Case Study: How a citizen-first redesign increased online transactions 289%

The challenge

Government websites nationwide, including Las Vegas’s, mirrored the internal structure of government itself. Each department promoted itself individually — its own logo, its own navigation, its own look 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 key insight

Citizens weren’t thinking about departments. They were thinking about the City of Las Vegas. I challenged the common convention that citizens should have to know — or care — about the organization’s internal structure just to find a service, and made the case that the City should present itself as ONE city offering CITY services, not a collection of disparate departments.

What I did

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. It also broke down the site’s siloed structure, making it far easier for citizens to discover related services owned by a different part of the city than the one they started in.

How I got it adopted

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. I brought in an outside vendor to deliver a usability and web-design training course, which I helped design, to representatives from every department knowing that outside experts tend to be trusted with a message that would be second-guessed coming from an internal voice.

The training included an exercise I helped design specifically so departments would arrive at the reframe themselves: 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. 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.

Beyond the project 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 became how the city approached digital work going forward, not a one-time project.

Results

• 289% increase in citizen online transactions
• Best of the Web award for best city government portal in the country
• The Center for Digital Government revised its national award criteria to reflect this approach — it became the model most government websites nationally have since followed

What this demonstrates

• Reframing a problem at its root, not its symptoms
• Building genuine, unanimous consensus across a fragmented organization — not through mandate, but by engineering the conditions for people to arrive there themselves
• Translating that consensus into a measurably better solution