In April of 2020, we began to look at the analytics behind the website for the Department of Child Support Services for the County of San Diego.
The design refresh was centered around a few major aspects: information, ease of use, and visual continuity.
Previous homepage (left), page for existing customers (center), and page for new customers (right).
Our first hypothesis we wanted to test was the amount of available information to customers the instant that they loaded our webpage.
Previously (above) there was no text to explain who the Department of Child Support Services was or what they did and nothing to guide customers on each individual page. Additionally, the "Existing Customer" and "New Customer" pages were nearly identical in layout at a glance.
Refreshed webpages. Homepage (left), page for existing customers (center), and page for new customers (right)
We opted to try and provide as much information needed to the common "passer-by" so that they could understand at a quick glance the process behind child support. These are the same pages from above for comparison.
For frequent visitors to the website, we wanted to ensure that they could get to the services and pages that they wanted quickly and easily.
For example, our page for our "Tools for Existing Customers" was streamlined for ease of use. Previously many of these buttons were "below the fold" and a user would have to scroll at least once to get to them. We highlighted their importance by placing them at the top of the page and aimed to make them easy to see and understand at a quick glance, even on a mobile device (right).
Additionally, being a department within the larger County of San Diego means that we have certain visual guidelines and accessibility features that we must adhere to. We made a conscious creative decision to try and establish a visual language that fit well within the larger County ecosystem, while leaning on elements and colors that were more specific to our department.
In doing so, we developed an internal brand guide and harmonized colors based on our "Child Need Support" logo to be used across many different platforms to help create visual continuity for our brand going forward.
