User Experience Audits

In the spring of 2021, Mesa County’s Public Health website offered a wealth of COVID-19 resources, but they still found residents calling in to ask for information that was on the website. They engaged USDR to streamline their content so that their diverse, multilingual residents could sign up for vaccines, understand reopening phases, and learn about testing.

By analyzing the website traffic, the USDR team observed how users were currently interacting with the site: they were visiting from mobile phones; they were searching for pages they needed instead of navigating to them from the homepage; and they were visiting the Data Dashboard instead of more critical pages because it was the first call to action on the COVID-19 hub.

Armed with these insights, the team made recommendations to Mesa County to center their vaccine sign-up, improve links to important secondary pages, and optimize for mobile browsing. The team measured their success in increased vaccine and testing signups and a reduction in the call volume.

Pueblo County needed to quickly communicate ever-changing COVID-19 information to the community while freeing up staff time to address other local concerns. The County wanted to update its website to be informative and accessible, with a particular focus on how to get a vaccine.

The USDR team partnered on a user experience and content audit of Pueblo County’s COVID-19 pages. The audit provided tactical design and communication recommendations that addressed navigation, content organization, plain language, visual design, and taxonomy. Using those recommendations, the team then designed new responsive webpages and mobile experiences for the County.

The Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry sought to make targeted improvements to its website’s core landing pages so that Pennsylvanians could seamlessly access and connect to any of the department’s diverse services. The PA team wanted to ensure any Pennsylvanian could quickly get to the service that they needed regardless of past experience with the department or knowledge of its bureaucratic structure.

The USDR volunteer team used Google Analytics and user surveys to develop a series of UX recommendations to improve customers’ ability to find information about services provided by the department. The team created a new homepage design that created a hierarchy of content putting the most frequently used links at the top, used empathetic language to steer users to the right service, and included a self-identification flow for users who don’t know exactly what they need. They delivered web and mobile mock-ups as well as a design system for the PA team to use as they refresh the rest of their pages.