The New York State Office of Rent Administration is a key government agency that protects more than one million New York State residents from excessive rent increases ensures their homes remain livable and comfortable.
The Opportunity
The ORA needs information to be easy to find, but as with many government agencies, it’s often buried under forms and hard-to-find pages. To improve accessibility, the forms and website needed a ground up redesign -- but the changes needed to check all the boxes legally, and needed to be shepherded through a complex approval process involving multiple stakeholders, lawyers, and state agencies.
Creative Insight
Incorporating design tweaks, best practices from the public and private sector, U/X principles and prior experience working with government agencies, we were able to create and implement a top down redesign of the ORA’s website, forms, and style guide.
Execution
Our solution focused on a few key elements:
- Reconfiguring the user journey to be more intuitive and user-friendly.
- Re-writing copy to be more vernacular, while maintaining the integrity of the directions.
- Implementing a flexible, self-segmenting document layout, streamlining the process of downloading and filling out forms.
- Decluttering the homepage design.
- Activating the homepage header to allow for key documents and timely information.
Results
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And Templates Redesigned
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Of Review per document
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NYS ORA Customers
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From inception to completion
Deliverables
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Redesigned Forms
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Website design & content recommendations
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New styleguide
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Implementation and approvals