10,000 websites, 10 years: Inside the U.S. government’s behemoth plan to overhaul its online presence
10,000 websites, 10 years: Inside the U.S. government’s behemoth plan to overhaul its online presence
40% of U.S. government websites aren’t mobile friendly; 60% have accessibility issues. Now, the government is taking on an ambitious upgrade.
U.S. government websites are notoriously difficult to use. That’s a big problem when digital channels have become the primary way American citizens interact with the federal government, according to the White House.
So Uncle Sam is finally doing something about it. The government is undertaking a massive overhaul to update and standardize more than 10,000 web pages used by more than 400 million people, businesses, and organizations every year. With numbers like that, patience is key: It could take as long as a decade to see the complete results.
Yep, government bureaucracy is just as complex online
According to the White House, as of last September, 45% of federal websites weren’t mobile friendly, 60% had possible accessibility issues, and 80% didn’t use the U.S. Web Design System code, the federal government’s design system meant to create a cohesive look and easy-to-understand user experience.
A memo from President Joe Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has outlined how government agencies should design their sites, and laid out the scale of what had to be fixed.
The government’s design system includes tokens, guidance for building an effective and inclusive user experience, standardized graphics for alerts and buttons, and a website banner that shows the U.S. flag and the text “an official website of the United States government” with a link for more information.
There are 243 icons in the system, including things you might find on other websites, like a paper-clip icon to attach a file. Other icons are specific to federal government functions, like tornado, flooded home, or coronavirus icons related to a natural disaster response, or a badge icon for law enforcement. The typefaces included in the system are Source Sans Pro, Merriweather, Public Sans, and Roboto Mono.
One fix? Government websites need a trusted visual language
“It is a personal pet peeve of mine that you can go to a government website and they all look different,” Clare Martorana, OMB’s federal chief information officer, tells Fast Company. “The public needs to know they’re interacting with the government.”
“One of the things that we’ve been working on is that visual language that will show you without having to use words, this is all within a family,” Martorana says. “I recognize it, it’s trusted. I can click on this link and I’m not going to be worried about being taken to some place or intercepted by a private sector company.”
Whitehouse.gov was one of the first government websites to get a makeover, with a new site built from scratch by the creative agency Wide Eye before Biden’s inauguration. Following OMB’s guidance on website design, work on the rest of the sites began in earnest after a process that included user journey research across the federal government’s online ecosystem and the use of automated scanning tools to collect information about existing web pages currently online.
More broadly, the work to overhaul the federal government’s web presence builds on the bipartisan 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, which was signed into law in 2018.
Today, 200 sites have started using the U.S. Web Design System. There has been progress elsewhere: mobile optimization for more than 600 sites, and SEO improvements for more than 400 sites, Martorana says. But with more than 10,000 .gov websites to tackle—not to mention a host of other government sites with domains like .org and .edu—there’s still a long way to go.
Since Martorana estimates the process of updating all federal government websites could take as long as a decade, they’re prioritizing the most trafficked pages first. (That includes pages for the U.S. Postal Service, IRS, CDC, Social Security, National Park Service, studentaid.gov, according to analytics.usa.gov.)
In addition to visual design, content and SEO improvements are a major focus. The goal, of course, is for people to actually find the official government information or benefits they’re looking for amid search results that include an alphabet soup of government agencies and SEO-savvy private companies making keyword plays to increase their business.
“There are opportunistic private sector companies—we’re a free society—that will intercept somebody and say, you know, for $9.95 I’ll give you the super special guide to doing this activity,” Martorana says. “The American public doesn’t need to pay for government information, nor should they.”
Digital first, not digital only: OMB plans to build on small wins
The IRS made improvements its site ahead of tax filing season. The agency conducted content user research focused on the 250 most-visited pages that accounted for more than 30% of their web traffic. Redesigning those pages to target first-time tax filers for fiscal year 2024, they helped rank the content higher in search.
Veterans Affairs, or VA, added native capabilities for assistive technology to its flagship health and benefits app so visually impaired veterans could get a benefits letter read to them.
“Every time I think of that, it just makes me smile,” Martorana says. “Just knowing that we can help people with their independence through accessibility technology, it makes your heart happy.”
While the private sector moves with more speed, Martorana, who is a former president of digital media company Everyday Health and former senior vice president, general manager, and editor-at-large at WebMD, says the federal government is “much more rigorous about what we’re trying to accomplish.”
It has to serve a much broader audience than the average private company, according to Martorana, which means they have to design an omnichannel experience not just across desktop and mobile, but offline with call centers and printed collateral.
She says feedback from their digital work will inform other facets of government communication, “so that the person that’s answering the phone can say the same thing that you would find online.”
“We’re digital first, but not digital only,” she says. “We have to serve everyone.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
.
Fast Company
(11)
