ROCKFORD WEBSITE
Summary
Mission
The mission behind redesigning the City of Rockford website was to create a more accessible, organized, and modern digital experience for residents, businesses, and visitors. The original website suffered from cluttered navigation, inconsistent layouts, and outdated visual hierarchy, making it difficult for users to quickly locate important city information and services. This redesign focuses on simplifying the user journey through cleaner layouts, improved content organization, and responsive interfaces that work across desktop and mobile devices. The goal was to create a civic website that feels approachable, trustworthy, and easy to navigate while still maintaining a professional government identity.
Client
My Contribution
As the UI/UX Designer for the Rockford Website Redesign, I led the visual direction and user experience strategy from research through high-fidelity prototyping. I began by analyzing the structure and usability of the existing website to identify pain points related to navigation, accessibility, and information overload. From there, I developed moodboards and visual systems to establish a more modern and community-focused design language. I created desktop and mobile wireframes, organized the site architecture, and designed responsive layouts for a variety of city pages including government resources, business tools, news pages, licensing systems, and community information. The final result was a fully interactive Figma prototype designed to improve usability and create a more intuitive experience for users navigating city services online.
Services
Process
Discover
During the research phase, I focused on evaluating the usability and structure of the existing City of Rockford website. The original experience felt visually outdated and difficult to navigate due to overcrowded menus, inconsistent layouts, and limited mobile responsiveness. I gathered inspiration from modern government and civic websites to better understand how municipalities present information in a cleaner and more accessible way. I also created moodboards that explored a balance between professionalism and community identity, combining strong typography, structured layouts, warm gradient accents, and imagery that reflected the city itself. This process helped establish the overall tone and visual direction of the redesign.
Planning/Structure
During the planning phase, I focused on simplifying the website’s information architecture and improving how users moved throughout the platform. I reorganized the navigation into clearer categories such as Government, Services, Business, and Community to reduce confusion and make important resources easier to locate. Alongside the sitemap development, I created a visual system that established consistent spacing, typography, color usage, and reusable interface components. This structure helped create a more cohesive and scalable design system across both desktop and mobile experiences.
Wireframes
Once the navigation structure was finalized, I created low-fidelity wireframes to plan the layout, hierarchy, and user flow of each page. The wireframes focused on improving usability, readability, and navigation across both desktop and mobile devices. After refining the layouts, I developed a full high-fidelity Figma prototype using cleaner typography, stronger visual hierarchy, responsive layouts, and consistent interface components. The final designs modernized the City of Rockford website experience while making important resources easier to access and navigate.
User Testing & Redesign
A major focus of the redesign was improving how users interact with city information online. The updated layouts prioritize clarity and accessibility by reducing clutter and surfacing important actions more effectively. Features such as categorized navigation, simplified content blocks, responsive event systems, and clearer call-to-action sections were designed to make the experience easier to understand and navigate. The redesign ultimately creates a more user-friendly digital environment that better reflects the needs of residents, businesses, and visitors interacting with the City of Rockford online.