Federal Agency

A federal agency that regulates workplace safety and health desired to leverage existing federal agreements with USDA’s National Information Technology Center (NITC) to expand the infrastructure needed to modernize their website by migrating to a Drupal content management system and leveraging program-developed modules and themes to facilitate rapid development efforts.

Challenge

Our overarching challenge as a team was to design, develop, test, and accredit a federally-compliant Drupal solution in the cloud. As this effort was focused primarily on content migration, other goals were to analyze static and dynamic web content and define templates, workflows, and requirements.

While it was initially conveyed that user experience, navigation, and new site feature design and implementation were all in scope, priorities shifted and UX fell by the wayside. Knowing what I knew about the site itself and its "at-a-glance" issues - big and small - that beleaguered it, I needed to take action to ensure that this content migration was as beneficial to users as possible. That was my challenge.

Strategy + Solution

In order to chart a course to anywhere, it is important to establish your origin.

This agency's website, at that time, had been built with the best of intentions but, after a while, had become a stockpile for content placed without much thought to how their audience would locate, ingest, and process it. To my knowledge, this practice had been going on for years at that point. As such, I figured to kick off my process by conducting a thorough usability review - one a bit more all-encompassing and less-restrictive than a traditional heuristic evaluation.

Newsroom Article Advanced Search Design

The product owner wanted to enhance search capabilities on newsroom articles. As the primary users of this feature were internal employees, I was able to do a quick survey to determine which features were most useful. I held a few JAD sessions to get this down right, during which I shared my screen virtually with our stakeholders in the Mid-West US and developed wireframes in Axure. Once completed, I passed them over to our development team and worked with them to ensure that the form and function was consistent with what was discussed.