Government agency redesign: FCCThe Federal Communications Commission regulates interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. We were assigned to redesign a responsive mobile and desktop site.
What i didWe conducted research, defining, ideations, prototyping, and testing. I was responsible for User Research, User Testing, and the desktop and mobile prototype. Overall our goal was to redesign the site to increase engagement and accessibility.
The problemGovernment sites can be overwhelming, the goal was to make the site more accessible and engaging. Text bodies were cluttered, little use of images and a confusing navigation bar.
The processWe began with our User Persona which would help us get a start on planning out the rest of our user research. From there we built on the research through the definition and ideation phases. All this information helped us get started on early renditions of our prototypes and through user testing, we made several iterations which would allow us to complete our final prototype.
User Research & FindingsOur user research consisted of a heuristic evaluation, user observations, proto/user persona, and user interviews. Our five user interviews were extremely helpful, in which we provided 20 questions to help create our user persona and that helped us throughout our research, ideation, and usability testing.
Ideation designWe prioritized our ideation from the information gathered in user interviews and Mary Simmons. We wanted to support our user hypothesis, our goal was to create a strong foundation for the prototyping that was to come. We performed card sorting on the government agency website and redesigned a new sitemap.
usability testing & findingsOur goal was to find how intuitive users find the navigation schemes in our redesign of the FCC’s website. We are looking to observe if there are any pain points throughout the navigation process and find out if we need to make any iterations in our redesign. We hope to achieve this by assigning tasks that require the users to take advantage of the different navigation tools offered in our redesign.
We wanted to make sure there was consistency in the layout for our header, navigation, and footer. After the low-fidelity we moved into mid-fidelity where we started adding images, logos, and other assets from the UI Style Guide we created. From there we began prototyping the mobile site. After our mid-fidelity was complete, we held a round of user testing, which we took notes from and brought back to our high fidelity.
conclusionWe made the sites more engaging and organized the information in a more compact form. The user testing was most helpful in reassuring that the changes made the site easier to navigate by reducing the amount of text, increasing image use, along simplifying the navigation and the footer. For future opportunities, I would dedicate more time and do a round of peer reviews with fellow designers.
