PURPOSE

This redesign aimed to make Ed.gov easier to navigate, helping students, parents, and teachers quickly find the educational resources they need. Focus areas included accessibility, usability, & improved UI structure.

TIMELINE

5-week sprint from December 12, 2022 – January 26, 2023.

TEAM SIZE

I independently led the redesign as both UX Researcher & UI Designer.

Ed.gov was selected for redesign based on alignment with its mission - equal access to education - and observable usability issues across platforms.

Target Users:
• Students
• Parents
• Teachers (e.g. proto-persona: Douglas Coukart, a high school teacher with student loans)

Methods:
• Heuristic evaluation
• Color accessibility evaluation
• 9 remote usability tests (7 desktop, 2 mobile)

Key Insights:
• Users felt overwhelmed by disorganized information
• Navigation was inconsistent, confusing, or incomplete

To better understand these pain points, I conducted card sorting to evaluate & restructure the site’s information architecture.

To create a more intuitive structure, I consolidated 13 primary pages hosting 113 secondary pages into 6 primaries hosting 86 secondary, forming the foundation of a revised Sitemap.

The site’s architecture was reframed from 5 sections into 3:
• Primary navigation
• Utility navigation (search bar)
• Footer navigation

Separately, I created a mood board, drawing from other government agencies’ branding patterns. This led to a UI Style Tile, which evolved into a comprehensive Style Guide that defined colors, typography, buttons, and layout behavior.

I designed 5 responsive homepage & navigation prototypes, progressively refined across desktop & mobile:

• Iteration 1: Based on initial research & user tests
• Iteration 2: Informed by 5-second test results
• Iteration 3: Introduced global branding colors from Style Tile
• Iteration 4: Fully aligned with finalized Style Guide
• Iteration 5: Adjustments based on usability feedback

Each iteration included updated UI components, wireframes, and interactive functionality.

Testing was conducted remotely via Zoom & Google Meet with users resembling our target groups.

• Iteration 1:
– Five 5-second user tests
– Navigation labels were unclear
– Homepage lacked visual elements

• Iteration 4:
– 7 usability tests
– Shorter labels, directional icons, image slider
– 97.62% success rate (14% higher than the original site’s average)

The final prototype demonstrated empirical usability improvements based on direct comparison.

• 11 usability tests & five 5-second UI tests
• 5 responsive homepage & navigation prototypes
• Card sorting → Sitemap overhaul
• Mood board → UI Style Tile → UI Style Guide
• Defined & tested a scalable, accessible design system for government use