Product design & frontend / 2026
Northstar Civic Platform
A calm, accessible service hub that helps residents find local support without learning how government is organized.
Northstar turns a fragmented catalogue of city services into a task-focused experience designed for stressful, time-sensitive moments.
The constraint
Residents arrived with a need, but the old site answered with departments. Finding rental support, a permit, or a missed collection meant translating a life event into the council’s internal language.
We reorganized more than 240 services around plain-language tasks. Search and navigation share one taxonomy, so the experience stays predictable whether a visitor types, browses, or follows a link from a letter.
The useful interface was not the one with the most answers. It was the one that made the next step unmistakable.
A system for urgent moments
The visual system lowers cognitive load with stable page anatomy, clear status language, and generous touch targets. High-priority services expose eligibility and response times before asking for personal information.
What changed
- Task completion is possible without knowing a department name.
- Every form preserves progress and explains why information is requested.
- Content editors preview service states before publishing.
- Automated journeys cover keyboard, screen-reader, and narrow-screen use.
Outcome
In moderated testing, residents found the correct service faster and with fewer backtracks. The shared content model also gave internal teams one source of truth for service hours, eligibility, and disruptions.
Visual record
Inside the work
