SFUSD unveils user-centered web redesign to improve access, mobile use and multilingual support

The San Francisco Unified School District on Tuesday laid out plans to rebuild its websites with a focus on accessibility, mobile responsiveness and simpler navigation for families, students and staff. District leaders said the redesign aims to centralize information, provide multilingual support and make it easier to find enrollment and school-by-school content.

The presentation by district communications and technology staff, supported by local design firm Exygy, described the current system as “outdated” and noted the district’s primary site averages more than 100,000 unique views a month. “Our search doesn’t work to really narrow down options successfully,” an unnamed communications presenter said, and about 25 percent of main-site users are accessing content on phones, a point the presenters used to underscore mobile improvements. Melissa Dodd, the district’s chief technology lead, described a proposed “front door” concept that would give parents a single path into school information, enrollment tools and key services so users can more easily find what they need.

District staff said Exygy’s assessment included one-on-one interviews, surveys and design sprints with families, school staff and students to develop prototypes and user flows. The proposal calls for a modern open-source content-management system, baseline templates for schools, improved accessibility for users with disabilities, expanded multi-language support and an employee dashboard to aggregate frequently used internal resources. “We need to bring all of our sites up to that kind of accessibility standard,” the communications presenter said, noting an Office for Civil Rights mandate affecting many districts.

Board members pressed staff about student engagement, outreach to underrepresented populations, integration with ParentVUE and funding for back-end staffing to maintain content. Dodd said students and high-school focus groups were part of intake surveys and that the team would provide more specifics on which student cohorts were consulted. On funding, she said resources had been prioritized through the district’s digital steering committee and that some implementation details would be addressed in Phase 2, which begins this spring.

District officials said the phased plan moves from assessment to a design-and-build stage and then to a content-governance and migration phase. Staff expect initial school “front doors” and updated sfusd.edu pages to appear in the coming school year; a broader rollout of department and school sites would follow as the district builds maintenance capacity and governance.