City of Los Angeles: LACity.gov

The Client

The City of Los Angeles is home to more than 4 million residents, 500,000 businesses, and 48 million annual tourists. From mountains to beaches to valleys, the City of Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolitan area covering more than 469 square miles. As diverse as its geography is, its population is even more diverse, with residents from more than 140 countries, speaking 224 different languages. 

The Situation

The City of Los Angeles heavily relies on its technology —  specifically its websites — to connect with and engage with its large, diverse population. 

The Challenge

The City of Los Angeles' official website was last redesigned in May 2019, prior to COVID-19 and the multiple social justice issues that would end up causing civil unrest. People's faith in government institutions was shaken and the City needed to reaffirm to its residents that the City government was there to assist in bettering its communities and its infrastructure. 

The Solution 

Previously, the City website primarily highlighted infrastructure work — paving streets, cleaning walls, etc. The new site, which included an upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, added to this, highlighting the communities of people that the City provides support for to showcase the City’s responsiveness and accountability to its citizens. The new site provides community assistance links to housing and renter rights, senior services, domestic violence survivors, and more, in addition to providing info on how residents can engage with their community through voting, volunteering, and other kinds of civic engagement. 

The updated site also allows citizens to report legitimate complaints and concerns about the government, including the anonymous reporting of fraud, waste, and abuse. In addition, the City updated all website copy in order to make it simpler to understand. Using simpler English language on the site also had the added benefit of making the site easier to translate to other languages using tools like Google Translate, which was built into the site.

The Results

The City of LA prioritizes user qualitative and quantitative feedback loops and a monthly metrics review to make continuous improvements across its digital services. Qualitatively, the City uses resident focus groups, app store comments, elected official feedback, and other methods to identify what customers like and dislike about a service; quantitatively, it uses performance measures, click rates, downtime, average time on app/site, and net promoter score (NPS) online surveys. 

Standardizing on NPS as a measure of performance across its services, the City randomly selected 5% of users and asked them how likely they would recommend the service to a friend or family member. The City then can compare results with other industries, and create improvement targets and perform A/B testing. Initial feedback from the community and elected officials on the new LACity.gov website has been very positive, with NPS scores increasing from a -6 in June to 17 in July.