An end-to-end mobile resource hub across Santa Barbara County, built to help 5,000+ people a year find essential services, designed for urgency, unreliable connectivity, and real-world stress.
The help was there.
It just wasn't in one place.
Program information lived across spreadsheets, web pages, and internal documents. What someone could find depended on where they looked, not what they needed.
Many people never learned the full range of services GSS offers; programs existed that the people who needed them couldn't see.
With no shared structure, what someone found depended on where they happened to look, not on what they actually needed.
The short version.
Four moves shaped the Service Finder. The research, artifacts, and decision-making behind them live in the deck above.
Rather than recruit people during crisis, I grounded decisions in service realities, stakeholder expertise, and proxy interviews with GSS staff.
I designed a four-level path from County → Department → Service Category → Program, with cross-listing so one program could surface through multiple paths from a single source record.
Proxy testing with GSS staff promoted Call, moved qualifying information earlier, and removed UI that competed with urgent decisions.
Larger tap targets, recoverable navigation, familiar map behavior, and three offline states kept the experience usable when conditions were not ideal.
Help you
can actually find.
The final Service Finder brings the architecture, accessibility patterns, and offline behavior into one discovery experience. Four core paths show how people can browse, map, search, and keep moving when connectivity drops.
What this project
taught me.
Structuring 55 programs meant balancing discoverability, hierarchy, and cross-listing while leaving room for the system to grow.
Under stress, clear navigation, large tap targets, and fast access to essential information matter more than visual density.
Connectivity cannot be assumed. Cached data, honest empty states, and clear limits have to be designed from the start.
Working with the design manager, stakeholders, and the pod helped ground decisions in user needs, service realities, and technical feasibility.
