Driving Positive Digital Experience in Local Government

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2022

The COVID19 pandemic required Hennepin County to rapidly shift how it engages with residents digitally. When physical locations closed to the public, the ability to serve digitally was critical to meeting ongoing resident needs. The Digital Experience division was created to coordinate work across the organization to address residents' digital needs and provide a consistently positive digital service experience. One example includes the restructuring of working teams to address operations and maintenance needs and creating staffing opportunities to build capacity and effectiveness across the organization. The Digital Experience division accelerates the digital transformation of resident experiences by standardizing, prioritizing, and streamlining the rapid release of in-demand applications, websites, and tools. The newly established web standards and pattern and component library are outputs of prioritizing this work. The team created a new digital accessibility policy that has been adopted into the county's Administration Manual. The county is dedicated to equipping employees with ongoing digital accessibility training. The Digital Experience division has both fostered a culture of user-centered digital service design coupled with an agile mindset throughout the entire organization and improved resident experiences by assessing and greatly enhancing the user experience and accessibility of websites and applications for our residents.