2025–2026
Job & Family Services: four clear starting points for Ohioans who need help, on the State’s new platform
People come to jfs.ohio.gov at hard moments: after losing a job, when the food budget runs short, when a child support payment is late. In 2025–2026 we rebuilt the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services’ website on the State’s new Contentful platform around four starting points instead of a list of programs, and moved three related sites with it, keeping the forms, search and chatbots people rely on. It has just gone live.
- 4
- JFS websites rebuilt on Contentful, live 2026
- 3
- new components added to the Ohio Design System
- Client
- Ohio Department of Job & Family Services
- Industry
- Public sector
- Scope
- Requirements workshops · Content strategy · Information architecture · Contentful build · Testing · Training
- Platform
- Contentful + Next.js
- Partnership
- 2025–2026
Challenge
Someone who has just lost a job needs to file for unemployment. A family needs help with food, cash or heating bills. A parent is paying or waiting on child support, and a neighbor wants to report suspected abuse of an older adult. Employers register and pay unemployment taxes. All of them start at jfs.ohio.gov, the site of the Ohio Department of Job & Family Services (ODJFS).
Each of those services belongs to a different program, and people should not have to know which one. In 2025 the State began moving its websites from HCL Digital Experience to a new Contentful-based platform, and the department took the move as the moment to rebuild around the people who use it: jfs.ohio.gov and three related sites had to move without losing the forms, search and chatbots people depend on.
We knew the department well: in 2022–2023 we had redesigned its web presence on the previous platform.
Approach
Starting from what people come to do
We began with requirements workshops with the department and its programs, a content inventory and strategy, a new information architecture and clickable prototypes. The structure that came out of it is on today’s homepage: four starting points, Job & Workforce Services, Unemployment Services, Public Assistance, and Child Support, Adult & Family.
Four sites on the new platform
We built jfs.ohio.gov, data.jfs.ohio.gov, the Youth and Family Ombudsmen site and olda.ohio.gov on Contentful and Next.js, and carried the department’s forms, search and chatbots over to the new stack.
New parts for the Ohio Design System
Where the department needed something the State’s design system did not have, we built it into the Ohio Design System: a locations map to find an office, a slider, and a page type for Tableau dashboards.
Tested, then handed over
System and user acceptance testing each closed with an exit report, and the department’s team was trained in Contentful and Piwik PRO before go-live, so it runs the new sites itself.
Impact
The new jfs.ohio.gov is live on the State’s Contentful platform in 2026, with the Data Portal, the Ombudsmen site and olda.ohio.gov: four JFS websites on the new stack, with their forms, search and chatbots intact.
For the person who just lost a job or needs help with groceries, the result is a site that starts where they do, with four doors instead of a list of programs, on a platform the department’s own team runs.
We took the project from research to go-live for the department, our second with them after the 2022–2023 redesign.
