Designing a nationwide government "do everything" platform

Designing an application that meets the needs of a single client can be challenging. You need to ensure that the app has amazing usability and a world class experience while balancing that with the client's desire to express themselves through your design.

...Now imagine that you're not just designing an app for one client, but instead you're designing a platform that needs to meet the needs of hundreds of elected officials, each wanting to express themselves in their own unique ways, all across the United States.

Enter GovHub. GovHub is a platform that government agencies can utilize to do everything from collecting taxes, to pet licenses, to parking tickets, to vehicle registrations. If the government is offering a service in one of their offices, GovHub should be able to offer the same service online.

As you'd imagine, the challenges of designing a "do everything" platform from scratch were many.

• How do you design a platform that supports any type of service, especially if most of those services are unknown at this time?

• How do make it so that even overly complex government operations can easily be navigated by everyone?

• How do you create a platform that requires as little code customization as possible while still allowing the clients to make it feel like their own application?

The list goes on and on.

While we could write a book about all of the challenges we faced and how we addressed each of them, let's focus on just one challenge for now: allowing all of the hundreds of government officials and agencies to express themselves throughout the application.

Let images do the heavy lifting

One of the best way of allowing for individualism within design is through the use of imagery. If done correctly, you can create a uniform experience across multiple clients while giving each of them the freedom to create something that feels uniquely their own.

For GovHub we choose to focus on the home page as the primary location for letting the clients shine via the use of full screen background images that highlight the best of what they have to offer.

Our clients loved that the background images are big and beautiful, immediately providing a sense of identity and class for the platform.

But the background images presented a new challenge. In order to make them work we had to make sure that the buttons on the home page would not only look good regardless of what background image is chosen, but also that they're accessible and can be easily interacted with regardless of ability or device.

After multiple rounds of brainstorming, design, and usability testing we decided to utilize white buttons with an opaque overlay. Feedback from these buttons were the most positive because they don't obstruct the view of the background in any way, they provide a clear call to action, and they meet all accessibility standards and are therefore usable regardless of the user's physical ability.

Checkout a quick walkthrough of Miami Dade's site below, highlighting the dynamic animations that we added to the buttons along with some additional pages that a user experiences along their journey.

Designing a platform like GovHub was a daunting task, but the reception from clients has been amazing and the platform has been credited with being the primary reason that many new clients choose the parent company to be their software provider.