2019–2025
Ohio Department of Transportation: find the road project near you, and be heard on it
When ODOT plans to widen a highway or replace a bridge, the people who live and drive nearby get a say, and every comment has to be counted and answered. We redesigned transportation.ohio.gov on the InnovateOhio Platform around them: project pages with their status and a way to comment, content that follows your location, and a dashboard where ODOT staff moderate and answer. Five ODOT sites launched in 2019–2020, and we kept improving them until 2025.
- 5
- ODOT-family websites launched on the InnovateOhio Platform, November 2019 – January 2020
- 6
- years of support and improvements, 2019–2025
- Client
- State of Ohio · Ohio Department of Transportation
- Industry
- Public sector
- Scope
- Discovery workshops · Information architecture · Public commenting · Geolocation · Multi-site launch · Ongoing improvements
- Platform
- InnovateOhio Platform (HCL Digital Experience)
- Partnership
- 2019–2025
Challenge
A road project can change a neighborhood for years. When the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) plans one, federal rules require it to reach out to the public: during a public comment period, every submission has to be counted and acknowledged, whether it is signed or anonymous, and the full record has to be available to the Federal Highway Administration on request.
In 2019 ODOT chose Base22 to redesign its website as it moved onto the InnovateOhio Platform, together with four related sites: DriveOhio, the Ohio Rail Development Commission, the Ohio Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center and the Ohio Transportation Engineering Conference.
ODOT’s team expected two things to work on launch day: a way for people to comment on projects that staff could moderate and answer, and content that follows where people are, so someone in one part of the State sees the projects and news that affect them. They also named what they feared: a site that would fill up with clutter, special features that would grow late or over budget, and a site left behind as the platform changed.
Approach
Fears and expectations first
We started in July 2019 with discovery sessions and “fears and expectations” workshops with ODOT’s core team and with each program: DriveOhio, the UAS Center, the Rail Development Commission and the engineering conference. Every expectation became a requirement and every fear a mitigation plan. For the Rail Development Commission, the answer to clutter was to launch with its most-visited content first and grow from there.
Public comments, counted and answered
Each project page shows where the project stands, from proposed to completed, its phases and contacts, and a button to leave a comment. Staff moderate, publish and respond, with email notifications, and manage every comment project by project from an admin dashboard with exports.
Content that knows where you are
Visitors can share their location or enter it, and authors tag news, events and projects by county and district, so the site shows what is happening near the person reading it.
Five sites, one family
The UAS Center, Rail Development Commission and DriveOhio sites went live in November 2019, the conference site in December, and transportation.ohio.gov on January 29, 2020. Each site got author, reviewer and approver roles, author training and user acceptance testing following ODOT’s QA process.
Five more years of improvements
ODOT kept building with us through June 2025: countdowns for public comment periods, email notifications by district, demographic questions on comment forms, a rebuilt admin dashboard, traffic advisories and news on the homepage, filters by topic and discipline for its manuals and resources, and the State’s new brand in 2023.
Impact
From January 2020, a resident could find a project near them on transportation.ohio.gov, follow it from proposal to completion, and leave a comment that ODOT staff would see, answer and keep on record, alongside four related sites launched on the same platform in the weeks before.
ODOT kept extending the site with us for more than five years after launch. We designed and built the five sites for ODOT on the InnovateOhio Platform, and supported and improved them from 2019 to 2025.
