Designing with the Public: How Figma Empowers Chicago Digital Services
summary
Facing an 838 million dollar budget hole, the City runs about 2.7 million residents and uses a web footprint of 20 million visits and 200 legacy apps, so the team runs 1,000 interviews with residents, recruits university classes to design in a shared Figma design system, and folds student prototypes and usability tests straight into production. Work targets accessibility and usable components, uses Bootstrap 4 for implementation, and yields measurable rollbacks into the living system and shipped improvements.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:03Speaker background
- 2:48Chicago’s digital challenges
- 4:11Budget and team limits
- 6:21University design research
- 7:45Figma for university partnerships
- 9:10Shipping work without resources
- 10:33Figma’s collaborative paradigm
- 11:20Design system development
- 13:03Student feedback loops
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