitating and replacing this infrastructure over the next few decades will be challenging without proper planning. Many communities do not have a large enough population base to spread the costs across of these large capital projects. The State Auditor and a team of collaborators worked to create a series of interactive maps that, for the first time, visualize data on Minnesota’s civil infrastructure.
SERVICES
PROVIDED
STRATEGY CONSULTING
OPEN/CLOSED CARD SORT
USER EXPERIENCE RESEARCH
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE DESIGN
CONTENT AUDIT
WIREFRAME & PROTOTYPE
RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN
WEB DEVELOPMENT
CONTENT MIGRATION
TESTING & QA
ANALYTICS & OPTIMIZATION
WEBSITE SUPPORT
ACCESSIBILITY COMPLIANCE
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
TECHNOLOGIES
USED
UMBRACO CMS
BOOTSTRAP
HTML/CSS/JS
VISUAL STUDIO
ASP.NET MVC
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