The Brief

Visit California is a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) with over 25 years of experience in promoting California as a premier travel destination. The organization, funded through a unique partnership between the state and the travel industry, operates with a substantial budget of over $185 million (2023). As the leader of California’s brand messaging, Visit California previously anchored its campaigns under the “Dream Big” brand positioning. However, following a significant shift in traveler motivations post-pandemic, Visit California recognized a growing desire for experiences that foster joy, connection, and adventure.

This insight led to the evolution of the brand into “The Ultimate Playground,” a strategic repositioning that highlights the state’s unparalleled diversity of geography, activities, and cultural experiences. 

The “Let’s Play” campaign leveraged a robust mix of television, out-of-home, digital, and social media activations to showcase California’s diverse offerings — from wine tasting and rock climbing to luxury hotel stays, food truck adventures, and outdoor music festivals. By highlighting the playful spirit inherent in every experience, the campaign aimed to deepen the audience’s emotional connection to the state, reinforcing California’s identity as The Ultimate Playground and setting the stage for sustained brand engagement.


The APPROACH

The initial roll-out of a rebrand update is critical, and transitioning from “Dream Big” to “The Ultimate Playground” required careful internal alignment and thorough message testing. Oomph, alongside Visit California’s partner agencies, began collaborating on this effort about nine months before the campaign launch. During these early planning meetings, our team contributed key ideas and strategic approaches to help shape the campaign.

Our focus remained on the web user and their position in the customer journey. Previous campaigns had not fully optimized the user flow, so we saw this as an opportunity to reimagine the experience. With paid media driving traffic to the website, it was essential to provide visitors with clear actions once they arrived. The advertising had done its job by capturing attention and sparking interest. Now, our challenge was to build on that momentum, guiding users from interest to meaningful engagement and action.

An interactive Quiz 

The Ultimate Playground campaign needed to accomplish a few things:

  • Educate the consumer about the new brand positioning and why California should be considered the Ultimate Playground
  • Inform the consumer about play and how it is more about kids and theme parks. Adults can and should play as well, and serious activities can be conducted in playful ways
  • Activate the consumer with inspiration by giving them a unique experience and curating inspirational, playful activities throughout the state

Our teams settled on a quiz as a way to engage visitors and serve them personalized content. Based on initial research, we decided an image-based quiz would be the fastest and most fun way to answer questions and receive a set of recommendations. Choosing preferences from a set of images is a quick way to make progress tangible. We limited the questions to nine, and most visitors took two minutes to complete the quiz.

Play Styles

The eight Play Styles were based on personas researched and created by the National Institute for Play, headquartered in California. Content creators at Visit California crafted a series of TV spots with glimpses into different styles of play. Our Play Quiz would highlight which Play Style matched the participant’s preferences, and our results pages served relevant, curated content, a similar Celebrity personality, and even a secondary play style. 

Email collection allowed visitors to send their play style results to themselves and allowed opt-in to more personalized content. Our team worked quickly over three months to solidify the approach, choose the quiz method and weighting criteria of the questions, and design the eight play style pages, two landing pages, a homepage takeover, and supporting pages for the new campaign. 


The Results

Play Quiz: Avg. session duration

3.01 m

Play Styles: Avg. session duration

2.25 m

Compared to Site: Avg. session duration

0.36 m

Our approach to the campaign was to support the bottom of the funnel and give visitors coming from digital ads something useful. Given the wealth of content the Visit California website contains, these broad Play Style personas made visitors see themselves in California. It brought curated content to them and provided what we thought of as a personal homepage with relevant recommendations. 

“Let’s Play” was the first part of a years-long brand campaign. We are already working on the campaign for 2025 which we hope will be even more engaging than the first!


THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Keene State College (KSC), a liberal arts institution within the University System of New Hampshire, needed a modern, user-friendly website that aligned with its mission while effectively serving multiple audiences.

Over time, the existing site had grown into an overwhelming digital ecosystem, filled with complex navigation, disjointed content, and inconsistent branding. To better serve students and stakeholders, KSC needed to:

  • Prioritize prospective students while maintaining relevance for parents, faculty, and alumni.
  • Simplify content structure to help users quickly find what they need.
  • Modernize the design and user experience while staying true to the college’s brand.
  • Improve accessibility and performance to ensure a seamless experience across all devices.

KSC partnered with Oomph to create a scalable, audience-first digital experience that supports recruitment, engagement, and long-term adaptability.


OUR APPROACH

We focused on eliminating friction and enhancing engagement through a user-first strategy, modern information architecture, and a flexible, scalable design system.

Understanding the Audience & Challenges

Our discovery process included stakeholder workshops, user journey mapping, and content analysis to identify key roadblocks. We uncovered:

  • Difficult navigation made it hard for prospective students to find admissions and academic program details.
  • Multiple audiences competing for visibility resulted in a cluttered, confusing user experience.
  • Inconsistent branding and outdated UI weakened the college’s online presence and first impressions.

By clearly defining what success looked like and identifying areas of improvement, we laid the foundation for a streamlined, student-centric digital experience.

