A small team of state employees and private-sector technologists is working to reinvent how California connects online with residents, through a sweeping redesign of the state’s homepage, CA.gov.
The group of 10 has just 12 to 14 weeks to develop what is being called “Alpha,” a new version of CA.gov with better functionality and improved access to services. They’re in their third week of work and the site is already live, being built piece by piece with real-time feedback from real-world users.
The California team is expanding on lessons learned during the rollout of Gov.UK and from the work of the United Kingdom Digital Service (UKDS), considered a gold standard for user-centered gov tech. Angelica B. Quirarte, assistant secretary for digital engagement at the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps), said the UKDS provided the fledgling team with insight into how to prioritize items to meet the delivery time window.
Michael Wilkening, special adviser on Innovation and Digital Services in the Office of the Governor, said a CA.gov redesign has seen various stages of development in recent years, but Gov. Gavin Newsom’s push to modernize state IT made this the perfect time to try a more radical approach.
Alpha is meant to be iterative, an evolving website shaped in part by resident critiques. The team’s user researcher is overseeing a six-question online survey asking participants questions such as: “Think back to the last time you needed to find information or actually get something done with a state government service. What was it? Did you trust the information you found?” The team plans to post a weekly blog and daily Twitter updates and to showcase its real-time work on GitHub to gather additional viewpoints from the public. Progress on Alpha is being closely watched by government officials in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Colorado, who are looking to give a user-focused makeover to their websites, as well.
The new site has a very simple look featuring a black-and-white color scheme and the Public Sans font developed by the United States Web Design System. It was designed using Bootstrap, a front-end website component library already in use by state agencies and departments — making website standardization potentially easier.
“This is part of that overall reconceptualization and reinvigorating the relationship between Californians and their government and rebasing it,” Wilkening said. “CA.gov should really be an embodiment of what that relationship looks like and it should be the place where people come to find out about California government, where they come to find out about services, how they access those services, ultimately it should be the place where they’re coming to apply for those sorts of benefits.”
The Alpha Team has embraced civic tech methodologies and productivity tools including Slack, G-Suite and GitHub. Everything the group learns is documented through various mediums, which will allow others in the gov tech space to easily replicate and build on the team’s work. By funneling the team’s workflow through GitHub, leaders are apprised of the staff’s workload, problems and task completion.
Team member Luke Fretwell, Alpha's project designer and CEO of Oakland-based ProudCity, said the nontraditional approach to providing a government service increases transparency and productivity. Coming from an open source background, he said he was initially apprehensive at how well open source and open culture would be viewed by his state contemporaries on the project.
“From my perspective, the folks that are on the state side that have been working in government for a long time are maybe used to a less-than-open culture. It’s been pretty amazing to see this team kind of disarm and be less inhibited about the way that they work,” Fretwell said.
When its initial 12 to 14 weeks ends, the group plans to continue its work on alpha.CA.gov — connecting with the state’s more than 130 agencies. Quirarte said even if the alpha site doesn’t function as initially imagined, the team’s work to rebuild trust between Californians and their government through an open and transparent design process will prove to be success enough. The group will have identified what Californians care about and how they want to interact with their government, she said.
“Alpha is for learning and even if I fail, if we fail, that’s still a lesson learned and someone else can pick it up and take it forward,” she said.
This story first appeared in Government Technology magazine, Techwire’s sister publication.
