Sam.gov
I was the lead designer for the redesign of the Sam.gov website. The redesign included reworking the home page and subpage layouts to work well within a CMS, selecting a new color palette and fonts, creating custom illustrations and icons, and researching competitors.
Target User
Government officials, public company employees, and healthcare providers
My Role
UX/UI Designer
Problem
How do we update the website design, focusing on search, without alienating current users.
My Process
1. Discover
2. Architect
1. Discover
Content Review
My first step was to review the content on every page of the website to determine how best to structure the pages for an optimal user experience. I took screen shots of every page and created a document to get a complete picture of the website and help inform the new layout.
Competitive Analysis
Since this was an internal site for our team, I leaned on our teams knowledge of our competitors. I looked at the different ways our competitors incorporated search into their sites and the different styles they, and other government websites used to help establish a new visual direction for Sam.gov. I also kept in mind 508 compliance throughout the design process and continually tested.
2. Architect
Wireframe
I started wire framing using the knowledge gained from the content review and came up with several different layouts that we could test with users before moving forward with higher fidelity designs.
User Testing
Together with a UX design colleague, we interviewed several users to see which wireframes they preferred, reasons why, and anything they thought was missing. These were all users who had knowledge of how the current website worked and could offer insights on how it could work better with this redesign.
3. Design
Illustration
As a team we took the competitive analysis we had done and came up with several styles and color palettes per designer on our team. We then voted and the winning style and color palette is what you see here. I then used these elements to create the illustrations in the header and the icons that would be used throughout the rest of the website.
UI Design
I took the most popular wifeframe from our user testing as a guide and using the chosen color palette and illustration style, I created high fidelity designs for the homepage and the subpages. Also, in tandem with the overall website redesign we rethought how the search would be implemented throughout the website. We completed separate competitive analysis, wire framing and user testing for this important part of the website.
Prototyping/User Testing
For this round of user testing I created a fully functional prototype that would closely recreate the experience a user would have if actually using the search function within the newly redesign website. It included a saved search functionality. The prototype also walked users through what it would be like to search for a certain topic, see the results and save that search. We took the best performing search design and added it to the final website design.
In Conclusion
I really enjoyed working with our team to create a new design that, based on user feedback, would be much more user friendly. Our goal was to create a future-proof website that focused on search. I was also able to start updating the design system to convert Sam.gov to this new design.
- Make sure I know all stakeholders before start
- Create a style guide and get buy in before design
- Add illustration animations