Context

SLIM is an Integrated Licensing Portal for Municipalities, where local governments can offer a digital experience for obtaining licenses for taxpayers or businesses. All services and authorizations related to environmental, health, or other licenses will be easily accessible on the portal without the need to search through different departments or be physically present at the responsible department. The SLIM project has been initiated many years ago and has been used by some municipalities such as Manaus and Maceió. However, with the start of the contract with the Municipality of Aracaju, there was a need for a complete redesign of the portal, including new functionalities and usability improvements.

Objective

To propose a new design for the SLIM Portal in Aracaju, considering its scalability to serve other municipalities.

Guidelines

Legacy Platforms

The SLIM platform in some cities has the following layout, with limited clarity of information, outdated aesthetics, and no responsiveness or adaptability for mobile devices.

Additionally, there is no standardization among the platforms, as the Municipality of Manaus redesigned its portal.

Government Digital Standard

As an effort to standardize the platforms, as well as future products of Vox, the use of the federal government's Design System, the Government Digital Standard, has been recommended.

Guidelines

• Most Accessed Services: A specific section with the top four most accessed services will reduce clicks and friction for a large portion of taxpayers who require such services.

• Service List: Categorized by type of person (individual or legal entity) or by the responsible department.

• Announcements: A section for short announcements issued by municipal secretariats and their services.

Proposal

This project was planned to deliver and validate a wireframe for a more in-depth analysis of functionalities and a high-fidelity prototype, all to be evaluated by the Municipality of Aracaju.

Homepage and Service Page

The Homepage has been redesigned, improving the information architecture and adding the planned new features.

The Service Page has been created to provide detailed information about the services and guide the user more clearly to the desired service.

White-label Aesthetics

SLIM Aracaju has served as the pilot for a new, modernized SLIM platform that can be easily scaled to other municipalities and state governments. Therefore, we have designed the portal to be white-label, meaning it is ready to be outsourced for other clients to implement their brands.

Accessibility Tools

When working with UI, accessibility is already embedded in the design thinking, even if sometimes it is not noticed. High readability, good contrasts, groupings, aesthetics, and various other concepts are essential in the design work, but they also strengthen the accessibility of our product.

That being said, in this project, we saw the potential to experiment with more specific concepts of Accessibility, such as high contrast tools, sign language visualization, font size control, among others, being the pilot to bring Accessibility tools to other Vox products.

It is worth remembering that Accessibility is not limited to the work of the designer; our front-end was essential in implementing good practices and accessibility tools in the code.

Accessibility Bar

Accessibility bar containing Skip-links for exclusive keyboard navigation, Auto Contrast buttons, VLibras, and Cookies.

Auto Contrast

VLibras

Navigable Prototype

https://www.figma.com/proto/PlEcvUJCinFEO75yIjyk58/SLIM-(Copy)?page-id=1305:5622&type=design&node-id=2453-15048&viewport=244,690,0.1&t=MOCvTdtnQjwgWIXO-8&scaling=contain&starting-point-node-id=2453:15048&show-proto-sidebar=1&hide-ui=1

Conclusion

It was an intense but fun project. The little time we had to present the project did not allow us to have contact with the user, but despite the circumstances, we were able to deliver something very satisfactory, not only for us but mainly for our client, the Municipality of Aracaju.

I learned and implemented for the first time concepts and accessibility tools, based on WCAG, such as Auto-contrast. I believe SLIM can be the spark that makes Vox Technology implement Accessibility for other user-focused products.

We had several learnings from this project. Screens that are so simple that we usually forget about them, such as error pages (404 and 500), also involve user experience research. Implementing the 404 and 500 pages, once a trivial and quick task, proved to be quite interesting.

This project also brought challenges, such as the short time and the fact that I was not exclusively on this project. In the end, with a lot of personal organization and great help from my leadership, we were able to deliver the project.