City of Somerville

Located outside of Boston, Somerville, Massachusetts is well known for its inclusive civic engagement. In collaboration with Code for America, Somerville joined the Digital Front Door movement to redesign their municipal website and enhance access and features for citizens and city employees. As a leader in innovative government online communications, I.F. was brought in as a key partner to build the city's Drupal website. 

Success through teamwork

We began with our Voice of Citizen® analytics to understand Somerville’s users and worked closely with Somerville’s project stakeholders to prioritize features for the new site.

I.F. worked in conjunction with Somerville’s selected design firm to implement a clean search-driven user experience in Drupal. We ran multiple rounds of user testing to ensure the site was intuitive as well as beautiful. The end result was a new city portal that quickly took citizens to the information they needed. This greatly improved the user satisfaction rates I.F. measured with ongoing Voice of Citizen® analysis. 

Success factors 

• In-depth discovery process to target key site features
• Multiple rounds of user testing
• Fully responsive design and functionality
• Easy-to-use city portal on homepage

Innovation in action: At-a-glance dashboard

Need to know when school is in session? When trash will get picked up? How about alerts for street sweeping, snow emergencies, or construction detours? As part of our effort to create a search-driven user experience, we created a city portal on Somerville’s homepage that offers an at-a-glance dashboard, keeping residents up to date about the status of different local services.