OregonStudentAid.gov Website Redesign & Restructure
Like many government websites, plagued with too much content, outdated material and poor navigation, OregonStudentAid.gov was no different. The Office of Student Access and Completion (OSAC) did not have the organizational structure nor the tools to keep their website updated.
With no budget but a couple of hours of work time with an awesome developer, I was able to lead the organization to restructure the content, migrate to a mobile friendly platform and create a background structure to keep the material reviewed and updated.
The end result is not my ideal, visually, but I am proud of the strides we were able to make through office politics. The website reflected the agency’s organizational structure. It was not organized by end users tasks. Many of the staff members were very nervous to remove material, for fear that someone, somewhere might need it. I worked with the staff to review and explain the analytics and realities of their pages. Additionally, together we discussed their work flow and their responsibility for keeping the content of their pages updated, which, when faced with the magnitude of what was on the site, they realized they had to reduce. We were able to reduce the content and pages by over 80%. I managed staff to re-write the remaining pages and structure them in a way that could be migrated to a mobile friendly platform.
With the reduction of pages and cleaner navigation menus, I designed the visual structure of the mobile reactive platform for the website. Our awesome developer took this design and migrated the website.
As a result, we saw a significant increase of mobile users by 34%, we increased total page visits by 10%, where we had seen a steady decrease in previous years and decreased our bounce rate by 5% (which had been steadily increasing over the last 5 years).
In addition to the redesign, I worked with the developer to create options that would allow the agency to be able to edit their pages. I built into the business processes, expectation and managerial checks to make sure that there was an infrastructure to review and update content.
View slides of the previous website and the update, HERE. Additionally, you can visit OregonStudentAid.gov.
