Today the redesigned SFMTA.com launched. The SFMTA is responsible for all ground transportation in San Francisco: Muni, parking, traffic, bicycling and taxis. Its website serves more than a million daily riders and holds over 30,000 pages and thousands of documents, maintained by content teams across Marketing and Communications, Public Affairs, Transit, IT and Data Services.
FivePaths partnered with InkëDesign on the complete redesign, built on Drupal.
Organized around how people travel
The new information architecture starts from the way people get around: Muni, walking, biking and the other modes the agency manages. That changed how content across the whole site relates to the places riders begin. Because so many people depend on the site every day, design changes were prototyped and staged to keep disruption to a minimum.
Flexible page templates let individual SFMTA teams manage their own campaigns and specialized content within a single framework, and a publishing workflow supports review and approval for Communications and Public Affairs.
Connecting the agency's systems
A transit website has to bring together information from many sources. The new site connects Drupal with:
- GTFS schedules, for automated route and stop schedule pages
- Realtime vehicle positions, for live route maps
- Salesforce, for route notifications and email sign-ups
- ArcGIS, for a layered map of capital projects
- Trapeze transit operations data
- FormAssembly forms, Tableau reports and data feeds for physical transit screens
- Google Translate and Google's trip planner, for multilingual access and journey planning
Accessibility was part of the work throughout, from templates to the interactive maps.
The team
Eric Leland led strategy and project management, Jason Salter the architecture and development, and Tyler Cifu-Shuster the integrations and APIs, with Inke Noël of InkëDesign leading design. We continue to support the site and develop it with the SFMTA.