Redesigning the Search.gov Landing Page

UX WRITING, VISUAL DESIGN, USER RESEARCH

Framing the problem

Launched in the early 2010s, Search.gov provided a free, scalable, built-in search solution for federal agencies. After ten years of building out the service, Search became one of the top 20 trafficked federal systems.

GSA wanted to align the Search.gov experience with the U.S. Web Design Standards to modernize its websites and forms and to continue leading by example in the world of digital civic design.

Why this project?

With 350 million queries and 2,100 search boxes across the federal website landscape, the Search.gov experience impacts a wide array of services and civilians. The search.gov team wanted to approach this thoughtfully. The team size was modest: two back-end developers, a devOps engineer, a product manager, and two GSA staff. The team brought me in as a loaner UX designer to help redesign the Search.gov landing page as well as the customizable search results page.

Redesign strategy: research first

The search.gov landing page had started out simple, but now had bolted-on features that were added over time without taking another look at the holistic site experience. The structure was ripe for both an information architecture and a visual design refresh, with a focus on improving the hierarchy and structure.

The General Services Administration (GSA) team was open-minded about pursuing some lightweight research — and with the structural issues this site had, a card sort was a perfect fit. In civic tech (even without a pandemic), we often work remotely, so we chose to run this card sort using the online tool Optimal Sort. The Search.gov team used close relationships with federal clients already using Search.gov on their sites to recruit participants for the study.

In our card sort, we included cards to cover every current navigation element and planned additions. Ultimately, we asked participants to sort 32 cards that ranged from “System Status” to “Help Manual” to “Boost specific search results.”

Results of the card sort

The card sort gave us the context we needed: users of the search.gov page wanted an organized way to navigate the resources GSA provides. A handful of distinct categories emerged: contextual inquiries (what is search.gov?), how to get started using search.gov to power your own federal site’s search, how to manage that search site once deployed, specific questions about improving indexing, and support. We also included a specific nav item for developers who needed more specialized and detailed information, to give them a quick access point.

Design process

With research and discovery covered, I followed my usual design process for a project of this scale. I started out with lightweight sketches to propose concepts to GSA stakeholders. Based on feedback from those design critiques, I iterated designs and built out more realistic, full visual designs, making sure to reference the U.S. Web Design Standards to both stay in compliance and use the established design system. Using this design system, trusted and used by many U.S. government websites, we both saved time on the engineering side and help further the brand recognition and authority of search.gov’s web presence.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this project was more waterfall-process than I would normally prefer, but this is sometimes the nature of government contracting. As a contractor, you are sometimes a temporary resource, as I was for this GSA project. So, I debriefed with my GSA stakeholders and worked closely with my Project Manager colleague to document and spec the proposed designs. And waited.

GSA (eventually) got a temporary development resource, who built the site out according to my provided design specs, and the site went live in January 2022. You can’t ask for much better when it comes to waterfall development! 🏆