Defining the Strategy & Roadmap

With a deep understanding of user needs, we developed a strategy focused on engagement, clarity, and accessibility.

  • Navigation designed for prospective students while keeping secondary audiences accessible.
  • A scalable mega menu that simplified content discovery without overwhelming users.
  • A brand refresh of the digital identity that modernized KSC’s online presence while maintaining its authenticity.
  • WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility compliance to ensure an inclusive experience for all users.

This strategy ensured that KSC’s website would be functional, engaging, and built to support student recruitment.

Executing the Vision

To bring the strategy to life, we developed a modern design system with a flexible, component-driven architecture that simplifies content management and improves the user experience.

  • Audience-first navigation & mega menu – Prospective students can quickly find key admissions and academic information, while faculty, parents, and alumni have dedicated sections tailored to their needs.
  • Scalable component library – A structured yet flexible design system enables KSC teams to easily update and manage content while maintaining a cohesive visual identity.
  • Optimized for mobile & accessibility – A fully responsive, WCAG-compliant design ensures a seamless experience across all devices.

By creating a well-structured, intuitive content ecosystem, KSC now has a digital experience that is easy to manage and designed for long-term adaptability.

This team brings creativity and structure to projects. Decisions are based on data and reports, but they include a connection to heart and real world users. They bring in subject matter experts at the appropriate time but never lose site of the big picture.”

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, Keene State College

THE RESULTS

A Student-Centric Digital Experience

The new Keene State College website now provides:

  • A clear, structured experience for prospective students – Admissions, academics, and student life content is now easier to find and explore.
  • A modernized digital identity – A refreshed brand and UI create a welcoming, engaging first impression.
  • Seamless navigation for multiple audiences – While prospective students remain the priority, faculty, alumni, and parents still have dedicated access points.
  • An accessible, scalable, and future-proof platform – Designed to support long-term growth, engagement, and institutional goals.

A Digital Experience That Grows With Its Community

Keene State’s new site is more than just a redesign—it’s a long-term investment in student engagement, accessibility, and institutional identity. By focusing on audience needs, structured content, and a scalable design system, KSC now has a future-ready digital presence that enhances recruitment, supports students, and strengthens the college community.

Is Your Higher Ed Website Ready for the Next Generation of Students?

If your institution is struggling with outdated content, complex navigation, or disconnected user experiences, a strategic digital approach can create clarity and engagement.

Let’s talk about how Oomph can help your institution stand out in an increasingly competitive higher ed landscape.

Go Ask Alice! (GAA!) is a judgment-free, anonymous question-and-answer site. It is part of Alice! Health Promotion, a department of Columbia Health. Their content has always been reliable, accurate, and thoroughly researched by professionals — humans, not Artificial intelligence (AI)!  While organic search brings many different kinds of audiences across the globe to their answers, their primary audience is the college students of Columbia University. These digital natives need the content to speak their language and to look modern and relevant. Oomph leaned into the college-aged persona to create a user interface that was fun, unique, and approachable while acknowledging and respecting the gravity of the questions students ask. 


The Brief

Empathize with both Visitors and Authors

We began by working to understand and empathize with their audience — which was easy. How many of us have gotten lost searching for answers to questions we might not ask our own close friends? Questions like, “Can I get Hepatitis A from eating raw seafood?”, “Do I have OCD?” or even “Why did my father abandon me?” Analytics supported how these types of questions were prevalent. They also showed that while many visitors found GAA! through search, those visitors found their answer and quickly left. While in some ways, this was positive — someone had a question and found a satisfactory answer — visitors missed lots of other answers to questions they might have.

For the Go Ask Alice! author team, technical issues often arose that were rooted in an overly complex content architecture and workflows that required lengthy workarounds. A complicated review and approval process and ineffective spam filters made combing through user submissions time-consuming. The longer it takes the team to create new answers, the less students will want to send GAA! their questions.

Our shared goals were to:

  • Modernize the design and attract more web-savvy students to read answers to questions they didn’t know they should ask.
  • Reinforce trust by being open about the process and the real human professionals behind the answers.
  • Improve search, filtering, and findability by leading with topics first and guiding visitors to the types of questions that interest them most.
  • Mitigate and simplify complex authoring processes to empower the small editorial team to answer more questions, support responses with engaging media, and reduce staff frustration.

The Approach

Modernization & Trust-building 

Most Gen-Z students and younger generations won’t trust a site that isn’t designed well for a mobile screen. Our design process emphasized the small screen experience, keeping filters, sharing, citations, and recirculation in logical places. The Columbia Health brand is also a powerful lever for establishing trust with a young audience, but we were careful not to let it overpower GAA!’s own authentic brand.

Human responses feel human

With the rise of AI and Google’s AI-generated search results, our design reinforced the humanity and empathy of GAA! by establishing a clear “Dear Alice” with a unique handwritten font and response from the author. When dealing with potentially sensitive and health-threatening answers, an authentic human voice is essential, and one that puts answers into context — is this thing I am asking about “normal”? What are the additional considerations I should know about? And so on. AI might give you one answer, but it won’t contain the context and nuance these anonymous human-generated questions require.

