Constructing a State Web Portal Through Design Alternatives, Measurement and Iterative Refinement

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Dec 2004/Jan 2005 by Brinck, Tom

E-Government

In the year 2000, the developers of a large-state portal approached us with a need to redesign the information architecture of their state website. The portal provided access to thousands of state agencies. Users consistently expressed frustration in finding relevant information.

Through a series of user interviews and user tests with successive prototypes of the new architecture, we dramatically improved the success rate and time for finding information through the state site. Our approach was based on systematically exploring the design space and was metric-based, allowing us to show formal quantitative evidence of site improvement and make well-grounded estimates of financial benefit for the state. Our approach was fundamentally user-centered, gathering feedback from many people throughout the process to achieve effective tradeoffs in the design.

Background Research

In order to inform our redesign, we began the process by conducting interviews, creating user profiles, analyzing "competitive" sites, conducting card sorting and analyzing the common tasks that users would perform.

Interviews. Our project was done in collaboration with the state government and the company that was developing and supporting the site. Our initial step was to develop an understanding of how people interact with their state and what they wanted from their state website. We sent usability specialists to visit several cities and interview citizens.

When people were asked what activities they do with the state government, a common response was that they couldn't think of anything. In some sense, it's reassuring to know that citizens are not regularly worrying about their government. However, there are, for example, two items that you would expect to be an issue for most adults: driver's licenses and taxes. This lack of awareness is suggestive of the general issue we had to address: people are generally not familiar with the roles government agencies play and do not have much knowledge of the structure of their state government.

User Profiles: These interviews then led to most of our user profiles, identifying who the audience for the site would be and what their expectations would be. Primary target users are citizens, businesses, out-of-state visitors, government users and education users (students, teachers and parents). The site had primary business goals associated with each user type. A central goal was to enable more effective participation by citizens in government and to make interaction with the government convenient. The site itself is self-funded based on pay services for businesses and cost savings through encouraging people to do government transactions online rather than through staffed offices.

Competitive Analysis and Design Alternatives. We identified several other state websites that were considered to be the best at the time and analyzed the architectures they were using and their style of navigation. This helped reveal various types of information that were highlighted on the home pages, labels used and categories chosen.

Through this process we identified five primary paradigms used or considered for presenting the top-level categories of the site:

* Role: categories corresponding to the different audiences, such as "Citizens."

* Topic: conceptual groupings, such as "Facts & History" or "Taxes."

* Agency: government divisions and agencies, such as "Legislative" or "Transportation."

* Task: grouping by what someone intends to do on the site, such as activities involved in "Visiting the State."

* Lifecycle: grouping by stages of life, such as "Primary & Secondary Education" and "Marriage Licenses" (this approach proves insufficient to logically categorize all topics).

The old website for this state organized information by agency to a large degree, which proved to be the most difficult organization scheme for users, as people were very unfamiliar with state agencies, both agency names and the division of responsibilities.

As with any site design identifying all the options for a state home page quickly led to debates within the design team over which kinds of items were appropriate for the home page. Is a home page primarily intended to route users to stable topics or should regularly updated news dominate the page? Should the governor's photo appear on the home page? Is this inappropriate political self-promotion for the governor or does it serve a useful civic function? These alternatives involve tradeoffs. There are no clearly right or wrong answers, but these are the types of discussions that will arise.

Exposing these design alternatives is a crucial step in the development of a site architecture. Most people are familiar with the process of exploring the design space for page layout in what we call the inverted pyramid process. In this approach for page layout, the designers begin with a large number of small, quickly rendered thumbnails to explore possible design layouts. Then they proceed to a moderate number of larger, relatively quick mockups that explore alternatives representing the best thumbnails. Then the designers make a small number of detailed prototypes of the best mockups, followed by iterative refinement of the best design.