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 feedback about what works and what doesn’t on our site. The effort to improve the website has become a true collaboration between those managing the website and those who use it.

We believe that transparency has benefits for everyone. Stakeholders can see how information is collected and used and, with respect to the Federal Digital Strategy, transparency helps agencies learn from each other. The result is a win-win situation where the public gets a better product and agencies get faster and smarter.

With this in mind, we not only produced a short video to help explain the cardsorting exercise, we have also posted the raw data for each of the key audiences that participated in the exercise. You can learn more about card sorting at Usability.gov.

To learn more about SAMHSA’s efforts to improve our website, visit the SAMHSA blog. Are there other tools and techniques we should consider? Are there other ways we could use card sorting? Drop a comment below and let us know!