City of Calgary
Green Line
Roles and responsibilities
My role:
Skillset:
Timeline:
Work nature:
Leader + Managing Client Relations + Senior UX Architect (Individual Contributor)
Communications + Negotiations + Analytics reporting + IA
6 months
In-house - City of Calgary
Context
Green Line is the largest infrstrucre project currently, as of 2024, in the City of Calgary. They were ground breaking in summer 2024 and wanted to rewamp their entire exsiting website which was to tell the citizens of Calgary about this upcoming project to now prepare the city and citizens for this major construction project that will disrupt a lot of lives.
My Process
Business Requirements
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Gathering business requirements
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Understanding their goals
Metrics and Analytics
Users and Persona
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Persona and Content Needs
Information Architecture
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Card sort
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Challenge: Card Sort
Challenges: Project Wide
Solution
Impact
Lessons Learnt
Business Requirements
Understanding the needs of the business unit is one of my core design philosophies.
Some of my core interview questions:
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What is your goal for this project?
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Who are the stakeholders/ decision makers?
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Why this date? What is it tied to?
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What could be the potential roadblocks?
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....more.
Goal #1
Connect people through station areas
Goal #2
For people to understand the area/ stations Green Line will serve
Goal #3
For people to understand the timeline
Metrics and Analytics
Analytics of the current website
I set up a crazy egg for the current top pages. I determined theses pages from the Adobe Analytics that we use in house. I also consulted the GL business about the top pages as per them. This helped me to:
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Understand what pages are users clicking on from their home pages.
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Where are the spending a bulk of their time.
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The Adobe Analytics gave us a better picture of the past 6 months on where are people coming from, what are they searching for on Google to land on the intermediate pages, the flow from pages to pages for bulk of the users, bounce rates, amount of time being spent on the top pages.
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Amount of time being spent ca be an indicators of 2 polar opposite factors:
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If the time spent is too little and they're bouncing off way too quickly, ifs an indicator that they didn't find what they were looking for.
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If the time spent is too long, it could mean the content was engaging or difficult to grasp.
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One has to be very careful when looking into the analytics and take it with a huge pinch of salt.
311 Phone Enquiry Survey
Strengths and weakness of current content
This helped us understand:
1. What are the burning issues people call up most about like Costs, Construction, and Timeline. They are either missing, buried or mislabeled.
2. What are the top topics that keep coming up in enquiry?
3. The nature of these enquiries- what specific content are they about? Does that content exist on our website?
4. Any usual comments that needed a second look?
Users and Persona
Full disclosure: This work was not done by our team. An external agency was hired by Green Line Business to identify the personas. But since personas are important to the story, hence a brief mention. All credit to eCommerce Canada for this work.
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This is the group that lives in the vicinity of the construction zones.
What do Impacted Calgarians care for:
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Community level updates
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How's my area impacted?
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How's my commute to work and other amenities in my area affected?
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This is the group that owns a business in the construction affected area.
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This group also has employees commuting to and from work.
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This will be the loudest group if not attended in time.
What do Businesses and Employees care for:
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How are customers getting into my store?
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What accommodations do I need to make for smooth business running?
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What resources are at my disposal to help during this tough time?
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This group encompasses every taxpayer of the city NOT in the construction zone.
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This group may not be the loudest but is the largest in number.
What do Broader Calgarians care for:
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What is the timeline for this?
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How will this infrastructure affect the prices of different communities?
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Will the current construction impact my commutes?
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This group includes people from around the globe who are passionate about such infrastructure projects.
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They are usually the Subject Matter Experts when it comes to infrastructure or construction.
What do Project Enthusiast care for:
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How large is this project? Project costs?
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What are the timelines?
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What do the photos/ rendering of the built look like?
Persona and Content Needs
This was a work done by me to understand how the different user needs help us formulate the content needs.
This table helped me understand how important each user persona is. We had 4 but we can not priortize all 4. This helped us priortize IA for Impacted Calgarians and Business and Employees.
Information Architecture
Card Sort
My team and I listed all the pages of the current IA and renamed them to prepare for a card sort exercise with the Green Line business team. For example, 'Impacts and Notices' were changed to 'Construction Impact', and 'Making Connections' was changed to 'Expanding the Transit Network'. The reason to change this was:
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more plain language for end user
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prevent the participants of this activity from grouping the current labels in the same categories as the existing site
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Existing IA topics
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Top 15 buried pages that had the most clicks
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Issues that people called about that did not exist
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Construction-related content that GL business said they want to highlight on the new website
69 items!
Challenge: Card Sort
The Green Line business unit arranged the card sort participants. We discovered last minute that maybe 5 out of 20+ participants were non-Green Line business unit employees. AKA most participants were Green Line employees who were well versed with their existing website and we risked skewing the data by mimicking their current website.
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California High-Speed Railway Authority
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Metrolinx- Projects and Programs
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East-West rail UK
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Suburban Rail Loop- Australia
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High Speed 2 UK
Solution
Priming!
At the start of the activity, we showed our participants 5 infrastructure websites from around the world to prime them with creativity. We emphasized on their IA grouping. This idea was purely brought forward by me. My team-mate did an excellent ice-breaker activity by asking each participant about their favourite Dessert item and showed them different ways to categorize.
Card Sort Activity
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We split the participants into groups of 4 and in a way that no two people of the same discipline end up together. E.g.: No 2 engineers together etc.
