Partnership for Public Service homepage in 2025
Partnership for Public Service
The Challenge: Build a Better Government
The nonpartisan, nonprofit Partnership for Public Service aims to build a government that better serves the public through thought leadership, training, and public awareness campaigns. For seven years, I was responsible for the design of the Partnership’s main website, which attracts half a million users from diverse audiences annually. In addition to designing around the needs of external stakeholders—civil servants, the media, the general public, and others—I needed to consider the goals and needs of an equally diverse group of internal stakeholders.
Beginnings: From Dreamweaver to WordPress
When I joined the Partnership in late 2017, the organization didn’t have a CMS. After a few months of working with the site code in Dreamweaver, we hired an agency to build parent and child themes for our sites in WordPress. I assisted with content migration and from 2018 on I was the primary WordPress operator for the Partnership. I led yearly tutorials for WordPress users across the organization to empower teams to own content updates on their pages of the site.
The Partnership’s leadership development course catalog for government employees
Improving Information Architecture by Interviewing Stakeholders
In 2020, the Partnership pivoted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic to begin offering more of its courses and resources remotely. Along with this programmatic change, the organization decided to update its design system and website. I was the lead designer of an information architecture overhaul and UI redesign for the Partnership’s website in 2021. I met with internal stakeholders from every department in the organization (approximately eight teams comprising 150 people) to understand the unique needs of different lines of business. Using the qualitative data from these focus groups, I made user journey maps to identify potential pain points in common user interactions like signing up for leadership development courses. Aided by additional data on external stakeholders collected by my colleagues, I made wireframes for the nearly 100 different screens across the website.
One of the Partnership’s data dashboards
Telling Better Stories with Data
After the launch of the redesigned website, I built new standalone products, such as an agency performance dashboard showing fast facts about 33 major federal agencies. I also designed a dashboard, updated annually, monitoring public perceptions of government across time and evaluating the state of trust in government. I regularly referred to quantitative data from Google Analytics and heatmaps to understand user behaviors and identify areas for improvement across the website.
A microsite I developed for the Federal Data Excellence Program
Boosting Engagement by 53% with Components and Collaboration
In 2024, I convened monthly meetings with teammates in marketing and content writing to coordinate a strategy for improving engagement on the site. For my part, I made updates to our component library to improve the usability and responsiveness of site features. Thanks to this collaborative effort, we saw engaged sessions on the website increase by 53% in 2024 compared to the previous year. I was able to verify that my UI changes and improved navigational components were having an impact on engagement by comparing heatmaps of site use before and after the changes were introduced.