Project Goals

To create a new website for the FTC’s consumer education materials.
To update existing content to be web-friendly.

Project Team

I collaborated with a user experience designer and a writer on the planning, content strategy and visual design. We worked with FlieshmanHillard on the development of the site and with Spark for usability testing.

What I did

Content Strategy

Web ≠ print

This site redesign involved overhauling our office’s content strategy. Our office was writing for print and posting the content online as static html and a PDF.

Working together with a writer and another user experience designer, I researched best practices and looked at other sites we liked. We redesigned the articles to include an intro, table of contents and use more headings. We wrote best practices and helped staff understand how to write web content.

Bye, bye microsites

We had many smaller microsites to market our content to different audiences. We cut out this duplicate content by creating collections of content (or 1-stops) for different audiences that linked to our existing content.

Hello scam alerts and blog

We knew information about scams was popular based on traffic data. Because scams change quickly, we wanted to be able to feature new scams easily. We create a page that displayed all of our scam content and an RSS feed so people could sign up for scam alerts by email.

To increase audience engagement, we created a blog that people could sign up for updates from by topic.

Content inventory and INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

We inventoried all the content and decided if the content should be kept, updated or deleted.

We rethought the site organization and did card sorts to test our ideas. We changed the navigation from 13 topics to 5.

Wireframes and design

I collaborated with another user experience designer to design annotated wireframes, write site requirements and do the visual design. We worked closely with our contractor’s developer to discuss our goals and how we could best achieve them.

Launch and governance

I worked on QA and prioritizing bugs pre and post-launch.

I helped staff learn how to optimize content for the web and use a content management system. I created instructions for staff and worked on a guide for site administrators.

Post launch usability testing

I advocated for usability testing which was pushed to post launch due to our timeline. We worked with Spark on usability testing. I reviewed user-testing criteria and questions, attended some sessions, helped prioritize findings and implement some changes. For example, in the usability testing we observed that people didn’t notice the related content in the right column of the site. In response, I moved the related videos from the right to the body of the articles.

Results

Consumer.ftc.gov is one of the FTC’s most popular sites with about 2.5 million page views a month. We have more than 230,000 subscribers to our blog. Site users give the site a high satisfaction score (85%) on our ForeSee survey. One of our current challenges is a lack of development support. We continue to monitor our ForeSee survey and Google analytics for feedback, making the changes we can and documenting ideas for the future.