St. Louis County Mobile App

Introduction

St. Louis County sorely lacks 21st-century technology for our 1 million citizens.  As is the case with most local governments, you call us when we are open, stand in line, maybe the wrong line, and hope you find the right person to answer your question or solve a problem.  Never was this more of an issue that with our 400K Millennials and Gen-X citizens.  They want to use their phone to connect with the County.     
    
Objectives

The contextual inquiry research validated this cohort wants access to County information on mobile, 24/7.  They don't want to push buttons on a phone auto attendant with a simple question.  They were frustrated, and with their insights, we were fixing that pain point.    

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Execution

With good research in hand, rapid prototyping began.  I demanded we look different than our peer-country mobile apps.  Working in agile and leading daily standups, the team built a solid user interface and a back-end database that worked.  A personalized experience focused on answering FAQs, creating an online service request, and event/activity information.   

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Results

We went from ideation to deployment in 8 months.  Once on the Google Play and Apple Store, users came.  UAT never stopped as we fixed bugs and added new functionality post-launch.  Call volume decreased.  Media exposure and viral marketing created buzz.  It was a great example of teamwork, using human-centered design principles with a sprinkle of design thinking approaches added in. 

 

Check out this video explaining the features and benefits of our new mobile app along with a few screen shots below   

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