Parklets & patios: how Digital and Data Services leveraged research to improve online guidance for San Francisco’s Shared Spaces Program
How can public agencies design websites that are responsive to key user groups and intents? This post presents a case study of how research supported San Francisco’s Shared Spaces program as it transitioned from a temporary pandemic response to a permanent public program.
Background
Imagine it’s late March 2020. San Francisco has just announced a Shelter in Place order mandating all San Franciscans stay home except for essential needs. You are among the 14,000 businesses impacted by new public health restrictions on indoor dining or other business activities. How will your business operate? How will you serve customers if people cannot gather indoors? Will you have to shut down, or will the City do something to help?
Enter Shared Spaces, a program created by the City and County of San Francisco in May 2020 to support neighborhoods and businesses. Colloquially known as “parklets,” Shared Spaces created public spaces for people to gather and eat outdoors, ensuring local businesses had a lifeline during the pandemic.
As the parklet situation continued to evolve in San Francisco, Digital and Data Services (DDS) worked with the Shared Spaces team in May 2020 to create public-facing information and a digital application process on SF.gov, the City’s main website and one of our team’s main initiatives. In this blog post, we outline how DDS re-engaged with the Shared Spaces team in 2022 to improve their existing website. This case study shows how we leveraged design thinking and research to make content more user-centered and to increase online engagement with a critical business permitting process on SF.gov.
The problem
In its original conception, the Shared Spaces program was meant to be temporary. But given the widespread popularity of parklets in San Francisco, in July 2021 the City passed legislation transitioning Shared Spaces from an emergency response to a permanent program. In this process, businesses with existing parklets had to apply for permanent Shared Spaces permits by January 1, 2022. Notably, the permanent permits required businesses to comply with regulations impacting public safety and accessibility.
However, as of late 2021, only 20% of the businesses that had applied for a Shared Spaces permit during the pandemic had applied for the permanent permit. And the deadline for compliance was fast approaching.
How Digital and Data Services got involved
It was during this critical period — the leadup to the January 2022 deadline for compliance — that the Shared Spaces team re-approached DDS for help. They wanted to understand why more businesses had not applied for the permanent permit, and how they could improve compliance with the legislation.
At the time, this request was outside our typical engagement with City agencies. Much of our work had focused on moving agencies to the City’s centralized website, SF.gov, from proprietary websites and sfgov.org domains. But this engagement marked a shift in needs. Programs like Shared Spaces not only need help creating new content; they also need help revisiting and improving content that has already been created. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for our team to continue to improve SF.gov as a critical online resource for San Franciscans. What is the best working model for re-engaging with agencies — one that enables us to scale our work across the 194 departments and public bodies we’ve moved?
Learning more about the Shared Spaces problem space
The DDS team went into this project knowing Shared Spaces was a complex program. The deadline for the legislation was imminent, the program was administered by multiple agencies, and the messaging around the transition from the pandemic to the permanent permit had been inconsistent. We also knew we had limited time and resources to give, so the big question was: how could we help the Shared Spaces team given our expertise and position in the City?
As a start, we conducted interviews with city staff to better understand the problems businesses were experiencing and how we might be positioned to help. We talked to staff throughout the City who had worked closely with businesses (reviewing applications and inspecting structures), including people who worked at Planning, Public Works, the Office of Small Businesses, and MTA. Although using staff as a proxy for businesses is an imperfect approach, we made a deliberate choice to leverage internal experts before spending time/resources on other research activities with businesses.
Through our interviews with staff, we had two key learnings:
- Businesses were not applying for a number of reasons: they did not understand the new permit was required, and compliance requirements were difficult to understand and apply.
- Businesses who were applying experienced numerous issues with the application process: the right materials were often not submitted, and the site plan (a key requirement) was often incomplete or at the incorrect level of detail.
As we talked with the Shared Spaces team about our findings, we realized DDS was not positioned to solve many of these issues (in terms of our own resourcing and where we had leverage in the City.) What we could do, however, was improve the online guidance to businesses.
Improving the Shared Spaces website with an expert evaluation
A key question we had when we started brainstorming how to improve online guidance for Shared Spaces was: which user groups were coming to the website, and what were their needs? We used this approach to ensure website content matched the needs of the people who were most likely to visit.
As a start, we mapped out the needs and intents for the key user groups we had learned about in our research with city staff: business owners, design professionals who help build parklets, and the public. This made it clear, for example, that the main reasons a design professional might visit the website were very different from a small business. While design professionals’ primary intent was to design and build compliant structures, business owners’ primary intent was to understand timelines and processes for the permanent permit.
Once we understood the needs and intents of different user groups, we examined how the Shared Spaces website’s existing information architecture did or did not support the needs of the various user groups. We leveraged a method called an expert evaluation to evaluate existing Shared Spaces web pages against those intents: by tracing how the website supported specific intents, we could see where there were usability problems or key gaps in information. This can be an effective approach if you have limited time and resources, and are reasonably confident you know your users and their needs.
Through this process we found, for example, that the home page:
- contained more resources to support design professionals than small businesses
- did not clearly flag the upcoming deadline
- did not provide clear resources for how businesses could evaluate their existing structures for compliance.
Improving the Shared Spaces website with content design
Once we had aligned on these challenges, our content team partnered with the Shared Spaces team to improve the existing content of the website. We focused on the findability, accessibility, and clarity of the content, to make it easier for people to access information and services.
We started with the “low hanging fruit,” focusing on the changes we thought would take the least effort but have the most impact. We partnered with the Shared Spaces team using an approach called pair writing, which builds trust with partners through real-time collaboration.
This culminated in a number of improvements to the overall user experience of the Shared Spaces website.
Concluding thoughts and learnings
Our collaboration with the Shared Spaces team highlights the transformative power research and design thinking can play in making online resources useful and accessible to the public. We hope to use approaches like this in the future, as we partner with other Departments who are moving or have moved to SF.gov. There is so much good content on SF.gov, and so many opportunities to make websites more human-centered!
In addition, we hope that some of the strategies we used to approach this work can inform our work with Departments, as we scale the efforts of our 50-person team to enact change throughout the City. As such, this case study shows the benefits of:
- Being intentional with how we scoped our work. We went into this project knowing we had limited time and resources, and that the Shared Spaces program was administered by a number of different departments. By thinking carefully about our own resources, as well as the leverage (or lack thereof) we had to change the service, we decided to focus our efforts on where we thought we could have an impact: the Shared Spaces website.
- Thinking carefully about when to partner with Departments to improve the information architecture and content of websites. Re-engaging with the team after the initial website launch provided a new window for collaboration. The process of moving websites onto SF.gov is often time-bounded and high-stress; working with teams outside of these constraints can lead to more (and more expansive) types of change.
- Leveraging the experiences of front-line staff to learn about businesses. Given the range of projects we take on as a digital services team, we often have to make difficult choices about how deeply we are able to engage in a given problem space. In a resource constrained environment, we felt this approach — doing research with staff who know businesses well, then conducting an expert evaluation — created a better balance of effort/impact than talking directly to business owners. Moreover, this approach sets a precedent for how we might scale “research thinking” throughout our engagements with the City.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to our Shared Spaces partner Annie Yalon (Planning) for her partnership on this project. Many thanks as well to the other collaborators and writers from Digital and Data Services: Graham Gardener, Matthew Glibbery, Sharon Huang, Bekah Otto, and Elise Hansell.
