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A Designer, Artist & Consultant.
Modernizing a Federal Government Site Search
Through testing feedback as well as extensive research of the department's support center database of issues, I determined the need for:
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Full layout update
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Backend functionality changes
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Interconnecting access to results
The original search interface was tested using simple interviews with users, asking them about:
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To describe their usage of search
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To describe failings and successes of the current search
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To visually illustrate any of the issues using the live site
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The results are as follows:
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Search can sometimes be way difficult to understand for new users and required training in just that functionality due to...
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...the initial version of the site having search not be a global function. By this, I mean that if a person is looking for a patient named Joe Smith and finds 20 of them but needs to figure out which is which, they need Facility data but cannot get that without going to the Facilities section to do a search for the ID of the Facility, go back to the Patient search and re-run the search using the ID to figure out which patient is the one being looked for.
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There needs to be an advanced search as well as something simple for a quick search. The current version had no easy search.
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The first step was to design a simple layout that was adherent to UX standards and met the needs of the users, so I created the design to allow simple and complex searches to be done.
The idea was then tested using an InVision prototype to solicit feedback on the before and after designs. The overwhelming response wads positive, so the idea was developed further into a template for instances of the search interface would have continuity.
The results page was where the opportunity presented itself to combine several functions of search into a simple but effective design which would save the user a great deal of time by adding a simple icon or two to the results to link to a preformatted query that would run in a separate tab and pull up all the patients for that facility.
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This was tested with the users and was received with enthusiasm.
The results were tested with users to tweak and determine any iterations, but it was not iterated very much since the research clearly pointed out the deficiencies of the original designs. Note in the image to the right that each entry has an eye and generic human icon, allowing the user to view the details about the facility (eye icon) or run a query to view the list of patients for that facility (human icon).
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One interesting piece of data revealed by the testing at this stage was that I determined that users would very much like to save their queries to be run again in the future, a subset of users indicating they would like the query run automatically in a report style notification.
This concept was added to the future improvements ticket section of JIRA for study and pitching to the client. They did opt to have this researched and mocked up at a future time.
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The final step was to create a series of guidance design pages showing the important functions and information needed for the developers to complete the programming.
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As a side note, I was meeting with the devs all through the process to make sure that my designs were also technically feasible to be done with the backend technology and the timeline of the project.
(click image to view larger)
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