Homepage built with EmpowerLA's design system
Brining the voices of Los Angeles’ 99 neighborhoods into the design and decision making process to help EmpowerLA better serve their constituents and re-imagine what website experience.
Empower LA
The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment represents LA’s 99 neighborhoods and together makes up a grassroots level of the Los Angeles City government to ensure the recognition and accommodation of these diverse communities in city governance.
Role
Product Designer
Design Thinking Facilitator
Deliverables
Usability Research
Workshop Designs
E
Product Designs
Summary
Empower LA, a department of the Los Angeles City government, wanted to improve its website's design and functionality by gathering insights from end-users. Using a three-phased approach that included design thinking and human-centered design tools, the project team delivered a reimagined website experience along with a design system, templates, and resources for the DONE team and development partner to build and launch the new website.
Discovery workshop with over 50 community members
The Challenge
The Department of Neighborhood Empowerment wanted to gather feedback and insights directly from the EmpowerLA website’s end-users – board members, public stakeholders and staff – to help the DONE team better understand and prioritize challenges within the current website, identify areas for improvement, and determine the greatest needs/wants of end-users.
Our Approach
We broke their challenge into three phases, starting first with a Discovery Workshop and brought together a diverse group of website users that represent the 99 neighborhoods of Los Angeles City to prioritize and unpack their pain points.
Throughout the project, we leveraged design thinking and human-centered design tools not only to understand challenges both constituents (users) and the DONE team was experiencing, but also held multiple sessions to help operations, design, and the development team stay aligned on various efforts to reduce misalignment and risk.
Alignment workshop with the EmpowerLA team to align on features
As part of phase two, we brought this prioritized list of pain points to the 15 EmpowerLA team members as part of an Alignment Workshop to contribute additional context to the identified user pain points and together develop tangible next steps and strategies for the team to begin planning design and development of the new EmpowerLA website.
Finally in phase three, we worked with the team define a website architecture, design deliverables focused addressing user pain points, and working with their external development partner all parties were aligned on an approach and timeline.
"I really believe the website and overall project wouldn’t be where it’s at without the support and guidance of Maicol and Rachael."
Julien Antelin
Director of Innovation, Neighborhood Empowerment for the City of Los Angeles
Wiki with instructions, resources, and design system for designers and developers to reference
Design system built in Figma to allow the EmpowerLA team to continue expanding the site