Dallas City Hall - City Calendar Module
Product: Responsive City Calendar on Dallas City Hall website and Department facing admin view to add/edit the events in this calendar.
Role: Integral part of the product team. Shared responsibility for defining use cases with IT Managers, and city departments.
Defining overall solution, features & estimations. Designing user-flows, wireframes & Visual Designs for responsive web.
Key Contributions:
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Conceptualizing admin controlled event feeds based on different rules
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'Duplicate event' feature for repetitive events with different agendas
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Defining the co-related functions on the admin tool, based on the features on citizen-facing website
Objective & Success mesurement
Objective
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Separating 'Department Content' from 'Citizen Services'
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Building a unified solution for 'Event Management' for Dallas City Hall
Success metrics
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Number of department adapting to the new event management system by EOD 2021 (Targeted at 10)
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Number of events created per department
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Detail Page Views
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Number of clicks on 'Add to Calendar'
Discovery Phase
Understanding Current User Flows & Problems
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Intercept Interviews with users
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Interviews with Department PR & CIO PR
User
Problem
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The current city calendar is difficult to use and
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Not able to keep track of council meetings and other urban development-related events
Ideal State
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View all city events in one place and filter them based on interest
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Receive SMS/Email notifications for events based on users interest
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Able to view live meetings and participate online
Dallas Citizen
- Doesn't know how to create events and add them to the department webpage
- Finds SharePoint too complex & 'Techie' to work with
- Gets a lot of calls for the canceled events & the exact location of the meeting hall
- Simple tool for creating events and sharing them on social channels.
- Ability to link the external event page. e.g. Texas Fair
- Ability to create recurring events
- Ability to notify people on cancelled events
Department PR
Office of Communications PR
- Wants to promote important events happening in the city of DCH home page
- Finds SharePoint too complex & 'Techie' to work with
- Wants to promote few department events if they are important at the city level. e.g. Events at Klyde Warren or Convention Centre
- Simple tool for creating events and sharing them on social channels.
- Ability to display all events happening in Dallas City & convention center
- Ability to create banners promoting key yearly events or special events
Understanding Background & Limitations
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Departments (36 in total) at Dallas city hall are using disparate solutions for public participation like FB Events, Posters, Public outlook Calendar & sometimes a custom SharePoint component.
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Due to this, there is inconsistency leading to a high learning curve involved with interacting with event/calendar-related UI.
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The currently used SharePoint tool is limiting in terms of flexibility and features. Because of this IT Services at Dallas City Hall (DCH) is aiming at building a custom component library by separating content and UI.
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Transitioning from department centric solutions to citizen-centric workflows
Comparative Study
Insights
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Filter by department, keywords & date
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Avoid event images
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Displaying contact person with name & phone number
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Event registration flow
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Difference between Multiday events (consecutive), Event Series (Multiple days within a timeframe ), Recurring events (Monthly/ Yearly Events)
Define Phase
Design Thinking Workshop
Design thinking session with key stakeholders & first internal customer (Planning & Urban Design Department).
Solution -
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A responsive 'Calendar' component for citizens
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Admin panel for creating and managing events
City Calendar - Requirements Document
City Calendar Admin Panel - Requirements Document
Design Phase
Designing wireframes & prototype based on City Design guidelines and department-specific branding
Prototype for Admin Panel
Prototype for citizen-facing website
Event Detail Page Variations
Deploy Phase
Supported the deployment in terms of creating the first few events using the admin panel for the 'Forward Dallas' Site. The calendar component is currently deployed in 'Forward Dallas Website' which is controlled through a 'SharePoint' dashboard.
The proposed Admin panel is under development and the calendar component will be deployed on 'City Calendar'.