San Mateo County
Improving ease-of-use and providing vital emergency information for San Mateo County’s 715,000+ residents
762,357
San Mateo County citizens using I.F. technology
27
Departments actively updating the website
1
Unified page for emergency COVID information
Special Features:
Drupal 10
Sitewide Alerts
Advanced Search
Machine Translation
Geolocation
Location/Maps
Located in the heart of Silicon Valley—the center of innovation—San Mateo County provides a vast array of services to its diverse residents, including social services, public health protection, housing programs, property tax assessments, tax collection, elections, and public safety. They partnered with I.F. to provide Drupal- and server-level maintenance and expansions for their complex, multi-site Drupal environment, and implement backend improvements and UX/UI enhancements.
Rock-solid and future-focused
As an Evolution & Support client, we worked iteratively with San Mateo County to improve their systems over time. First, we prioritized security enhancements, including transitioning all 23 sites to HTTPS. We then tackled their search feature by rebuilding their custom site crawler and modifying their content structure to make it consistent across their numerous sites. We also reduced their deployment time with a custom script. By analyzing our Our Voice of Citizen® data, we also improved their menu system and other navigation features.
Success factors
- Security-first practices
- Iterative back-end technical improvements
- Voice of Citizen® data revealed ways to increase ease of use
- User-centered navigation
Innovation in action: Responding to COVID-19
During the rapidly evolving COVID-19 emergency, our Evolution & Support team created a comprehensive landing page to provide residents with a single location for critical updates and resources. The County wanted an easy-to-use, flexible template they could update and maintain without outside assistance. We conducted research including an environmental scan to determine what information to present and how best to present it. The result was a landing page featuring a clear alert banner, options for embedded content such as aggregated news updates and health orders, and structured, customizable fields to organize the county's extensive resources. We also provided content and UX guidance to support an easily searchable, structured set of Shelter in Place FAQs, emphasizing clear labels and plain language.
