Taking a Citizen First Approach to a Website Redesign
2018 NACo Achievement Award Winner
Fairfax County, Va., VA
Best In Category
About the Program
Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)
Year: 2018
Home to 1.14 million residents, Fairfax is the largest locality in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Fairfax County website supports the County's goal of a "government without walls, doors, or clocks" providing essential information, services and about 125 online services. Besides being a web presence representing this beautiful section of Northern Virginia, the website has a requirement of corralling the content from about 54 governmental departments and offices and presenting it in an intuitive way that doesn't require the site visitor to be familiar with the structure of the County's government. The project began with a rigorous dive into the core of the user interface. Fairfax County's departments, agencies, stakeholders, and citizens were consulted during the requirements gathering phase. The team then undertook a heuristic evaluation to glean a better understanding of needs faced by those interfacing with the website, and how to provide the optimal user experience. Research in the form of heat maps, citizen user studies, and testing of various site map variations helped evolve the site architecture into one that is focused on the citizen first, and making interactions with local government quick and easy, with a focus on new topic-level pages to highlight the most resident-focused information. To further add to the user's experience, a new search strategy is being utilized to improve content discovery, and satisfaction surveys have been featured on every page to provide near real-time feedback to the County staff of content contributors. The newly imagined Fairfax County Website demonstrates how cooperation, technology, and design can bring the strengths of modern web applications to bear upon the needs of a wide array of users. This strong investment in the highest standard of website design will surely deliver for years to come.