About the program

Category: Civic education and public information (Best category award)

Year: 2017

County governments often face distinct challenges when it comes to building a “brand” and offering personalized services across the vast areas they manage. In Yuma County, Arizona—covering 5,522 square miles and home to two military bases—the local authorities aimed to align with the needs of its growing, dynamic community by revamping an outdated website into a customer service hub. A survey of the Yuma County website showed that residents prefer to handle government tasks online and want to do so quickly. Unfortunately, the former site fell short of those expectations. Analytics provided a comprehensive assessment of the existing website’s performance, revealing a heat map that indicated 90% of visitors only engaged with 10% of the site’s content. This pattern, it turns out, is common across government websites nationwide. Typically, these sites act as collections of information for residents and leave an initial good impression on visitors. However, the Yuma County team aimed for something more ambitious. Their vision was to create the new website as a true customer service center. They adopted a “Walmart” strategy for the redesign. Just like a megastore, where the main entrance functions like a homepage, and signs from the ceiling represent icons guiding users to different services, the new website incorporates that same logic. If visitors have questions or need help, they can find support right away—similar to a Walmart employee at the door. This is where the online chat feature comes in. Each page has an “Online Help Center” overlay, easily accessible on the right side for desktop users and at the bottom for mobile users. County staff monitor this chat during business hours and can relay messages after hours. Moreover, the homepage, along with all department or agency homepages, includes widgets highlighting the most requested content, focusing user attention on the top 10-20% of services offered.