Website Makeover: Dept. of Labor

It feels good to influence change for an agency’s customer experience.

GSA’s First Fridays Usability Testing Program has quickly grown from its humble beginnings to testing top-level government websites. We recently observed people using the Department of Labor’s homepage (below).

During the test, we noticed a few issues that people were having again and again:

1. Too much text – users couldn’t easily find what they were looking for
2. The Search box looks just like the Subscribe box
3. Unclear starting point – users didn’t know where to begin to find information
4. People missed key items like “People are Asking” section

Our First Fridays group, like any good usability tester, left the web folks at Labor with some recommendations on how to address these problems. And this week Andy Bailey at Labor wrote a blog post about the positive experience they had and the changes they made (click on the picture above to get a better look).

Just because a site is live and the links work doesn’t mean a site is easy to use. Websites like DOL.gov took their usability testing seriously, and their site came out looking clean and clear. Nice work, Labor!