The Department of Labor (DOL) is a cabinet-level department of the U.S. federal government responsible for occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, reemployment services, and some economic statistics; many U.S. states also have such departments. The department is headed by the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
As an organization with diverse functions, DOL carries out its mission through a number of offices and agencies. These are organized into major program areas, and headed by an Assistant Secretary or other official.
The Challenge
The Department of Labor is comprised of over 20 departments - each of them with their own focuses, branding, social media presences, and missions separate from the larger agency. So when the idea to establish a unified brand across the DOL was proposed, stakeholders took issue.
A solution was identified early on and, for the agencies with a more simple information architecture, this worked just fine. However, for others, this created a paradigm where roughly 4-5 levels of navigation were to be represented, pushing the site content down almost 40% down the page.
Identifying who to go to for what questions or content was difficult with so many players involved. To make matters worse, the information being fed to many of the websites was void of structure and navigation levels easily drilled down to more than five levels at points. Needless to say, it was challenging to find any information without the use of global search.
