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Skills
Information Architecture · Content Strategy · CMS Design · Facilitation
2
City domains unified
7
Content types designed
5
Staff roles mapped
The City of South Bend’s digital content was split across two domains, making it hard for residents to find what they needed. Behind the scenes, the problem was just as acute — staff across multiple departments were creating and managing content without clear ownership, consistent structure, or shared standards.
The city hadn’t yet committed to a CMS. Part of the work was helping evaluate options and make the case for one — ultimately landing on Payload, an open-source platform suited to the city’s needs for structured content and AI readability.
What it lacked was an architecture to match.
I started with discovery interviews across city departments — talking to subject matter experts, department editors, and the web manager to understand how content was actually created, reviewed, and published. What emerged was a picture of fragmentation: content owned by no one, workflows that varied by department, and a publishing process that put too much on too few people. I partnered with a service design intern throughout, treating the project as a teaching opportunity as much as a design one — coaching them through IA fundamentals, interview techniques, and how to work with stakeholders across a large institution.
We inventoried both page types and the types of information that lived on each page — services, permits, licenses, events, departments, reports. That inventory became the foundation for a unified IA spanning both city domains. I mapped content into linked Notion databases, treating them as a living prototype we could test and refine with stakeholders before anything touched the CMS. This let us validate structure quickly without committing to code.
Having selected Payload, we moved into prototyping directly in the city’s CMS. I designed content templates for each of the seven content types, with structured fields that would make pages consistent, scannable, and readable by AI systems as well as humans. The content editing interface was designed for non-technical staff: clear field labels, helpful guidance copy, and a publishing workflow that gave the right people the right level of control without creating bottlenecks.
In parallel, I hosted a series of lunch-and-learns teaching city staff the basics of Figma — components, design libraries, how to work with design files without breaking things.
My contract ended before the work could be implemented. A new leadership team came in with their own priorities and process — and the specific deliverables may look different by the time anything ships.
What’s stayed is the thinking. The team has continued moving forward using methods from our work together — applying job mapping, running benchmark usability tests, and building on the foundation we laid.
The deliverables are complete: a unified information architecture across two city domains, seven content type templates, a role-based governance model, and a CMS prototype built in Payload. The system was designed to serve both residents navigating city services and the AI tools increasingly used to surface that information.
The work is unimplemented. I believe it’s sound.
