San Francisco

San Francisco Health Services System

A Passion for Civic Service
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Digital Ecosystems

A critical public resource stretched beyond its limits

Over 126,000 San Francisco city and county employees rely on the SFHSS website to understand and access their health benefits. As the organization's audience grew, its information architecture hadn't kept pace — members were struggling to find what they needed, and support call volume was climbing. For a government agency, the stakes of a confusing digital experience aren't just inconvenience. They're real people missing real benefits.

The mandate was clear: make the site work harder for more people — without compromising the ADA compliance, multilingual access, and platform security a public-sector system demands.

Call Center

BUILDING THE RELATIONSHIP

A Long-term, continuous team — No B team.

M7 came to SFHSS as a designated San Francisco Local Business Enterprise — already familiar with the city, already invested in its people. What began as a focused initial engagement earned a multiyear contract: three years with a two-year extension option. Scope expanded to cover experience design, custom tool development, analytics, and ongoing platform operations.
 

No handoffs to new faces every quarter. The same senior team, continuously building real-world bonds with the people and systems we were improving.

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Card Sort

RETHINKING INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Research-driven. Member-first.

Navigating a government benefits site shouldn't require a manual. SFHSS's site had accumulated layers of content that made wayfinding increasingly difficult — a common result when organizational priorities evolve faster than the digital experience serving them.

M7 led a structured card sorting exercise to objectively map where the site's information diverged from members' actual mental models. We also reviewed tens of thousands of inbound support calls logged in SFHSS's Salesforce CRM — using real call data, not assumptions, to surface where members were falling short and what needed to change.

The output: revised personas, journey maps, and a redesigned IA that created intuitive, audience-specific pathways. Driven by evidence. Built for people.

CUSTOM TOOLS

Turning complexity into clarity.

The retirement benefits cost estimator was one of the most impactful deliverables of the engagement. What had previously required extended customer service calls — navigating layers of variables and conditions — became a friendly, accessible self-service tool that puts the answer in members' hands in minutes.

Pragmatic problem-solving at its best: identify the highest-friction touchpoint, then design it away.

Custom Development
Analytics

ANALYTICS

No more flying blind.

M7 overhauled SFHSS's analytics with a full migration to Google Analytics 4 — delivering precise event tracking, a privacy-centric data model aligned with public-sector requirements, and access to built-in predictive insights. SFHSS leadership now has a clear, continuous picture of how members interact with the site and where experience gaps persist.

Data-driven improvement isn't a one-time exercise. It's infrastructure.

 

ACCESSIBILITY & MULTILINGUAL SUPPORT

Serving everyone. No exceptions.

San Francisco's population is exceptionally diverse. Accessibility isn't a compliance checkbox here — it's a design constraint that shapes every decision. M7 maintained ADA 2.0 compliance across every phase and integrated multilingual support for English, Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino.


A site that works for most people isn't good enough when you're serving the public.

 

Multilingual
Process

PLATFORM STABILITY

Continuous. Disciplined. Zero drama.

Availability and security are non-negotiable for a public-sector system of this scale. M7's engineering team operates across Development, Staging, and Production environments, uses source control, and runs automated deployment processes that minimize the risk of anything reaching production unvetted. Regular risk assessments keep the platform protected throughout the engagement. 

This is the infrastructure you get with an M7 engagement — not just a goal, but as an operational commitment.

 

THE OUTCOME

A more useful, more accessible public resource — and a growing relationship.

What started as a modest engagement has grown into a sustained partnership. The work has meaningfully improved how 126,000+ members access and understand their benefits — reducing friction, increasing self-service capability, and bringing the site into alignment with what a modern government agency should offer its people.

Five years of continuous improvement. No silos. No black boxes. Just a senior team that showed up and kept building.

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