Navigation

Since its creation in 2016, the number of pages on the redesigned phila.gov platform has grown significantly. It’s home to over 100 City departments and agencies, 150 programs and initiatives, and over 700 services. As the platform expanded, the need for more content types, pages, and components was imperative yet the website navigation and information architecture hadn’t been revisited since we launched the redesign.

I managed and led a team of six including myself and a UX designer, content team lead, software engineering team lead, and two other software engineers in a comprehensive overhaul of navigation on phila.gov. The project aimed to integrate new content types and applications into information architecture; improve the accessibility and consistency of phila.gov navigation across pages, features, and devices; and restructure the secondary menu on department and program pages for improved versatility on desktop and readability on mobile. This project updated navigation on the website through all levels including:

Global navigation (where am I?)
Local navigation (what’s nearby?)
Contextual navigation (what’s related?)
• Navigating within a page
• Navigating to a related page
Utility navigation (what can I do?)

While completing a comprehensive audit of the website's navigation, I classified all the elements and set up a virtual whiteboard to collect feedback.

After soliciting and organizing insights from across the Digital Services team, I conducted an affinity mapping exercise with leadership to repackage the possibilities into discrete projects/tasks. From there we ranked them in a priority matrix to determine which opportunities we would pursue.

zeryabsial@gmail.com