Clarity on homepage; looking forward at "Hire" content, front end design

Summary

This sprint included a lot of research and development work. Research focused on testing the work of the last two sprints against the hypotheses around what our users wanted. Development focused on refining existing styles and getting features ready for new content. Additional work was done toward making the site more maintainable in the long term.

Research findings indicated that while our work was good, the homepage was still not serving our users as well as expected. Initial testing of the content on the “Hire Us” page indicated there is much more we can be doing to help our users feel comfortable recommending 18F or going with us on their next project.

Problem: We don’t know how well the mailto links work for business referrals

The only way we directly collect business leads through the website is through a mailto link on a the Hire 18F page. We knew that email address got a lot of traffic but had no way of knowing how much of it we could attribute to the success of content on that page.

What we did

Elaine and Corey dug through Google Analytics, and with the help of Atul Varma, made a Dashboard to expose how many clicks every mailto link on the site received. This same dashboard also shows the previous page path so we can know, at a glance, what page people are coming from when they get to the featured project page (right now, FEC).

Research findings: Homepage

Hero still confusing

When we rolled the FEC-centric hero graphic onto the homepage, the hypothesis was that by designing around the work we did, people would be less confused about our relationship with the partner agency. We tested the homepage since adding the new graphic and learned that it’s still confusing.

Revised introductory language works

We also learned that the new language describing who we are and what we do was working for people. People still had questions about our relationship with GSA and what our name means, but could accurately describe what we do in their own words. One user described us this way:

I think of it as very complementary to GSA, figuring out ways to help customers to be fearless about technology. You are the technical experts and you can help folks better use technology and make connections digitally.

People still want examples of our work

Even though the FEC project didn't work as a hero feature, our users still want examples of our work to complement their better understanding of what we do.

What we're doing about it

With those findings in mind, we’re exploring new sitemaps and homepage designs that put information about who we are and what we do more up front, letting people learn the examples of our work as they go deeper into the site. Austin put together some invision sketches of what the homepage might look like, and Corey led a workshop to help us figure out what the information architecture should be. We won’t be deploying these changes for at least two more sprints since they are fundamental re-thinkings that require careful design. You can, however, see the work on a Federalist preview branch if you like and, of course, follow our progress on our Waffle board.

Research findings: Hire 18F page

We learned that the content on the hire us page is not working the way we need it to. The design of the page works but research participants found the content unwelcoming. In particular, language about limited resources restricting what projects we can take on was, in the words of one user, "a turn-off...We all have limited resources." Other issues with this page included a weak call to action that didn't indicate a point of contact. Users also struggled to identify themselves, or someone else at their agency, as someone who could or should contact 18F about a potential project. Finally, there was a confusion over the word "hire" itself. Users thought it meant "get hired by 18F" and not "pay 18F to do things."

What we're doing about it

We’re simplifying the content and creating an email template for leads to use in contacting us. The goal is to write new copy that addresses the problems we learned about in this research. We have not launched anything yet but going forward we are working on all of this in a Federalist preview branch.

Maintainability

The team is committed to ensuring the long-term maintainability of its codebase over time. Moving to the US Web Design Standards, and following the 18F visual identity guidelines, were the first steps in this effort. The next is writing up a style guide for the site itself, showing how we're implenting the standards in individual components, and how each element on a page should be rendered. The team is practicing "styleguide driven development" — as new elements are styled on the site, they are first added and styled in the styleguide. You can see the styleguide in progress on its Federalist preview branch.