Hummingbird Creative Group

For the past few years, the US government has been redesigning their large array of Web Sites. Considering just how large the Federal government is and how much people in America rely on getting accurate, clear information from their government, this is no easy task and required a well reasoned approach.  In following such an approach, they turned to the rapidly growing field of web usability. Web usability or usability in general, is defined by Wikipedia as:

Usability (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability ) is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability can also refer to the methods of measuring usability and the study of the principles behind an object’s perceived efficiency or elegance.

In layman terms, this is to say: the study of how people achieve their goals using technology (a web site   in this case) and how effectively that technology (the web site) aids them in this task. Usability represents the fusion between the goals of the Designer and Developer/Programmer. Designers seek to solve visual problems. From common problems like creating the right shape and color to a street sign so that it grabs your attention and conveys a simple message quickly enough that you don’t get distracted from and deceptively complex Nike ads that through “simple” imagery, convince you that you really do need a $100 pair of running shoes to walk the dog. Programmers face an equally challenging set of problems but in a more abstract sense. For the programmer, the challenge is how to organize information so that it can be efficiently stored, retrieved and viewed without constant human oversight or participation. If this seems confusing, think of 20th century phone operators using a switch board to route calls. Today, of course, this is handled by software and given the sheer number of calls made every day in America alone, it could not be done by humans.  The ever-increasing number of calls demanded a new way of organizing phone traffic that could keep cost down (less humans to pay) and not need to be tended to all of the time (not something mechanical that could wear out). For the most part the programmer’s job is to save money for a company by making certain tasks work more efficiently. The designer on the other hand seeks to make money for a company.

The place where these two (Designer and Programmer) meet successfully in the software/internet world is –get ready for it– usability. Good usability applied to your site creates, for the customer browsing your Web page, a great looking site that has all of the information they need/want presented in a simple and direct way—the way they expect to see it. Now if anybody is in desperate need of good usability, it is the US government. They have thousands of laws that any given person or particularly businesses need to understand and be in compliance with.  A comprehensive redesign program was launch to create new and better versions of several of their sites including FEMA and US-CERT. Case studies of the greatly improved results can be found here:

http://www.us-cert.gov/usability/

http://www.fema.gov/media/site_case_study.shtm

Take note of how the sites aren’t simply dressed up with more updated graphics, although that is obvious and important. The structure of the content on the site and how it is presented is very different. It is the same words, just a different way of being organized. In the case of US-CERT, the rate of those who could not find what they were looking for on the site fell from 49% to 29%! Imagine if you are selling a product from your site or trying to generate leads (and ultimately sales), 20% is a very big jump considering what was done.