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Summary of work

Gainesville residents, contractors, and real estate professionals frequently needed to look up permit information for properties — whether checking the history of work done on a home they were considering buying, verifying that a contractor had pulled the proper permits, or tracking the status of their own permit applications. The city's existing permit data was theoretically public but practically inaccessible, buried in a legacy database interface that required knowing specific case numbers to retrieve anything useful.

The permit locator project aimed to make this public information genuinely accessible through a map-based search interface that let users find permit records by address, property, or geographic area. Designed as a civic tech project in collaboration with Code for Gainesville, the tool needed to be simple enough for a non-technical resident to use while surfacing enough information to be genuinely useful to professionals.

The design prioritized the address-lookup use case — the most common need — while making map browsing and filter-based exploration available for users with broader research needs.

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Process

I started by mapping the resident use cases with city staff, identifying three primary scenarios: property research (looking up all permits on a specific address), contractor verification (finding permits associated with a specific contractor license number), and status checking (tracking a specific permit application). This defined the search and filter model before any visual work began.

Wireframes were developed for the map interface, search results panel, and permit detail view. I ran informal review sessions with city staff and two residents to validate the approach before moving to visual design. The visual design drew on the city's existing digital style guide while introducing patterns more appropriate for a data browsing tool than a standard city webpage.

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Outcomes & impact

• The tool launched as a public resource and was promoted through the city's communication channels
• Resident feedback collected through the Code for Gainesville brigade was positive, with users specifically citing ease of address lookup
• City staff reported a reduction in phone inquiries for permit status information in the months following launch
• The project was featured in a regional civic tech roundup as an example of Code for America brigade work

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Learnings

Government service design is a specific discipline with specific constraints — accessibility requirements, public data obligations, limited maintenance budgets — and designing within those constraints requires different instincts than designing commercial products. The most important design principle I practiced here was radical simplicity: if a resident can't figure out how to use a tool without help, the tool has failed its public service mission regardless of how good the underlying data is.