City of Coral Gables

We partnered with the City of Coral Gables, Florida’s recognised Smart City, to overhaul their digital platform and deliver a streamlined, accessible, user-focused experience aligned with their vision.

22%

Faster page load times

6.4%

Increase in engagement

100%

ADA reviewed

The ask

After working with a number of UK councils, we began our partnership with the City of Coral Gables in Florida in early 2022. The city had recently been recognised as a Smart City, so the new website needed to reflect this initiative.

Users were finding the platform overwhelming, with poor navigation and an information architecture that struggled to prioritise user needs and the structure didn’t support the kind of experience they were aiming for. Coral Gables came to us looking for a clean, intuitive platform that would simplify navigation and stay in line with accessibility standards particularly with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance being a major focus.

Grid of multiple Coral Gables mobile page views

The approach

Zoocha started with a light-touch discovery phase, targeting the key user needs and biggest pain points in the existing platform. A key element of the new design focused around improving the information architecture, consolidating an overwhelming three menus on the homepage with 21 individual options, down to two key menus with 9 user-centred options.

Our front end team made use of Storybook to implement a clean front end architecture that allowed for versatile components to be reused and replicated across the entire site, providing consistency throughout. To further improve the editor experience, we ensured that the user permissions matrix would promote a controlled and clear workflow process with access restriction, approval and content history.

A pretty street in Coral Gables, colourful buildings, restaurants with parasol and people sitting outside, the street is adorned with palm trees. A man is riding a bike down the walkway.

Integrating with Granicus, Zoocha were able to implement a flexible events management functionality that allowed events to be displayed clearly through the events page, with users able to filter selectively and view event agendas. The previous alerts banner for Coral Gables was inaccessible and hard to read, our team updated this with a scheduled alerts functionality that the user can dismiss after reading.

With an ADA team set to review content before publishing to ensure compliance, accessibility was a key focus for Coral Gables. Our front end team therefore worked closely with the Coral Gables team to create an accessible link guidelines document, detailing how each link item on the site would comply with ADA guidelines.

The results

We were proud to launch the new Coral Gables site and continue growing our presence in the USA. Since launch, the site has seen page load times decreased by 22%. Engagement across all pages has increased by an average of 6.4% whilst steadily decreasing bounce rate across core pages.