State of Rhode Island

The Client

RI.gov is the official government web portal for the State of Rhode Island. It’s built by a team dedicated to developing online services to enable citizens or businesses to complete tasks online.

The Situation

The State’s previous sites were a completely fractured landscape of statically maintained websites with multiple generations of design templates going back 15 years, differing with every agency. Additionally, each agency within the state needed to be able to “speak for itself” and publish with greater autonomy. The State needed a platform that could serve a wide variety of needs and levels of expertise. 

The Challenge

The State of Rhode Island wanted its updated website to:

• Establish a more unified “voice of truth” for the state through a common design language
• Provide agency authors with a cohesive design system and modern tools
• Normalize processes where scale can provide benefits, like online form handling
• Enable faster communication to citizens across the entire ecosystem
• Create a single platform that would allow for centralized technology management and reduced maintenance costs 
• Better serve citizens in the most performant and accessible way
• Grant agencies greater autonomy and the ability to communicate with the public more effectively, efficiently, and frequently by engaging more team members in the content writing and management process

The Solution

Working with digital experience firm Oomph, the teams decided to pivot from the original redesign project to focus on COVID-related sites first, which made it possible for the State to tap into COVID relief funding for the project. With the state already committed to Drupal and Acquia Site Factory, Oomph focused on research with stakeholders and agencies to define needed functionality and design flexibility. By adopting common typography with multiple color themes in a unified design system, accessibility and inclusivity were baked right into the platform. 

Additionally, the team put migration processes in place to easily import static content and files, preserving old URL paths to help ensure minimal disruption with old links and bookmarks. Site Factory and Drupal’s JSON API allowed Oomph to create a suite of custom modules to control asynchronous notifications to publish content hierarchically from one site to another across the network. Acquia Edge CDN and Edge Security ensure there won’t be downtime or site slowdowns due to attacks or event-driven traffic spikes. And the flexibility of Drupal’s theming system made it easy for Oomph to create admin controls for the visual theme, storing author preferences for how they wanted their agency or department site to look.

The Results

Oomph delivered the first site in a mere 4.5 months, and the State deployed 15 sites within eight months — so far, 67 sites are on the new platform. Metrics show that the new site is resonating with citizens and State staff:

• 300% improvement in page load times compared to legacy systems
• Improved authoring experience provides real-time constituent information delivery and engagement, especially around the frequently changing COVID information landscape
• New site deployments achieve 96-99% Lighthouse accessibility scores and performance scores consistently above 90%
• Greatly reduced risk of security and compliance incidents with the centralized, single code-base approach
• The consistent design system across agencies enhanced public trust 
• One-click deployment in Site Factory allows the State to launch new sites in minutes with accurate and consistent brand content