As demand for online government services continues to grow, Hennepin County is working to ensure that digital access is equitable, intuitive, and responsive to the diverse needs of its residents. Since summer 2025, Graduate Student Researcher Chinmay Arora has supported Hennepin County’s Digital Experience (DX) team’s resident-centered, data-informed approach by identifying seven distinct resident segments, ranging from senior homeowners with low digital confidence to smartphone-dependent families and transition-age youth.
Arora’s summer research paired behavioral and access patterns with barrier profiles that show how life circumstances, digital habits, language, trust, and accessibility shape residents’ interactions with county services. He used a multi-layered segmentation framework and tools such as the Pain/Opportunity (Pain Point vs. Service) Matrix, where resident challenges are translated into clear, actionable design priorities. Aurora then built on the initial segmentation by aligning segment-level barriers with key service touchpoints over the fall term.
His research highlighted high-impact opportunities and support prioritization across digital improvements—particularly where issues like mobile-only access, accessibility constraints, language needs, and trust challenges show up most consistently. Aurora hopes to inform the development of inclusive personas, journey maps, and a prioritized set of service improvement recommendations, that may help to establish an automated service relay/triage system so that high-impact pain points can be routed to the appropriate departments more efficiently.
“The segmentation translates resident experiences into actionable design priorities. It gives the Digital Experience team a shared way to identify where people get stuck, which barriers matter most for different groups, and what improvements will have the biggest equity and usability payoff, so the county can target changes that measurably reduce friction and improve completion of services.”