Unique Colors & Illustrations

Blue is strongly associated with Columbia Health and prevented the previous site from standing independently. Our design reduced focus on blue and shifted the site’s primary colors to maroon and yellow. Several other colors create wayfinding paths associated with answer topics. Scrolling the All Topics category page becomes a delightfully random color experience.

All color combinations adhere to WCAG 2.2 guidelines for Level AA, increasing the accessibility of this color-rich site for all visitors. 

A new set of illustrations curates a sense of inclusivity better than stock photos could. A wide variety of humans were chosen to represent the diversity of student populations. Little details, like the randomized person in the site’s footer, add a sense of surprise and delight to the entire browsing experience.

Supporting Trust with New Features

Enhancement ideas started to surface during Discovery and continued throughout the process from both teams. Some of our favorites include:

  1. The editor’s name, the answer’s published date, and its revision date were moved from the bottom of an answer and brought to the top. This information helps establish credibility quickly before reading an entire answer
  2. A feedback feature was added to individual answers, giving the GAA! team real-time data about the responses but also giving new visitors a greater sense of social proof
  3. A “Cite this Response” feature makes cutting and pasting an MLA (Modern Language Association) General Format- or Chicago-style academic citation into research papers easy. Since answers are so well-researched, these citations propagate GAA! further into academic culture

Increased User Engagement & Accessibility

Accessibility & Safety with a Quick Exit Button

Go Ask Alice! has many sensitive questions: questions about sexual abuse, suicide, drug use, and topics generally that you may not want someone else to see on your phone. We introduced a Quick Exit feature on each page of the site. When visitors click the button, a new tab is quickly opened, and the site’s browsing history is removed from their device. While this is not a well-known action in the general population, many in unsafe situations know how they work and what “Exit Site” means. 

Oomph has written an in-depth article about the quick exit button and has released a Quick Exit Drupal Module to help other teams implement this feature. 

Encouraging Question Browsing over Asking New Questions

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the major workflows we redesigned was asking a question in the first place. The GAA! team has compiled thousands of great answers over the years and frequently updates old answers with new content to keep them current with changes in medical approaches. The small but mighty team didn’t want to answer the same questions over and over again by referring new askers to pre-published answers. 

Our solution emphasized search and intentionally made access to the Question form difficult. Visitors are encouraged to search for answers to previously posted questions first. Quite often, they will discover an answer to their questions (and maybe some helpful answers to questions they did not expect). Only if they have searched first will they encounter the “Can’t find your question” call to action, which leads them through the steps of asking a new question. 


The Results

The new site feels like a new beginning for the GAA! team. While the site has only recently launched, we look forward to seeing how it impacts key metrics like time on site and return visits. In the meantime, we’re also excited to see how the newly revamped admin experience helps the GAA! content team serve their audience even better than before. 

When faced with a sensitive question about mental, nutritional, emotional, or sexual health, college students can continue to Go Ask Alice!

From code to launch

4.5 mos.

Sites launched within a year

25

Performance improvement

350 %

THE BRIEF

A Fractured System

With a network of websites mired in old, outdated platforms, Rhode Island was already struggling to serve the communication needs of government agencies and their constituents. And then the pandemic hit.

COVID accelerated the demand for better, faster communication and greater efficiency amid the rapidly changing pandemic. It also spotlighted an opportunity to create a new centralized information hub. What the government needed was a single, cohesive design system that would allow departments to quickly publish and manage their own content, leverage a common and accessible design language, and use a central notification system to push shared content across multiple sites.

With timely, coordinated news and notifications plus a visually unified set of websites, a new design system could turn the state’s fragmented digital network into a trusted resource, especially in a time of crisis.


THE APPROACH

Custom Tools Leveraging Site Factory

A key goal was being able to quickly provision sites to new or existing agencies. Using Drupal 9 (and updated to Drupal 10) and Acquia’s Site Factory, we gave the state the ability to stand up a new site in just minutes. Batch commands create the site and add it to necessary syndication services; authors can then log in and start creating their own content.

We also created a set of custom tools for the state agencies, to facilitate content migration and distribution. An asynchronous hub-and-spoke syndication system allows sites to share content in a hierarchical manner (from parent to child sites), while a migration helper scrapes existing sites to ensure content is properly migrated from a database source.

Introducing Quahog: A RI.gov Design System

For organizations needing agility and efficiency, composable technology makes it easier to quickly adapt digital platforms as needs and conditions change. We focused on building a comprehensive, component-based visual design system using a strategy of common typography, predefined color themes and built-in user preferences to reinforce accessibility and inclusivity.

The Purpose of the Design System

The new, bespoke design system had to support four key factors: accessibility, user preferences, variation within a family of themes, and speedy performance.

Multiple color themes

Site authors choose from five color themes, each supporting light and dark mode viewing. Every theme was rigorously tested to conform with WCAG AA (and sometimes AAA), with each theme based on a palette of 27 colors (including grays) and 12 transparent colors.

User preferences

Site visitors can toggle between light or dark mode or use their own system preference, along with adjusting font sizes, line height, word spacing, and default language.


