Accela’s flagship offering, Civic Platform, is a beastly, configurable enterprise product with decades of strange decisions under the hood. While a total overhaul is still in the works, I delivered two major features to modernize the workflow and exceed our accessibility obligations.
With global search, we investigated the use cases for search and the limitations that users were coming up against in the old feature. A new design combines a workflow that more closely maps the mental model of a back-office worker creating reports, flexible filtering options and familiar design system components for an intuitive experience, all within some tricky API constraints.
The platform’s form designer was notoriously unfriendly and inaccessible, and did not help users on either side of the experience. After a dev upgrade to Angular, it was… almost responsive, but not giving our agencies what they wanted. Working with a design researcher and the PM, I stripped extraneous legacy configurability to provide a best-practices model with strong defaults, including supplementing drag-and-drop with accessible interactions and guidance on tab order and hot keys, and devised a migration plan for old customer forms.
Before the redesign, we had a non-responsive, inaccessible drag-and-drop that did not help the user navigate fields or align anything in a consistent manner.