Development
Office of the New York State Attorney General
Background
The Office of the New York State Attorney General (OAG) serves to protect the legal rights of the state’s citizens, businesses, and natural resources. As both the “people’s lawyer” and the state’s chief legal officer, the Attorney General advises the Executive branch and handles cases both on behalf of and against the state.
Over 5 million users visit OAG’s website each year to report fraud; file complaints about workplace and consumer issues; find information about civil and consumer rights; and learn about charitable, consumer, and real estate investment decisions.
Challenge
OAG’s previous site was built with the Drupal 7 Content Management System (CMS) and was nearly 10 years old. With the wide range of users who accessed their website, OAG wanted their new website to cater to different types of users and provide more effective and efficient communication with each visitor.
A major request was to redesign the site’s navigation to be more user-focused, rather than reflecting the internal bureau system. The new organizational structure would need to prioritize access to news, public information, and commonly used forms. OAG also sought to improve the site’s search functionality to help new and regular site visitors access their desired content more efficiently. Additionally, the new site would need flexibility to accommodate mobile access and newer technology and content updates.
Solution
We started with our discovery process, analyzing the site’s 12,000+ pages and their visitor data. From there, we developed user personas to help identify specific goals and weak spots we could improve upon.
Through our research, we learned we needed to build a site that was flexible and fully responsive on mobile devices, and that was readily accessible to a first-time visitor. We created a new system of user-intuitive hub categories with an internal taxonomic system to tag documents, publications, and press releases.
Additionally, we built a full-site search tool and created multiple avenues for search and access which catered to the average first-time user. The site’s main menu, which is present on every page, contains an “I Want To…” dropdown menu with a list of the most common reasons people access the OAG website. OAG staff have found that this menu is one of the most highly trafficked and useful tools on their new site, and they often direct users to it for common requests.
GOV-SPECIFIC/WEB DEV SPECIFIC CALL TO ACTION STATEMENT NEEDED FOR THIS SPACE.
In the website’s UI/UX design, we utilized OAG’s existing style guide to develop a visual design system. Where applicable, we updated the guidelines to improve accessibility while retaining consistency with the brand.
OAG’s new site uses Drupal 10 CMS. 10,550 pages of content and press releases were transferred from the previous site, and 3,500 documents and publications were uploaded to the new site with appropriate tags. The site translates into 12 languages and meets WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards. In a 28-day period, the site will see anywhere from 200–300k users.