Strategic. People Curious. Baker of UX Cake.


Leading Experience Strategy at Accela


When I joined Accela as the lead on UX research and experience strategy, I inherited three products — all connected, all crucial, and all deeply tangled.


The Civic Platform was the workhorse — a massive, ColdFusion-era (!) tool that ran municipal operations for everything from building permits to fire inspections to park management.


The Citizen Portal (ACA) was the public-facing window where residents and developers could apply for permits or track service requests.


The Inspector Mobile App was meant to help field inspectors log and sync data between departments.


Great in concept. In practice? Let's just say… imagine trying to modernize city hall with a fax machine and a hope.


Before I started, the UI team had made some visual and structural improvements using Angular UI, shown in the last two images. However, adoption was low—users preferred the older, more complex interface.


Through customer interviews and surveys, I found out why: the new design limited their control and access to the data they needed to do their work effectively.


The Reality Check


Most municipalities still ran their data on self-hosted servers. That meant every city’s IT department — not the folks who actually ran inspections or approvals — had to run the show.


When even a minor process change took 30 business days and five tickets, collaboration wasn’t just slow, it was painful.


Departments using the same software were still operating in silos, replicating their old pen-and-paper workflows digitally — only slower.

Inspectors printed forms, drove to sites, and re-entered data later. Residents tried to submit applications online, only to be sent back to city hall for an actual stamp.


It was a system built to connect people… that accidentally made everyone lonelier (just as hard to collaborate, and now more steps to do it!)

Multiple records workers needed to manage intake and paper + online records between all apps.

Records worker doing intake and updates on paper to start the process and then entering data in the computer (often because resident can’t or won’t).


Paper plans – all must on paper have one version per change and approval from multiple sources per change, but this was required to make sure each approver saw the change. This process was being mimicked electronically rather than handling change management (notifications, merges, version histories, etc.) which could streamline this working process vastly.

Paper inspection created in the field waiting for a back office admin to check, compare and update e-file (although the inspector also created the e-file).

Hall of Paper Records – must legally be kept in perfect identical sync with e-records, many agencies handled this through meticulously doing twice the work rather than relying on system automation to manage it (and create paper record if they really wanted).


Seeing the Bigger Journey


Because I led research across all three products, I could see the real problem: no one was looking at this as a unified, human journey.


A permit applicant, city planner, IT admin, and field inspector were sharing one experience — they just didn’t know it.


So, I pushed for a holistic view: every persona, every touchpoint, every handoff. Not three product experiences — one civic ecosystem.



Building the Research Foundation


  • I recruited participants from seven user segments: back office permit handlers, code inspectors, planners, IT admins, finance, front-office staff, and agency back-office teams (100+ participants across the U.S.)


I had the team map their critical journeys and tested real task flows. Using SUS as the scoring metric, and qualitative interviews with each participant, we got a baseline understanding for their struggles, and uncovered the ugly truths:


  • -Redundant, self-built data fields
  • -Data exchange between departments nearly impossible
  • -IT admins acting as workflow creators instead of enablers
  • -Field inspectors losing time just getting data synced
  • -Leadership lacking trust in cloud hosting (fun fact: on-site servers are not safer; ask the city of Atlanta)
  • - UI semantic, content organization, and navigation is disorganized and inconsistent

Below are a handful of the examples captured and presented to gain approval from company leadership to get approval for a large-scale front-end redesign of key areas of each app in the product Suite. And the steps (research, design) we’d follow to do this.


Defining the Experience Strategy


We laid out five pillars for the long-term UX and experience strategy:


  1. Streamline and simplify setup: put the power in the hands of the user to configure their tools without having to build them from the ground up (their patterns were similar enough that we could do this by building tools for them.. you know like empowering software platforms are supposed to do! Revamp records architecture and Navigation
  2. Encourage Cloud Adoption: educate municipalities and shift toward secure, scalable hosting.
  3. Simplify Inspector Tools: streamline data entry and syncing both on- and offline.
  4. Design for Collaboration: create “out-of-the-box” workflows that multiple departments could actually use together.
  5. Redesign Workflow Management: replace the analog-style “document everything twice” logic with true digital change tracking and audit history.

Every pillar tied back to a single vision — civic technology that actually helps people work together.

  1. And we had to Modernize the UI to unify visuals and interactions across apps with a shared design system.

Proving It Out


Once we re-architected and prototyped the key user journeys, we ran the same usability tests we started with.


The new designs significantly improved SUS scores and reduced time-on-task across nearly every user segment.


Some components shipped before I left; others are still in implementation.

Accela’s a big ship — and big ships don’t turn fast — but the course is set. My role was making that turn possible by delivering a future vision with tangible, momentum-building wins at every step.


Images below are some of the main redesigns.

Record UI updated with consistent and standard header identifying type, details, and allowing the user to accomplish most tasks quickly and consistently through it (phase one of a record simplification plan).

Workflow management two streamline collaboration between all workers, departments, and agencies with version control and inline editing that keeps records update context for the user (rather than double work to change a record detail or status, then document it was changed!)

Workflow management two streamline collaboration between all workers, departments, and agencies with version control and inline editing that keeps records update context for the user (rather than double work to change a record detail or status, then document it was changed!)

Workflow management two streamline collaboration between all workers, departments, and agencies with version control and inline editing that keeps records update context for the user (rather than double work to change a record detail or status, then document it was changed!)

Improved searching on any data attribute with optional faceted results and robust filtering and results match highlighting.

Improved searching on any data attribute with optional faceted results and robust filtering and results match highlighting.

Quick Checklists to keep in-field inspections easy, fast and consistent requiring less redundant work.

Quick Checklists to keep in-field inspections easy, fast and consistent requiring less redundant work.