My largest project at CityBase was to design a portal for the City of Chicago to collect the Ground Transportation Tax from transportation vehicles bringing passengers through O'hare International Airport and Chicago Midway Airport. The portal processes 800,000 transactions/year and will generate $3 million in annual revenue to the city.
"CityBase is a Chicago-based company that helps cities reach and serve residents and businesses online, on the phone and in person. The company runs a technology platform, designs payment and communication channels, and aggregates operational data for municipalities, agencies, and utilities based on their proprietary academic research, design and data-driven analysis.
CityBase’s cloud-based SaaS platform integrates directly with local governmental agency databases and centralizes the customer interactions of multiple city agencies. The company’s products provide cities with comprehensive information about their operations and revenue collection, while providing citizens with a more unified and useful gateway to the government." - CrunchBase
Over Spring 2017, I was fortunate to intern at CityBase, a leading startup in the new & rapidly growing sector of government/civic technology. I worked alongside the Chief Design Officer, a Senior Designer, as well as our engineering team to develop a project for the City of Chicago from conceptualization to a shipped product. This was my first experience with the Agile development process, from creating and using user stories to working through development cycles and creating MVPs that coincide with developer constraints.
Project Context
The Ground Transportation Tax (GTT) is a City of Chicago tax on all businesses that provide ground transportation vehicles to passengers at O'Hare International Airport and Chicago Midway Airport. Every taxi, livery, or limo that goes through the airport pays a tax for every ride that they give. The problem is that this tax was highly unregulated, resulting in a loss of $3 million annually for the city. My project was to create an online portal that will allow transportation businesses to register their vehicles and process tax payments, and allow Admins to manage the accounts in the system.
CityBase built a camera that captures timestamped license plates of these vehicles and dumps them into a database.
I had to create three primary workflows:
- Onboarding process for businesses --> allowing them to create an account, register all their vehicles, and upload payment information.
- Business dashboard --> allow businesses to view/edit/add their registered vehicles, view ride history for each vehicle, manage payment information, and manage their account.
- Admin dashboard --> allow Admins to search for user accounts, be able to filter through rides (by time, by user, by license plate number), be able to find all user information, and be alerted when users have not paid/their payment has expired/other errors associated with their accounts.
The Process
Still in the process of putting this together. In the meantime, check out my interactive prototypes below.