In 2012, the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency (SFMTA) accepted our agency’s bid to redesign its website.
I set out to rewrite the beast from scratch.
All 2,000 pages of it.
Because it actually was
SFMTA.com was old. And it showed.
Both the public and SFMTA staff found the site overwhelming and unusable:
It needed an update.
Understanding our client’s world
At our first stakeholder meeting, we ran a domain modeling workshop.
In one session, we learned their organizational structure, external partnerships, and in-house jargon.
Once we could speak their language, we began coaching them away from their org chart and into a user-centered mindset.
<aside> 👍 I can’t recommend this exercise enough. It will help you understand your users, clients, customers — even your coworkers, and the invisible power dynamics at your own job.
</aside>
Diagnosing an ocean of ills
We used qualitative interviews, email support requests, and an index of customer questions submitted to 511.org to create personas, write user stories, prioritize content, and shape the site’s IA.
Then, I opened a blank spreadsheet and my nightmare began.
Auditing a 13 year-old city website is like doing a KonMari decluttering of a landfill. Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill both ways.
<aside> 💪 Spiritually, this audit broke me. Professionally, it inoculated me against project overwhelm for the rest of my life.
</aside>
Object-oriented content design
After the audit, I joined the planning stage of the custom Drupal build.
I collaborated with our lead developer and visual designer to define a modular content system and layout templates.
My monstrous, magnificent content audit guided what needed to be created, removed, or rewritten, and how the new layouts would accommodate it.