Case Study: Reimagining Government Services Around Citizens, Not Organizational Structure

The problem

Government websites nationwide — including Las Vegas’s — typically mirrored the internal structure of government itself. Each department and division promoted itself individually, presenting citizens with a myriad of different logos, navigation structures, and looks-and-feel. To pay a bill, register for a class, or find a service, a citizen first had to know which department and division owned it. That’s putting the burden of knowing which department owns what onto the citizen, and it was baked directly into the navigation of nearly every city site in the country.

The reframe

I challenged the common convention of the time that citizens should have to know — or care — about an organization’s internal structure in order to find a service. I also made the case that Las Vegas should present itself as ONE city offering CITY services, not a collection of disparate departments. Someone coming to do business with local government wasn’t thinking about a department; they were thinking about the City of Las Vegas. Having to navigate a patchwork of disconnected sites, each with its own look and logic, was a poor experience regardless of how well any single department’s page was built.

The solution

I reimagined the city’s site around plain-language citizen tasks instead of departmental structure — “pay a bill,” “register for classes” — removing the organizational barrier entirely. This meant rethinking information architecture and navigation from the ground up, not just relabeling existing department pages. It also broke down the site’s siloed structure, making it far easier for citizens to discover related services that happened to be owned by a different part of the city than the one they started in.

Beyond the redesign itself, I introduced usability testing into the city’s software development lifecycle and worked to educate the organization broadly on user-centered design principles — so the task-based thinking wasn’t a one-time redesign, but became how the city approached digital work going forward.

Building consensus

An idea this radical for its time couldn’t succeed on the strength of the idea alone — it needed genuine buy-in from all 18 city departments and the city manager, not just tolerance of a top-down mandate. I made a deliberate choice to bring in an outside vendor to deliver a usability and web-design training course, which I helped design, to representatives from every department — outside experts tend to be trusted with a message that would be second-guessed coming from an internal voice, and that trust mattered for a change this fundamental.

The training included an exercise I helped design specifically so departments would arrive at the reframe themselves rather than have it handed to them: participants listed the nouns the city offered — licenses, permits, classes — and then the verbs residents would likely associate with those nouns: apply for a license, register for a class. Working through that exercise firsthand is what led departments to the same conclusion I’d already reached: a citizen-focused, task-based navigation structure wasn’t one option among several — it was the only one that made sense.

That process is what turned a genuinely radical idea into unanimous agreement across all 18 departments and the city manager — one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of in my career.

The outcome

• 289% increase in citizen online transactions directly attributable to the redesign
• Best of the Web award for best city government portal in the country, built on the information architecture and navigation I conceived
• The Center for Digital Government recognized the approach and revised its own national award criteria to reflect it — and the citizen-task model became the standard most government websites nationally have since followed

What made this work

The redesign succeeded because it started from a genuine reframe rather than a visual refresh. Most government-site projects at the time focused on modernizing the look of department pages; this one questioned whether department pages should be the organizing principle at all. That’s the same instinct I bring to any complex problem: understand what’s actually broken before deciding what to fix.