Mobile first

Knowing that many site visitors will be on mobile devices, each design component treats the mobile experience as a first-class counterpart to desktop.

Examples: The section menu sticks to the left side of the view port for easy access within sections; Downloads are clearly labelled with file type and human-readable file sizes in case someone has an unreliable network connection; galleries appear on mobile with any text labels stacked underneath and support swipe gestures, while the desktop version layers text over images and supports keyboard navigation.

High Accessibility

Every design pattern is accessible for screen readers and mobile devices. Color contrast, keyboard navigation, semantic labeling, and alt text enforcement all contribute to a highly accessible site. Extra labels and help text have been added to add context to actions, while also following best practices for use of ARIA attributes.


Performance aware

Each page is given a performance budget, so design components are built as lightly as possible, using the least amount of code and relying on the smallest visual asset file sizes possible.


THE RESULTS

Efficient and Effective Paths to Communication

The first sites to launch on the new system, including covid.ri.gov, went live four and a half months after the first line of code was written. A total of 15 new sites were launched within just 8 months, all showing a 3-4x improvement in speed and performance compared with previous versions.

Every site now meets accessibility guidelines when authors adhere to training and best practices, with Lighthouse accessibility and best practice scores consistently above 95%. This means the content is available to a larger, more diverse audience. In addition, a WAF/CDN provider increases content delivery speeds and prevents downtime or slowdowns due to attacks or event-driven traffic spikes.

State agencies have been universally pleased with the new system, especially because it provides authors with an improved framework for content creation. By working with a finite set of tested design patterns, authors can visualize, preview, and deploy timely and consistent content more efficiently and effectively.

We were always impressed with the Oomph team’s breadth of technical knowledge and welcomed their UX expertise, however, what stood out the most to me was the great synergy that our team developed. All team members were committed to a common goal to create an exceptional, citizen-centered resource that would go above and beyond the technical and design expectations of both agencies and residents .

ROBERT MARTIN ETSS Web Services Manager, State of Rhode Island

THE BRIEF

The Virtual Lab School (VLS) supports military educators with training and enrichment around educational practices from birth through age 12. Their curriculum was developed by a partnership between Ohio State University and the U.S. Department of Defense to assist direct-care providers, curriculum specialists, management personnel, and home-based care providers. Because of the distributed nature of educators around the world, courses and certifications are offered virtually through the VLS website.

Comprehensive Platform Assessment

The existing online learning platform had a deep level of complexity under the surface. For a student educator taking a certification course, the site tracks progress through the curriculum. For training leaders, they need to see how their students are progressing, assign additional coursework, or assist a student educator through a particular certification.

Learning platforms in general are complex, and this one is no different. Add to this an intertwined set of military-style administration privileges and it produces a complex tree of layers and permutations.

The focus of the platform assessment phase was to catalog features of the largely undocumented legacy system, uncover complexity that could be simplified, and most importantly identify opportunities for efficiencies.


THE RESULTS

Personalized Online Learning Experience

Enrollment and Administration Portal

Administrators and instructors leverage an enrollment portal to manage the onboarding of new students and view progress on coursework and certifications.

Course Material Delivery

Students experience the course material through a combination of reading, video, and offline coursework downloads for completion and submission.

Learning Assessments & Grading

Students are tested with online assessments, where grading and suggestions are delivered in real time, and submission of offline assignments for review by instructors.

Progress Pathways

A personalized student dashboard is the window into progress, allowing students to see which courses have been started, how much is left to complete, and the status of their certifications.

Certification

Completed coursework and assessments lead students to a point of certification resulting in a printable Certificate of Completion.


FINAL THOUGHTS

Faster and More Secure than Ever Before

When building for speed and scalability, fully leveraging Drupal’s advanced caching system is a major way to support those goals. The system design leverages query- and render-caching to support a high level of performance while also supporting personalization to an individual level. This is accomplished with computed fields and auto-placeholdering utilizing lazy builder.

The result is an application that is quicker to load, more secure, and able to support hundreds more concurrent users.

Why Drupal?

When building for speed and scalability, fully leveraging Drupal’s advanced caching system is a major way to support those goals. The system design leverages query- and render-caching to support a high level of performance while also supporting personalization to an individual level. This is accomplished with computed fields and auto-placeholdering utilizing lazy builder.

The result is an application that is quicker to load, more secure, and able to support hundreds more concurrent users.


THE CHALLENGE

Enabling Seamless Content Sharing for NBC’s Local Affiliates

NBC Sports needed a centralized digital platform to streamline content submission, review, and approval for 200+ local affiliate stations covering the Olympics. The Games generate hundreds of hometown stories, and NBC wanted to empower local affiliates to contribute and distribute content efficiently.

The solution needed to:

  • Enable fast, high-volume content submission from affiliate stations. 
  • Implement a structured review and approval workflow to maintain content quality.
  • Facilitate communication between NBC editors and local affiliates.
  • Provide a secure, centralized repository for Olympic assets, training materials, and media.

NBC turned to Oomph to develop a custom-built editorial platform, ensuring a frictionless content pipeline for local Olympic coverage.


