A UXer with an MBA, because UX is serious business

Michelle Pakron
Official State Website of Mississippi
Award-winning Project

award-winning project | 2014

ms.gov | Official State Website of Mississippi

UX Analysis & Design, Content Strategy, UI Design, HTML & CSS, SharePoint Branding & Implementation; Quality Control & Browser/Device Testing

ms.gov, round 3

In 2012, Mississippi Interactive launched our first iteration of ms.gov. We re-imagined the site and built it from the ground up. That version won a slew of awards, including being named the top 5 state website in the country by the Center for Digital Government.

Our next redesign, released April 2013, was a bold departure from the 2012 version. Responsive, mobile-first, and future-forward, the site also won many awards and placed in the top 10 of the state websites for the second year.

The 2014 release is yet another significant departure from the previous one. This new design is bold, bright, clean, full of great content, and is beyond responsive. An army of carefully crafted media queries ensures that the site looks great, no matter the viewport.

Awards

This version of ms.gov has won several awards: Silver Davey Award; W3 Silver Award; IMA Interactive Media Awards Best in Class (Government); Communicator Award- (Gold) Award of Excellence-Government Site; and Communicator Award- (Silver) Award of Distinction-Structure and Navigation.

What I did

I was the primary strategist, UX analyst and designer, and front end web developer for ms.gov. That covers concept, the ideas for the functionality, all of the design, built the site in HTML/CSS/JS, integrated the design inside SharePoint 2010, configured all of the SharePoint settings, wrote dozens of media queries, and then tested the site in BrowserStack, a VM, and on many, many devices. UX tasks include: competitive analysis, heuristic evaluation, process flows, wireframes, and analytics analysis. As the webmaster for ms.gov, I fielded citizen emails and provided direct customer support.

Techy bits

Designed in Adobe Fireworks, built with Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Designer, and Notepad. Adobe Photoshop was used to edit all photos used on the site; photos and graphics exported to the web with Fireworks. The site uses SharePoint 2010 as the CMS and Bootstrap 2. Built at Mississippi Interactive for the State of Mississippi.

Project excerpts

Previous versions of ms.gov that I designed

2013 Version

The 2013 release of ms.gov was named one to the top ten state websites by the Center for Digital Government.