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The GL employee pool was from around the world SME- LA, NY, London, Mexico, you name it.
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The card sort was a huge success. People contributed wholeheartedly.
It was an open card sort
Top three lessons from this exercise:
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People want plain language and not business or construction jargon.
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People care about 'what's happening outside my front door' and not so much about everything else that's happening.
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People want to know the overall map of the construction and timelines.
Lesson learnt about the activity:
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69 items are too many items for people to process.
Our card sort yielded an IA that went through two tree tests after.
We went through 10 different versions of the IA due to the challenges listed below in the next section.
Challenges: Project wide
Throughout the project, The Green Line Business had 3 major challenges:
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Lack of knowledge of content and frequency of updates
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Very Internally focused/ business-y website
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Unable to make a decision on Navigation functionality
The Mess: Lack of knowledge of content and frequency of updates
They did now know what kind of content update they would get from the construction site and the frequency of it. This meant that Green Line Business was unable to finalize an IA. And we were 2 months away from the launch.
Unknow unknowns
Unknow unknowns
Unknow unknowns
Unknow unknowns
Known Unknowns
Known knowns
Known Unknowns:
For this, my team researched similar infrastructure websites to create them with a wish list of items that will help their targeted personas to accomplish their goals.
Known knowns:
For this, we already had a laundry list of items from the previous website. plus the data from metrics and analytics of what people were looking to get an answer to.
Merging the 2, known unknowns and known knowns helped us set up broad categories of items to accommodate for. We assured the Green Line client that the IA labels could be edited until the very end. And we keep the IA and it's broad categories flexible in-terms of naming. We went through 10+ iterations of the IA as they found out more but we worked with them at every step of the way.
Solution
The Mess:
Unable to make a decision on Navigation functionality
Green Line had a very particular view regarding the website's navigation functionality. Our developers had already put in the time to develop this brand-new IA navigation functionality. But Green Line decided to not go with it and wanted to start from scratch. This stressed our PM out! Developers had raised their hands.
Solution
Tacticle Empathy
Active Listening
Curiosity
I scheduled a session with them to go with non-judgemental open-ended questions to understand their internal motivations.
By leaning in I found out that due to WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, there was a requirement to have an overview page for each section, which was not sitting well with the Green Line Business. They found it redundant and unnecessary. They felt this page would only repeat content and be a wasted click.
I empathized with their request and we had a back-and-forth chat (details I am happy to discuss at an interview). And we were able to reach a point of agreement that made them satisfied and that is how it got implemented as well.
The Mess: Very Internally focused/ business-y website
The IA was starting to reflect the internal priorities of the business unit. For example, they wanted to one of the IA items to be about a tunnel-boring machine which they would be getting from Germany to dig up the tunnel.
Step # 1
Tacticle Empathy
Active Listening
Curiosity
I scheduled a session with them to go with non-judgemental open-ended questions to understand their internal motivations.
Step # 2
Refocus: Users and Feelings Exercise
I scheduled a session with the Green Line business to do an internal self-reflection. I showed them the 'Emotion and Feeling Wheel' below to show them an array of emotions one feels.
I asked them 2 questions:
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What are the feelings that people will be feeling during construction?
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How you want the users to feel?
Rank emotions:
I collected all the emotions related to 'how you want users to feel' below and asked the team to rank them.
The top 3 feelings that came through are:
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Informed
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Optimistic
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Excited
This exercise helped the Green Line business to embody what it feels like to be amidst construction and to refocus on the website's purpose to make people's lives easier. This became a North Star, and every time we got caught in this circle again, pointing them to this North Star helped us focus on what matters- the users and how we want them to feel!
Solution
Solution
Wireframes
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Some of the things I worked on but not shown here:
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Detailed navigation functionality design and multiple presentations to Green Line Business.
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I presented to the Directors and higher-up stakeholders at numerous points throughout the project to get their buy-in.
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Flushing out the template requirements for station pages and content requirements to these.
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Storytelling needs to use animations and the details of it.
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A lot of negotiations and persuasion along the way, through the project.
Here's the link to the live site which was the final output of this effort:
Impact
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The bounce rate post-launch was 40.4% which is still high but the average time spent went up by 14.4%
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People were most engaged with the Stations pages.
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We met Green Line's goals of connecting people via station and showing people the timeline and areas on the map this line will serve for Calgarians.
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We met the launch date of June 2024 even with changing goalposts and unclear directions.
Lessons Learnt
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The Client Relations from the past with Green Line Business Unit were rough. There was a lack of trust. Green Line is one of our more demanding clients who want to do good work but lack insights on the web processes. And lack of trust has made them not be receptive to us in the past. It was a bumpy start, with a lack of response from their end on anything proposed. So entering the project was like entering a war zone. I was worried for the mental health of my team, especially the UX Architect (UXA). But I took this as the opportunity to practice negotiations, empathy, curiosity and active listening skills at every step of the way. There were some rough meetings which impacted the mental health of my UXA. I reached out to him and took work off his plate to give them a mental break. Also asked them to not attend any meetings with Green Line until they were completely ready.
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There is power in collaboration, and this project was a testimony to it. Every time we felt we didn't have a way around it, it helped to get everyone in the same room, ideally in person, and organize activities to brainstorm together. This helps people, no matter how close they may seem, so approach the table with a curious mindset and be open and receptive to others as we're hard-wired for reciprocity.