OUR APPROACH

Oomph partnered with NBC Sports to develop the Olympic Zone, a secure, Drupal-powered editorial platform that served as the content submission and management hub for all NBC affiliates covering the Games.

Streamlining Content Submission & Editorial Review

NBC’s local affiliates needed a way to quickly submit articles, athlete spotlights, polls, media galleries, and ad campaigns for review. Oomph built:

  • A structured multi-step review system, ensuring content met NBC standards before publication.
  • An automated notification system, alerting teams when content was submitted, reviewed, or approved.
  • Role-based permissions, restricting publishing rights to authorized users.

Centralizing Olympic Media & Resources

To support affiliates with high-quality content, the Olympic Zone became a one-stop destination for NBC-provided assets, including:

  • Training materials & editorial guidelines for covering the Olympics.
  • Olympic-themed graphics, videos, and pre-packaged content.
  • Integrated Digital Asset & Video Management System for encoding, processing, and rights management.

Enhancing Collaboration & Affiliate Profiles

To foster communication between NBC’s editorial team and affiliates, the platform allowed:

  • Stations to create detailed profiles, listing contacts, market details, and associated satellite stations.
  • Direct communication channels, ensuring seamless interaction between NBC staff and local teams.

THE RESULTS

The Results: A Powerful Platform for Olympic Storytelling

The Olympic Zone platform successfully empowered NBC affiliates to share high-quality, localized Olympic coverage at scale, ensuring a consistent and efficient editorial workflow throughout the Games.

  • 200+ affiliates seamlessly submitted and distributed Olympic stories.
  • Streamlined approval processes reduced editorial bottlenecks.
  • Local stations accessed curated Olympic content, enhancing coverage.
  • Secure, scalable infrastructure supported high traffic volumes.

By delivering a powerful, intuitive editorial platform, Oomph helped NBC Sports amplify local storytelling, ensuring every market had access to the best Olympic coverage.


The Brief

Simplifying Complexity without Losing Power

The biggest challenge as Oomph acclimated to the tax-collection world was rapidly learning enough about the complex regulations and requirements of municipalities in the industry to provide sound advice and recommendations. We started by examining their systems — the workflow of documenting and planning new product features and adding them to the roadmap, of designing the UX of those features, and of leveraging their in-house design system to build and support those features. 

RSI’s main product, GOVERNMENT PREMIER, are highly customizable and configurable. Every single screen has options that would display depending on the authenticated user’s role and privileges and the tenant’s own back-office processes. User stories included many requirements based on permissions and configuration. This added challenges when imagining potential interface solutions that need to accommodate growth in multiple directions. 

Oomph’s purposefully used our outside perspective to ask many questions about GOVERNMENT PREMIER’s processes. We took our years of experience designing interfaces for a wide range of consumers and applied them here. In this typically slow-to-evolve space, a user-focused experience coupled with GOVERNMENT PREMIER’s technical expertise would revolutionize tax collection as a friendlier, more intuitive, and highly customizable experience.


Our Approach

Maintaining Consistency in a Rapidly Evolving Product

Our findings and recommendations indicated previous UX teams did not create a rulebook that governed their decisions, and so, the system lacked consistency. Quality Assurance reviews would suffer from this lack of governance as well. Therefore, the first thing we did was to establish rules to design by: 

  • Use Storybook as a source of truth, and expand atomic elements with larger patterns (called molecules in Atomic-design-speak).
  • Enforce a global design token system for colors, typography, stateful user feedback, and spacing.
  • Use Material UI (MUI) from Google as our foundation. This was a previous decision that was not fully enforced, which led elements to become over-engineered or duplicated. This became known as the “Build on the shoulders of giants” rule.
  • Destructive actions (like Delete or Cancel) are placed to the left of creative actions, like “Save” or “Next.”
  • Every screen has one primary focus. Complex screens need a focal point for the task and user’s need to feel confident they are using the interface correctly. When long forms are required, break them down into smaller chunks. Users can save their progress and concentrate on smaller groups of tasks. Color should be used to focus users on the most important actions, and to alert them when data errors need to be addressed. 
Entity Summary screen Before
Entity Summary screen After

Ultimately, these rules are flexible and have served well as a starting point. Any new screen can adhere to these rules, and when we find cases where these rules are preventing users from completing their tasks or are frequently confusing users, we revisit them to make updates or clarifications. Oomph has continued to consult on new screen design and UX workflows after more than a year of working together.

A sample of components from the GOVERNMENT PREMIER application

The Results

Setting a New North Star to Align Our Compasses

To continue to move the product forward without increasing UX and technical debt, the teams needed a well-defined shared understanding for the user experience. Internal teams were moving forward, but not always in the same direction. Within the first month, our teams agreed upon a playbook and then continued to expand it during our engagement. We met twice weekly with product owners across the company and became a sought-after resource when teams were planning new features.

