April 2012
12 posts
Background
georgia.gov is the main website for the state of Georgia. Each year, about 4.5 million people visit the site, accounting for almost 16 million page views. On the site, citizens can browse the site by topic and find links to information on other state websites, or search for the information they’re looking for. The site went live in 2002; but with the exception of a refresh in 2006, it’s never...
Methodology
With the redesign, we wanted to do something different. Something that hadn’t been done before. And we wanted to redo everything, not just give it a facelift. So we looked at every aspect of georgia.gov. - content, search, information architecture, platform and design. What wasn’t working, and why wasn’t it working? We had our ideas, but we wanted our decisions to be based on real data. So we...
Got Any Ideas?
We knew what the problem was. Now how were we supposed to solve it? This was the fun part. We read blogs, poured over presentations at major web conferences, and armed ourselves with the latest research in usability, search, design, content strategy, even the rise of mobile devices.
We then came together for several navel-gazing sessions in which we looked at how we could address the...
Search
As we mentioned before, the old georgia.gov relied heavily on browsing. Each link to an agency service or content was organized in a special hierarchy. And state government is good at organizing things. Unfortunately, state government is also big - immense, in fact - and users have trouble finding things. Can’t find hunting licenses under “Environment”? Well, try “Tourism.” Car tags not under...
1 tag
Layout
“It’s my belief that in order to embrace designing native layouts for the web – whatever the device – we need to shed the notion that we create layouts from a canvas in. We need to flip it on its head, and create layouts from the content out.”
- Mark Boulton, Web Designer
“If something is on the screen and people aren’t clicking on it, we remove it.”
- Steve Hafner, CEO of...
Content
In the past, georgia.gov had simply pointed the way to information on other websites. But given our new focus on search, we had to make sure that users found the right information quickly. There were two problems with this approach:
We couldn’t control the search results from websites that were not hosted with us;
There may be more than one agency (or search result) with information about a...
Responsive Design
We wanted to do something special with GeorgiaGov - something that no other state site had done. With Responsive Design, we think we’ve accomplished that.
Responsive Web Design is a new way of presenting web content in which the layout of the site adapts to the device that is accessing it. A person with a large computer monitor will see a different layout than a person using a mobile device. ...
Less is More
Jared Spool and the CrazyEgg study opened our eyes to the realization that screen space was valuable, as was our users’ time and patience. We began laying out the front page with a few rules in mind: The fewer words, the better. Content went through several edits, and each time we pared down the number of words and simplified them. We allowed for lots of white space. We made search bigger, took...
Where are the Pretty Pictures?
One thing that you won’t find on the new GeorgiaGov is a gallery of beautiful photos depicting the state’s natural resources. It’s something that is on almost every other state portal. The reason is simple. Stunning photography of the North Georgia mountains or the beaches of Cumberland Island won’t help our constituents get their child support. It’s eye candy, and it takes up room and bandwidth....
Testing the Look
We didn’t design in a vacuum. User testing played a major part in the design process, helping us gauge how well we were meeting users’ expectations. To test the new design, we conducted a 5 second test in which users were given a snapshot of the front page for 5 seconds, then asked a series of questions about what they thought the site was about, what types of feelings it conveyed, and what they...
What the Font?
Fonts can be subjective - everybody has a favorite, and everyone has an opinion -but when it came to which fonts to choose for GeorgiaGov, we were all in agreement: we needed something that could be read easily, and something that would load quickly. Verdana is widely known as one of the more readable sans-serif fonts for type, as is Georgia among serif fonts. They are common on both PC and...
Usability
We paid close attention to usability during the whole design process, paying attention to detail:
We added “search as you type” functionality to help users find relevant content more quickly.
Popular topics were worded as a call to action; instead of “child support,” the link read “Get Child Support”.
Links looked like links - blue and underlined - and were consistent throughout the site.
...
September 2011
1 post
Testing the IA
Information architecture, or the structure of the website, was now taking a back seat to search. We joked that the new GeorgiaGov would just have one big search field - no menu, no navigation. Of course, we can’t do that. Yet. We use menus to direct users toward a smaller universe that’s more directed toward their interest. From this second level, users can see popular topics in that area as...
April 2011
1 post
Design
Most people think of design and layout as very subjective, based on the whims of a few art students who throw something together at the last minute. Far from it. Our design decisions were based on careful research, testing and analytics. We began with personas - creating imaginary people who we thought were typical users of georgia.gov. We quickly discovered that, unlike other products that have...
