CALIFORNIA FIRST5

Reimagining communication for California families.

Parents are a child's first teacher. The California Children and Family Commission (CCFC) wanted to engage parents above the critically educational role they play in their children's first five years. To that effect the content intensive website had to reach 3 main target audiences: children, teachers and parents and make affordance for english-as-a-second-language as well as well as general market parents. Thinkspace gave CCFC a way to manage content from 58 county commissions from one centralized location and parents what they needed most: ease of use and "findability" because what we find changes who we become.
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SITE TYPE: governmental non-profit

RESPONSIBILITIES: information architecture, user experience, interaction design



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OUR CHALLENGE


The California Children and Family Commission (CCFC) is dedicated to improving the lives of California’s young children and their families through education, health services, child care and other programs. CCFC’s original site hadn’t changed in years despite the fact that its content had increased exponentially and its demographic shifted dramatically. A vast amount of content needed to be integrated in the areas of nutrition, language development and smoking cessation. Furthermore, an archaic link policy frequently bounced users to other external governmental sites without any navigational help.




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OUR THINKING


A scalable content strategy was needed with inventory hierarchies defined by overall user goals on the one and CCFC’s cross-departmental content management work-flow requirements on the other. To promote stickyness and engagement, dynamic content modules with image galleries and expert advice videos were given priority over text heavy content.




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THE RESULTS


Thinkspace worked hand-in-hand with creative, technical and content management teams to complete IA and interaction design in just under 4 weeks and California First 5 won the 2012 webawards for Government and non-profit standard of excellence.