A sample of screens from the GOVERNMENT PREMIER application

During our time together, we have celebrated these outcomes:

  • Oomph consolidated the color palette from 55 colors to just 24 without losing any necessary distinctions. All colors are contrast conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA as a baseline.
  • Colors, typographic sizes, spacing values, form elements, buttons, icons, and shadows have all been converted to design tokens.
  • Figma has been used as the design system record, while Storybook has been strengthened and updated to smartly leverage Material UI. The success of Storybook is largely due to its inclusion as a GOVERNMENT PREMIER project dependency — it has to be used and the latest version is often pinned as the product evolves.
  • An internal Design Manager at RSI was established as someone to lead the engineering team and maintain quality oversight as it pertains to the design system.
  • Oomph completed designs for 15 features for GOVERNMENT PREMIER, many of which involve designs for three or more screens or modals. Oomph also designed workflows for over a dozen Online Services workflows with a heavier emphasis on mobile-responsive solutions.

As Oomph moves into our second year collaborating with the GOVERNMENT PREMIER teams, we plan to fully investigate user personas on both the admin and taxpayer side of the platform, add more context and governance to the project designs, and provide quality assurance feedback on the working application. We value our partnership with this unique team of experts and look forward to continuing the tax software revolution.


THE BRIEF

Three Organizations Working Towards One Goal

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention (Action Alliance), and the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) have been commissioning The Harris Poll to conduct a bi-annual, nationally representative survey of adults in the U.S. to understand the public’s beliefs and attitudes about mental health and suicide.

This year, 2022, all three suicide prevention organizations teamed up with Oomph to take that data and distill it into a microsite for easy consumption among professionals and the general public who visit the site.

The data from the poll shows that progress has been made, but there is still more to do. We all must continue to learn more about suicide and mental health, particularly through increased research efforts, teaching everyone how to help prevent suicide and strengthen mental health, and advocate for improved access to care and robust crisis services.

Oomph made sure our approach to information design, branding, and messaging came across effectively and clearly. How could we use data to show people which actions they could personally take to affect positive change?


THE APPROACH

Design Sprint to E-Learning Microsite

Our initial idea of the audience was more public facing rather than a specific audience. We started our design approach to be stylized and playful.

Taking a step back, we regrouped and determined that the audience was more academic and administrative, therefore it was to lean towards a professional tone. A new idea clicked — we could present this microsite as an e-learning experience.

The new design direction features four key chapters: the Introduction, Learn About the Data, Know How to Help, and Advocate for Change. By implementing a tab-like navigation, it allows for users to hop to each section they may be most interested in, and reads as if it is an eBook.

Each section is color coded, and the navigation has a gradient that brings in all of the sections together in unity to showcase that message throughout. Each section follows a similar pattern: an introduction, data from the Harris Poll, an opportunity to find resources about the chapter, and shareable resources to help spread the message on the viewer’s own social channels. We hope that by the end of the microsite, the user is ready to inform themselves further by finding resources or sharing about the current perceptions of suicide.


THE RESULTS

Ongoing Public-education Impact

While Suicide Prevention Now is just one step of many, we hope that this project will help more people to become an advocate, or help spread awareness about suicide prevention. We hope it helps to save lives.

While working on this project, we became aware of a national suicide hotline number that is quick to dial and easy to remember, just like 911. Dial 988 to be connected to a friendly and helpful advocate if you or someone you know are having thoughts of suicide.

Working with Oomph was a great experience all the way around. From exploration to delivery, Oomph provided excellent guidance, and the quality of the final site is fantastic! I look forward to working with the team again in the future.

JONATHAN DOZIER-EZELL Director of Digital Communications,
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

The Brief

Oomph has worked with Lifespan since 2010 and created the second version of their intranet on Drupal 7. A critical tool like an intranet needs regular maintenance. Even with regular updates, there comes a time when the whole platform needs a re-architecture to be flexible, secure, and performant.

In 2021, it was time to plan the next phase of the intranet on Drupal 9. Lifespan used the redesign as an opportunity to realign the employee journeys with the evolution of their work. And COVID-19 had provided an opportunity to reevaluate whether a security-first, HIPAA-compliant intranet could be available to those working from home.

Departments

164

Job & Clinical Tools

430

Staff Contacts

40000

Critical Top-Tasks

The Oomph team ran a Discovery and research phase to gather requirements and understand employee expectations. We ran workshops with client stakeholders, identified important work tasks and created 5 employee personas, conducted one-on-one interviews with key persona types, and gathered feedback from employees with an online and email survey. 

Through this research, we started to see two different types of tasks emerge: those that required speed to a destination and those that required exploration and unstructured browsing.

Tasks requiring speed to completion:

  • Access health and safety policies
  • Access a staff directory and immediately contact high-value individuals
  • Access job tools, which are often 3rd-party digital services, for everything from timesheets to diagnostics to general education 
  • Access online forms to request items and services
  • Access HR and employment benefits

Tasks requiring unstructured browsing: 

  • Access Department sites, particularly my department for relevant news & events
  • Be exposed to company culture through up-to-date news and events, videos, seminars, and important business announcements or press coverage
  • Access the internal job board to find advancement opportunities
  • If I am a new employee, or a new manager, access onboarding material and quick links for new individuals
  • Visit and browse the Bulletin Board 

It became clear through our process that Lifespan employees needed to move quickly and slowly, often in the same session, depending on the important tasks they needed to complete. The intranet needed to support both types of journeys to remain a successful platform for getting work done and absorbing company culture.


