In our research at Code for America, we found the people who worked on city websites to be different from the audience of most mainstream CMS’s. Most of them wanted a better website but needed guidance how to do create one themselves.

Our user research helped us to define features that differentiated us from the rest of the CMS market. This included:

  1. building in a clear content strategy with pre-defined content types specifically for government.
  2. designing the workflow to help government staff be more objective and user needs driven.
  3. incorporated site analytics that motivated city staff to make better decisions and prioritizations.
  4. helped city staff write content that was shorter, simpler, and at an 8th grade reading level.

My role on this project included user research, prototyping, interaction design, and front-end development.