Synopsis

Group College Project

Timeline:

14 weeks

Problem

MyFlorida.com, the official state portal for the State of Florida, missed the mark in more ways than one. With a lack of branding and calls to action that failed in aiding users in finding the important information they needed, myflorida was a nightmare for Florida residents. Here were the major issues:

When people think of Florida, they think of family vacations at Disney World and beautiful beaches. Myflorida did not provide any information regarding Florida’s most successful source of revenue: tourism. Myflorida also had no mention of policies and safety protocols for residents in regard to COVID-19, something that is imperative for residents to know for the sake of their health. While most state portals hosted necessary information in regard to travel, education, jobs, and residency, myflorida.com failed to provide this basic type of information.

Lack of relevant content

Myflorida.com is a single-page application that does not load any new information when requested but rather directs the users to a completely different website that hosts the information the user was searching for via external links. Myflorida.com is essentially a home page to a completely different website, flgov.com.

The website's links directing the users to another website, flgov.com, makes the whole experience for the user inconsistent in terms of styling. While some of the design choices overlapped for the two separate websites, there are stark differences in the layout and typography of the two sites.

In the areas of design accessibility, myflorida fell short. Certain bodies of text on the site are quite small and do not meet the text recommendation of at least sixteen pixels for font size. Some color combinations on the website also did not meet the necessary contrast ratio for users with visual impairments.

This site needed a lot of done to revamp it, but the main goals to focus on are:

Competitive Analysis

Before we continued forward with our redesign process, we did a competitive analysis with other state portals including California (ca.gov), Mississippi (ms.gov), and Michigan (michigian.gov). We liked the intuitive nature of California’s navigation and Missiippis's implementation of a dark mode. From Michigan’s state portal, we strive to imitate its simplicity and ease of navigation. We strived to utilize similar features in our redesign of myflorida.

Partial Rebranding

Before we could rebrand myflorida, we first had to understand why the current design choices were not working. The three main issues were the logo, colors, and inconsistent styling.

Myflorida’s original logo was simply the state seal of Florida. Besides the lack of creativity of the logo, the seal itself is visually busy and unappealing to the eye. For the new logo, our team wanted to simplify the logo in a way that still represents Florida well. Since Florida is well known for growing a variety of crops, we decided we would represent a fruit stem along with the name of the state portal.

Logo

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Developing a responsive and functional layout for added content

From our market analysis research, we found that myflorida was missing a lot of basic information that other state portals had such as education, travel, and jobs, just to name a few. We knew in the revamp of myflorida that we needed to include this information and wanted to ensure we categorized information in an easy-to-understand format, so we created a sitemap to organize our thoughts.

Since we decided to add a large amount of new content to myflorida.com itself to follow suit without competitors, we needed to make sure that we organized all this new content in a manner that was easy for the user to navigate. To do this, we created mid-fidelity wireframes for both desktop and mobile devices to ensure our design allowed users to easily find what they were looking for.

Mobile Design

Key features

Design Accessibility

Design accessibility is important for every product. For this redesign, we wanted to ensure the website was as accessible as possible within the tool and time constraints we had.

Final Product

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Future Improvement and Insights

• Don’t confine yourself to a small design box: As the designer, I partnered with our social media and branding specialist to pick colors that we thought best represented Florida. While we tried a wide spectrum of different hues of blue, green, yellow, and orange, I wish my teammate and I did not give ourselves that tight of a design constraint. If we instead chose to implement one of those colors and used neutral complimentary colors, I think our design could have looked more elegant and refined.

• Test multiple designs: While our UX/UI specialist did a great job with the wireframes, I feel as though much more iteration could have been done to make even more appealing yet effective design layouts.

• Don’t be shy to help outside of your selected role: Even though as was the designated designer, I had to help the development team on WordPress due to time constraints. What I found is that I really enjoy development and seeing the designs come to life. I am glad I did not constrain myself to only design during this project.

• Communicate well and communicate often: With so many working parts moving towards one goal, it is easy for things to get lost in translation. What I learned from this experience is that frequent communication is imperative for all team members to make the project flow better with ease.

• Sometimes, unfinished projects will be handed to you: I want to note that we were not able to accomplish a lot of what we set out to do during the development phase due to being given only two weeks to accomplish it. The project was supposed to be carried onto the next semester, however, our projects got switched around and I was then placed on another project to complete. This was part of our professor’s plan to prepare us for the workforce in which sometimes we will be dropped into the middle of new projects in which we have to speedily catch up and finish development from there.

I think my team and I did a wonderful job at revamping myflorida. It was my first time working as a group on any college project and I learned many valuable lessons from it.