The Approach

A Focused Priority on Search

Expectations about fast and accurate search are high because of you know who. When designing search for an employee intranet, the baseline requirements are even higher. We knew that we had to get the design and implementation of search right. 

We took a learn-once, use-everywhere approach when it came to search interfaces. Search would be a core part of finding many types of content — tools, forms, people, departments, locations, and more. Each had to have a similar structure and set of filtering options to be the most useful. 

The list of tools, locations, or people needed smart defaults. Before someone conducts their own search, each screen displays popular searches and the common content people need to access. In some cases, an employee does not even need to search in order to find what they need.

Two search pages, similar interfaces: The Job Tools search and Staff Directory follow similar patterns, adhering to our “learn once, use everywhere” rule

Personalization that follows Employees from Device to Device

Personalization had to be a part of our solution as well. Employees are able to use S.S.O. to access the intranet from their personal devices or workstation computers in the hospitals. Workstations are often shared between multiple clinical staff, therefore, our system needed to support stopping one task on on device and picking it back up on another.

A Favorites feature allows employees to create their own transportable bookmarks. Almost everything on the site can be bookmarked, reducing the need to search for commonly used content and tools. Six custom favorites are available from the left drawer at all times, while the entire list of favorites is one more click away.

Supporting Speed and Engagement

Speed is at the heart of critical tasks and high-quality patient care. A nurse, at a shared workstation, needs to log in quickly, find the tool they need, and administer care. Time is critical. They don’t want extra clicks, a search that doesn’t work intuitively, or slow page load times. Staff don’t want it, and management doesn’t want it, either. 

Engagement is slower and the intention is different. Speed is for tasks. Engagement is for exploring. This is how company culture is communicated and absorbed. This is when people catch up with department and company news, find events to attend, view a photo gallery from an event they missed, or browse a bulletin board to swap items with other employees. You can’t have an intranet that is ALL business just like you can’t have an intranet that is NO business.

The intranet landing page, called simply the Dashboard, contains links to support speedy task completion as well as content promoting company culture

A Dashboard Built for Speed or Browsing

On the starting page, an employee might be in need for something immediate or might have time to explore. We do not know their intention, therefore, this page needs to support both. 

The left drawer is open to employees on the dashboard. It is open to show them what it contains and to remove a click when accessing the important common destinations within. The first seven links are common items for any employee, curated by the Lifespan team. They are a mixture of tactical items — like time sheets — and company culture items — like the CARE recognition program. 

Below that are the employee Favorites. The first six favorites are shown while all are available with an extra click.

The top navigation supports speed to common destinations, some of which are search interfaces and others which are built for browsing. 

The rest of the page showcases engagement and company culture. Featured news stories with images are balanced with quick news and event lists. Flexible content sections allow authors to add and remove content blocks as new items are required. 

Other content pages that were focused on engagement are the deeper News and Events pages, customized Location pages (for each major hospital location), and a community Bulletin Board.

A individual location page on mobile has flexible content areas for each team to customize their experience
The section navigation sticks to the left side and expands to reveal deeper navigation for that section

The Results

Smooth Onboarding and Acceptance

No matter how confident our teams were, we didn’t really know if the redesign was a success until employees moved from the older tools they were familiar with. The Lifespan team did a fantastic job creating walk through videos ahead of the launch. Old tools and directories stayed available for a period of overlap, but our teams saw quick adoption into the new tools in favor of the familiar. 

Since the intranet is now available off of the closed Lifespan network, we have seen mobile traffic increase dramatically. The responsive design is an improved experience over the previous intranet and the numbers prove it. In fact, we have found that more employees engage in company culture content on their personal devices, while using the company workstations for their tasks. 

Oomph is very proud to have worked with one of the largest private employers in the state, and we are very proud to have our work used by over 17,000 people every day. Oomph continues to support the Lifespan team and the intranet project, iteratively improving the features and evolving the toolset to be effective for all.


THE BRIEF

While One Percent for America (OPA) had an admirable goal of helping eligible immigrants become U.S. citizens, the project faced a major stumbling block. Many immigrants had already been misled by various lending institutions, payday loans, or high-interest credit cards. As a result, the OPA platform would need a sense of trustworthiness and authority to shine through.

The platform also had to handle a broad array of tasks through a complex set of workflows, backstops, and software integrations. These tasks included delivering content, signing up users, verifying eligibility, connecting to financial institutions, managing loan data and investment balances, and electronically sending funds to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.


THE APPROACH

Given the challenges, our work began with a month-long discovery process, probing deeper into the audience, competitive landscape, customer journeys, and technological requirements for the platform. Here’s what we learned.

The Borrower Experience

Among those deep in the citizenship process and close to finishing the paperwork, many are simply waiting to have the funds to conclude their journey. For them, we designed as simple a workflow as possible to create an account, pass a security check, and apply for a loan.

