Cross-posted from HHS Digital Strategy Blog: 
Written By: Andrew Wilson,  Office of Communications, SAMHSA
Public participation and collaboration are central to making the Digital Strategy work. At the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), they are central to our work to improve the organization and presentation of SAMHSA’s website.
As part of our initial efforts, SAMHSA has been using an online exercise (cardsorting) that allows anyone interested to provide input on how to better organize and categorize the information on the website. In just one week, more than a thousand people provided direct, concrete …

Written By: Andrew Wilson, Office of Communications, SAMHSA
Several weeks ago, we asked for help in thinking through how SAMHSA’s website could be better organized. Using an online exercise (called a card sort), participants organized key behavioral health topics into pre-defined categories. The response to our request for participation was tremendous with over 1000 individuals participating over the course of one week.  Participants included:

847 Behavioral Health Professionals
193 Personal/ General Users
70 SAMHSA staff

Drilling Deeper
The next step in this process is to ask for your help with a different exercise – a “reverse …

Written By: Andrew Wilson, Office of Communications, SAMHSA
The SAMHSA team supporting Project Evolve has been working hard over the past few months to make improvements to the website. Many of these improvements are still “behind-the-scenes,” but enhancements are underway to both the technical infrastructure underpinning the site and to how the information is organized and presented.
Last fall, the inaugural Project Evolve blog post invited readers to help us evaluate a new way to organize information on the website. Instead of structuring the site around SAMHSA’s organizational layout, we began moving …

by Andrew Wilson – SAMHSA’s Office of Communications
Several weeks ago, we posted a draft version of what the new SAMHSA.gov homepage might look like and asked for your feedback. The new page is still very much a work in progress, however posting the page at such an early stage gives your voice and your input an even greater role as this project moves forward.
As expected, the response that we received was tremendous. Seventy five unique ideas were submitted and nearly one hundred people participated in the discussion. Many useful observations …