The employees at RPAD found two problems with their current website: it was frustrating to navigate the website themselves, and it was equally frustrating to receive constant calls from citizens who were having trouble filing property taxes or getting information from the website. I worked closely with my design lead, engineers, and project manager to make the experience of filing and finding tax information on the Real Property Assessment Division of Honolulu's (referred to as RPAD) website much easier to navigate.
KICKOFF (RESEARCH + INSIGHTS)
Unfortunately for this project, RPAD did not want us to conduct user testing on the citizens of Honolulu, so we were left to conduct our own assessment in-house. Our team pivoted to conducting user interviews with a sample size of the employees at RPAD instead, gathering information about what they perceived was a lot of pain points for their users. My design lead and I then proceeded to create a content audit, restructuring the website navigation based on the findings in our research to solve the main issues their customers were facing.
Some examples of pain points we found while conducting user testing:
CHALLENGES
SOLUTION
The solution myself and my team came forward with was to organize the information on the home page as a hub, where you could look at the page above the fold and see due dates, frequently asked questions, an easy to digest residential process video, and quick button links to most used pages.
For internal pages, we chunked the information into digestible tabs. Originally the tabs were located under the hero image, but we found this to be a bit cluttered. The final design would have the tabs off to the left, with easy clicking and hover options to show the information that was listed. RPAD provided us with a document of updated structured information, which helped us easily add the information during the process.
The rest of the site was a simple restructure of the contact and about us pages. These pages were updated to reflect the design of the new site with minimal changes. This website was also developed to be responsive on tablet and mobile.
