Overview
The LA County Department of Building Safety carries out inspections and issues permits to builders in LA. Their mission is to ensure public safety and guide customers in building, energy, and green standards. I was brought onto a project for the LA County through Zobrist Consulting.
Role
As a freelance UX designer, I was tasked with defining new UI paradigms to improve the usability of the case management portal. The case management portal was used by county staff to review building projects submitted by county clients. Zobrist kept my role short and sweet.
Design
Inspection Case Management Service Application
For the redesign of the case management application, I used UI inspection and heuristics to identify usability problems associated with the current design.
- One page form was too long
- Form field widths were not a good indicator of required input length
- Form fields were not used in their appropriate context (ex: radio buttons vs drop-down menu)
- Users had no way to save. They had to fill the entire tedious form in one session, or all work was lost
I introduced tab navigation with the intention to introduce the ability to save the current incomplete state. The team decided that saving was a feature that would not go into the current iteration due to project time constraints.
Previous and next buttons helped navigate through the tabs.
Splitting up the long page site into three subsections helped focus users on relevant content and took away clutter.
The wire-frames were reviewed regularly and took roughly three iterations before reaching a consensus with both the client and tech team. I proceeded to design a mock-up of the final product in Illustrator. The dev team was able to successfully replicate my design in its entirety.
