Design and research operations for Mass.gov

Overview

Mass.gov is the digital front door for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; over 75% of Massachusetts residents interact with the state government through the website.

In 2016, MassIT (now the Executive Office of Technology Services and Security) began a full redesign of Mass.gov to make key online services more usable and accessible and to migrate to a modern Drupal CMS. I joined a few months ahead of the launch to support the redesign and post-launch iterations.

I led design projects and research spikes that rapidly improved digital experiences for core audiences post-launch

I was a Senior Designer on the team, and was responsible for:

• Leading design projects for the new Mass.gov and rapidly iterating based on public and stakeholder feedback
• Extending the Mayflower design system to a growing suite of applications and needs.
• Leading research projects to measure Mass.gov performance and its effectiveness in delivering services and information to the public.
• Coordinating and facilitating design reviews across projects to build awareness and community for designers across the organization.

I worked with a team of product managers, engineers, content strategists and other designers, as well as vendor teams and agency partners.

Projects

A digital hub for regulatory and policy documents

In addition to transactional services, Mass.gov is the home for volumes of agency reports, regulations, and policies. This information is often essential for the public, the business community, and state and local workers.

On the legacy site, regulations, policies and reports were often published as a PDF or Word doc, which made it hard to find via search and less accessible than content published as HTML pages.

In the redesign, we wanted to:

• Make it easy for agency authors to publish full publications and document coversheets as HTML page, so they were more searchable and accessible.
• Develop a structured data schema to improve search optimization and future migrations.
• Design affordances to signal if something was a part of a bigger collection and how to navigate through it.
• Unblock the team so we could migrate top information collections to the new Mass.gov.

I led research sessions with agency staff who manage this content and with people who regularly access this information to serve the public and for professional purposes. We needed a solution that would work for many kinds of content, so I also audited multiple collections of reports, regulations and policy documents to develop a draft data schema and vocabulary.

I used the draft data schema to create wireframes that I reviewed with authors, site visitors, and team members including product owners, content strategists, and engineers. After iterating with stakeholders, I created high fidelity designs based on the Mayflower Design System.

I wrote initial annotations based on research and then reviewed them in detail with our engineering team, and collaboratively updated the designs based on their feedback. This feature is now live and well used on Mass.gov.

Research operations for Mass.gov

During my time with EOTSS, I led multiple research projects to assess how Mass.gov was performing on the ground, and how the public engages with digital government resources.

These projects included:

• Running intercept testing at RMVs to evaluate Real ID messaging and prototypes.
• Organizing sessions with law librarians to observe Mass.gov's on-the-ground role in delivering legal resources to the public.
• Growing a user testing panel to recruit members of the public for voluntary usability testing.
• Recruiting and conducting interviews with high-frequency Mass.gov audiences, including trade and professional organizations, state and municipal workers, and local businesses.
• Interviewing job seekers and collaboratively mapping the key points in their journey to getting unemployment benefits.
• Designing and facilitating research sessions with DTA benefit seekers to identify which visual indicators and affordances they rely on to determine a site is a trusted government source.
• Mapping the license suspension hearing processes to scope future tech and service improvements.
• Creating a usability benchmarking testing cadence to assess template performance post-launch.

Navigation patterns for organizations

During research on high frequency Mass.gov visitors, we learned that agency organization pages were hard to navigate, and certain audiences relied on these pages as a waypoint for services and information.

The organization page template had been highly reactive to customer requests, and had evolved to create long, dense pages. New template subtypes also created confusion for agency authors.

I led a design sprint to quickly iterate on the template and improve its navigation. The goal was to:

• Identify missing navigation markers on organization pages and inconsistencies between template subtypes.
• Create pathways to information lower down on the page, like office locations, application log ins, and key services.
• Keep the one-page model (for now); avoid organizational sites or top-level navigation changes.
• Test any new patterns with real users

First, I evaluated what we had. I compared the original design specs to what agency authors had actually implemented and iterations the team had made. I also audited the existing data model and UI to identify what information and features were consistent across different template variations, and where there were opportunities for alignment.

I reviewed these findings with the team and then began designing and testing different sub navigation concepts. There are hundreds of organizations on Mass.gov, and we wanted to optimize for predictable experiences while also giving authors flexibility to adapt for their audiences.

We landed on an organization sub navigation component that agency authors could turn on and adjust within set categories. I tested the navigation with TreeJack and in usability tests, and post-launch ran Chalkmark heatmap tests which confirmed the new navigation was used and findable.