Brand & marketing strategy, UX design, and creative direction.
Brand & marketing strategy, UX design, and creative direction.
Rebuilding the online presence of Texas’ IT backbone.
User Research, Information Architecture, Drupal CMS, Brand Design, Visual Design, Responsive Design System, Messaging
DIR manages all communications technology, government information and related operations for the state of Texas. Through its website, they connect state agencies to the best IT vendors in the country. With its infrastructure, they’re responsible for securing the state’s data. They’re charged—by law—with driving the economic competitiveness of Texas.
But you wouldn’t have known it by the state of their old website:
Years of feature creep had taken its toll: the sitemap was unmanageable, content was ungoverned, services unfindable, responsive support nonexistent. Audience goals had blurred and customer calls were piling up.
It was time to migrate 100K+ pages of content into an intuitive architecture and a dynamic CMS. But what would DIR need in the future, and what did users need now?
Through audits, surveys, interviews, and workshops, we identified needs of users. Gauging DIR’s capacity to manage success, we drafted a design strategy with realistic short and long term goals.
Before rebuilding site architecture, we plotted every user need and desired outcome. This process informed our taxonomies and the functionality each journey would require.
Our new content architecture would yield new content types (structured and unstructured) and design patterns requiring a balancing act between ease of migration, engineering, usability and budget.
The visual design would support both the organizational identity and the user experience. The new component-based system embraced a minimalist language, conveying a clear and simple interface for task-heavy usage, across devices, that was easy to read and scale.
New system typography, color palette and image art direction carried over to offline marketing and collateral, rounding out a brand transformation anchored in a digital-first mindset.
A deep bench of new content types required an atomic methodology and a flexible system of responsive components.
We made every piece of functionality not just responsive, but progressively enhanced for a universal, seamless, device-optimized experience.
Last but not least, a small moment of delight. Being a fully WCAG AA accessible site, flashy animation and transitions were off-limits. Instead, we added a small set of custom marketing icons to add subtle character across the new intentionally stark branding.
Organization and clear design ops were critical: Components shared taxonomies and class names. Libraries were linked between visual design and dev handoff (Figma > Zeplin). Version control and documentation were cloud-based, and QA run using an agile, kanban-based PM process.