Department of Education

DEPARTMENT OF
EDUCATION

During the summer of 2020, the team at IDSI was tasked with pitching a site redesign to the U.S. Department of Education. In our brief, we were to redesign up to 6 pages from the current website to which we choose the following:

Homepage
Program Office page
Informational page
Grant page
Contact page
News page

Our challenge was to take an old, outdated site and convert it to something more attractive, user-friendly, and easily editable, all while remaining informative and containing the multitudes of information the current U.S. DoE site contained.

The Problem

“The overwhelming amounts of information & ineffective navigation utilized by the Department of Education website makes it difficult for users to find what they need.”

If you’ve ever browsed through the labyrinth that is the Department of Education's current website you’d know the challenge that awaited us. With a multitude of outdated information, systems, and dead links, we decided to first begin with the following:

Map out the entirety of the current site
Consolidate all relevant information
Organize all the information and details to be user-centered.

In our first meeting, we knew the site needed to be modern, friendly, and responsive as well as integrate social media, photography, and video. While keeping in mind, that it needed to be innovative with much-needed updated technology and plugins. But most importantly, it needed to be compliant with federal accessibility standards.

Currently, the DoED’s website serves more as an information repository rather than a user-centered system. After our initial lightning talks and HMW exercise, our team began to research the following:

How state-specific departments of education websites set up their information systems.
Gather data on which systems were most successful.
Explore award-winning federal sites for usability & accessibility parameters.
Take note of common themes in design & imagery.

After a while of gathering samples, clear themes and motifs emerged, and we developed a plan for our proposal.

While anyone is sure to praise the Department of Education for being an amazing resource with a plethora of information the task of finding said information is a different story.

I’m not going to lie, I am so grateful that I didn’t have to map out the DoED’s site by myself. Alongside fellow designer, James, we delved into every crack and crevice the DoED had to offer to which we resurfaced with a detailed map of the current site.

With the map at hand, James was then able to organize and condense all the pages into a more manageable flow while I went through and created a document breakdown of what each item on the map was; a page, external link, web text, or 404 error.

Research

Define

As we moved toward the ideation phase, we had a couple of important aspects we wanted to keep in mind for the future look and feel for the Department of Ed.

Adding more imagery in order to balance out all the text & data.
Creating illustrative iconography to keep things fun & undaunting.
Ensure the text is still bold and stands out while still maintaining accessibility standards.

After gathering samples and doing some research on fonts, Cassandra went on to create a moodboard for the team to review.

Ideate

Ultimately, we chose to use a WordPress framework as it’s a modern and user-friendly tool the client can use to update the site. DoE is jam-packed with department homepages and blogs full of various information so making sure content could be created intuitively and seamlessly was pivotal.

For users, we wanted to incorporate a “Get it Done” modal in order to streamline the process of finding what they were looking for. Also, we wanted to break up the blobs of text, links, and FAQs by grouping them into a “Common Resources” grid with clear CTA text and descriptive iconography.

With all that in mind as well as the updated site map, Cassandra and Erika moved on to creating wireframes.