Regulations.gov
This website was selected as a finalist for the 2008 Web Managers Best Practice Awards. Members of the Web Managers Forum will vote for winners, to be announced at the Government Web Managers conference May 5, 2008, in Washington, DC.
Below is this finalist's nomination form, so Forum members can learn more about the website before they vote.
Describe the top customer task you're nominating:
Searching for documents
URL of the top customer task:
Describe how you identified your top customer task.The eRulemaking Program Management Office (PMO) employed the use of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) Survey in December 2006 to better evaluate the eRulemaking user community and customer satisfaction. Since its deployment, survey results indicate that searching for a document is the users' primary task. Approximately 75 percent of Regulations.gov users visiting the site search for a regulatory document. Other user tasks (submitting a comment, downloading a document, bookmarking and notifications) account for less than 25 percent of what they did on the site.
To further analyze user experience with searching, the PMO used the following tools and activities to capture user feedback and determine critical areas of improvement:
- Analyze ACSI survey reports and answers to search–specific questions
- Host in–person stakeholder meetings
- Examine Helpdesk tickets
The analysis of the feedback gathered from these tools and activities indicated that Regulations.gov users had difficulty in searching. Therefore, the PMO's top priority for addressing the top customer task was to improve the search functionality.
Describe how you made this task easier to complete.
After reviewing user feedback and the technical constraints of searching within the existing system, PMO researched mature search engine technologies to determine products that would best meet user goals and system requirements. The PMO evaluated three major products and selected the Endeca Search tool as the best fit. The PMO also established a multi–agency Search Workgroup comprised of ten federal agency representatives to lead the search improvement initiative. In a period of 4 months, the Workgroup assisted in the requirements gathering and evaluation of search engine features that would best meet the needs of users through the use of personas, open discussions, and benchmarking. On December 22, 2007, the new Regulations.gov search engine was deployed. Regulations.gov now provides users with a simple, intuitive method for searching that is common to many other popular websites, including Google, Ask, and MSN. When users visit the Regulations.gov homepage, they easily observe the centralized, search textbox as the starting point to complete their tasks.
Users also benefit from the following new site search features:
- Full–text and multi–word search
- Dimensions and guided navigation
- Relevancy ranking
- Date ranges
- Spell correction and suggestions
- Word stemming
- Breadcrumbs
- Sorting
- Search–term highlighting
- Context snippets
- Results total
How do you routinely monitor the success of this task?
The PMO continues its use of the ACSI Survey and search–specific questions in measuring the success and customer satisfaction of this task. The ACSI score for the search element has increased 13 points since the December 22, 2008, deployment of the search engine. The overall ACSI score has increased 10 points since deployment. The PMO also receives new reporting metrics with the search engine technology, such as request response time, total number of search requests, search features used by visitors, etc. These metrics are used to determine if improvements or adjustments are needed in the future. The eRulemaking Program's longstanding vision is to provide the public with the ability to easily access and participate in a high quality, efficient, and open rulemaking process. With this new search engine, the public now has immediate and easy access to over 1.3 million rulemaking and non-rulemaking documents published by over 29 federal, cabinet-level departments, and independent agencies.
Extra Credit: Describe what you've done to improve other critical tasks and promote critical tasks within your agency.
The eRulemaking Program launched a Regulations.gov home page redesign along with the new search engine deployment in December 2007. The multi–agency Regulations.gov Usability Workgroup, in consultation with the Search Workgroup, dramatically redesigned the new home page to highlight the new search features. The new home page also includes features to receive daily updates of site content through an RSS feed and to improve the usability of the site, such as streamlining the navigation bars and providing the user with the ability to change text size. During the next phase of site enhancements, the Regulations.gov Usability Workgroup plans to concentrate its efforts on branding the mission and goal of the site; improving the design of the site's docket, document and comment landing pages; implementing a more intuitive commenting process; and including more plain-language text throughout the site. Additionally, the Workgroup plans to evaluate Web 2.0 technologies to add the benefit of user generated content and collaboration to the Regulations.gov site and user community. Customer satisfaction of the new Regulations.gov continues to improve, with scores of all the elements including functionality, look and feel, navigation, and site performance increasing dramatically (from 8 to 13 points) since deployment of the new website.
Page Updated or Reviewed: April 15, 2008
