As one of Socrata’s ear­li­est cus­tomers, the City and County of San Francisco had an open data por­tal that had be­gun to show its age. As civic tech­nol­ogy, gov­ern­ment trans­parency, and other ef­fects of the open data move­ment be­came more preva­lent, San Francisco needed to up­date its por­tal to re­flect chang­ing trends and ex­pec­ta­tions in user needs when it came to find­ing the data as eas­ily as pos­si­ble.

Working closely with newly ap­pointed chief data of­fi­cer Joy Bonaguro, who con­ducted nu­mer­ous in­ter­views with users to de­ter­mine how to find in­for­ma­tion, we de­signed and built a cus­tomized ver­sion of the Socrata open data por­tal to bet­ter serve the cit­i­zens of San Francisco.