Other users who are just starting the process need to understand whether they’re eligible for citizenship and what the process entails. We knew this would require smart, in-depth content to answer their questions and provide guidance — which was also a crucial component in earning their trust. Giving away genuinely helpful information, combined with carefully chosen language and photography, helped lend authenticity to OPA’s stated mission.

The Investor Experience

OPA sought to crowdfund capital from small investors, not institutions, creating a community-led funding source that could scale to meet borrowers’ needs. A key innovation is that funders can choose between two options: making tax-deductible donations or short-term loans.

If an investor makes a loan, at the end of the term they can decide to reinvest for another term, turn the money into a donation, or withdraw the funds. To reinforce the circular nature of the platform, we designed the experience so that borrowers could become investors themselves. The platform makes it easy for borrowers to change their intent and access different tools. Maturity dates are prominently displayed alongside “Lend Again” and “Donate” actions. Testimonials from borrowers on the dashboard reinforce the kinds of people who are helped by an investment.

The Mobile Experience

Our research made it clear the mobile experience had to be best in class, as many users would either prefer using a phone or didn’t have regular access to a tablet or computer. But, that didn’t mean creating a mobile app in addition to a desktop website. Instead, by designing a universal web app, we built a more robust experience — more powerful than most mobile apps — that can be used anywhere, on any device.

However, tasks like signing up for an account or applying for a loan need to be as easy on a mobile device as on a desktop. Key UX elements like step-by-step workflows, large touch targets, generous spacing on form fields, soft colors, and easy-to-read fonts produced a highly user-friendly interface.


THE RESULTS

Together with our technology partners, CraftsmanMotionpoint, and Platform.sh, we built an innovative digital platform that meets its users exactly where they are, from both a technological and cultural standpoint.

This groundbreaking work earned us a Gold Medal from the inaugural 2022 Anthem Awards, in the Innovation in Human and Civil Rights category. The award recognizes new techniques and services that advance communities and boost contributory funds.

In our ongoing partnership with OPA, Oomph will continue working to expand the business model with new features. We’re proud to have helped build this impactful resource to support the community of new Americans.


The Brief

New Drupal, New Design

Migrating a massive site like healthdata.org is challenging enough, but implementing a new site design simultaneously made the process even more complex. IHME wanted a partner with the digital expertise to translate its internal design team’s page designs into a flexible, functional set of components  — and then bring it all to life in the latest Drupal environment. Key goals included:

  • Successfully moving the site from Drupal 7 to the latest release of Drupal
  • Auditing and updating IHME’s extensive set of features to meet its authoring needs while staying within budget
  • Translating the designs and style guide produced by the IHME team into accessible digital pages
  • Enhancing site security by overhauling security endpoints, including an integration with SSO provider OneLogin

The Approach

The new healthdata.org site required a delicate balance of form and function. Oomph consulted closely with IHME on the front-end page designs, then produced a full component-based design system in Drupal that would allow the site’s content to shine now and in the future — all while achieving conformance with WCAG 2.1 standards.

Equipping IHME To Lead the Public Health Conversation

Collaborating on a Comprehensive Content Model

IHME needed the site to support a wide variety of content and give its team complete control over landing page layouts, but the organization had limited resources to achieve its ambitious goals. Oomph and IHME went through several rounds of content modeling and architecture diagramming to right-size the number and type of components. We converted their full-page designs into annotated flex content diagrams so IHME could see how the proposed flex-content architecture would function down to the field level. We also worked with the IHME team to build a comprehensive list of existing features — including out-of-the-box, plugins, and custom — and determine which ones to drop, replace, or upgrade. We then rewrote any custom features that made the grade for the Drupal migration.

Building Custom Teaser Modules

The IHME team’s design relied heavily on node teaser views to highlight articles, events, and other content resources. Depending on the teaser’s placement, each teaser needed to display different data — some displayed author names, for example, while others displayed only a journal title. Oomph built a module encompassing all of the different teaser rules IHME needed depending on the component the teaser was being displayed in. The teaser module we built even became the inspiration for the Shared Fields Display Settings module Oomph is developing for Drupal.

Creating a Fresh, Functional Design System

With IHME’s new content model in place, we used Layout Paragraphs in Drupal to build a full design system and component library for healthdata.org. Layout Paragraphs acts like a visual page builder, enabling the IHME team to construct feature rich pages using a drag and drop editor. We gave IHME added flexibility through customizable templates that make use of its extensive component library, as well as a customized slider layout that provides the team with even more display options.

You all are a fantastic team — professional yet personal; dedicated but not stressed; efficient, well-planned, and organized. Thank you so much and we look forward to more projects together in the future!

CHRIS ODELL Senior Product Manager: Digital Experience, University of Washington

The Results

Working to Make Citizens and Communities Healthier 

IHME has long been a leader in population health, and its migration to the latest version of Drupal ensures it can lead for a long time. By working with Oomph to balance technical and design considerations at every step, IHME was able to transform its vision into a powerful and purposeful site — while giving its team the tools to showcase its ever-growing body of insights. The new healthdata.org has already received a Digital Health Award, cementing its reputation as an essential digital resource for the public health community.