FCC Website Changes

The FCC’s Chief Information Officer recently blogged about the FCC’s efforts to dramatically improve the usability and functionality of the FCC’s website.  For those of us who use the site regularly, that means change is coming, and pretty quickly.

The FCC isn’t just making changes for the sake of change.  They’ve actually done research to identify how website visitors use the website.  They’ve just concluded an effort, done with users, to evaluate and determine the navigation and information architecture of the site.  They also did one-on-one interviews with users and stakeholders to identify common tasks and issues.

A prototype of the new FCC website has been launched and can be viewed here.  It includes a new, more intuitive information architecture, homepage design that actually features content that users are coming to the site to access daily, and clean typeface to make the site easier to read.

By the end of May, the FCC will implement a new search application into the current FCC website.  The new search tool will aggregate results for both the website and EDOCS, plus add filters.  In coming months, the FCC will build out the back-end functionality of the website and improve site security.  By September 30, 2015, the FCC will launch the new site with all the changes.