How To Increase Usability Of Government Websites and Boost Your ROI

Understand your agency’s goals and how your website can fulfill them. Aligning your objectives with your customers’ needs will help you be more strategic.

Choose key performance measures and conduct a baseline usability test on your website’s top tasks. Create goals to define what success looks like — from your customer’s perspective.

Design the website or top pages based on top customer tasks. Use terms your customers understand, which will reduce their frustration — and the number of help-desk questions you receive.

Conduct usability tests with real customers throughout the design process. The designs can be paper prototypes; they don’t need to be fancy. Then, use the results to make additional improvements before you launch the website or publish new pages.

Compare your baseline usability test to your redesign measurements to see how much your site’s performance has improved. Translate that improvement into dollars and time. Implementing user-centered design can reduce errors, cut down on help-desk queries, and slash redevelopment costs, while increasing citizen engagement and site traffic.

Keep asking for customer input to make the site even easier to use. Use web analytics, surveys, blogs, and other tools to find out how well your top pages are working. Keep making small, ongoing improvements. It all adds up to a positive return on investment.