National Aeronautics & Space Administration
Content and Interactivity
The NASA Web Portal shares the excitement of exploration through interactive media, live mission coverage and regular features on NASA's work. Content written and produced at the general public's reading level appears in formats beyond HTML pages: Flash multimedia elements, RSS feeds, podcasts, on-demand video and audio and 24/7 live streaming of NASA's television service. Public enthusiasm is apparently through consistently increasing traffic and customer satisfaction ratings. Since coming online in January 2003, the portal has served up 4.7 billion web pages and 12 million live streams of NASA TV in 413 million user sessions.
Design, Usability and Accessibility
The portal navigation, tested with users before implementation, lets them choose their preferred path to content: topical ("Missions") or audience-centric ("For Students). Graphic banners quickly take users to the day's important news, and the search engine covers NASA's wide-ranging content. Survey data show most visitors find what they're looking for, validating the approach. All material, including Flash, is 508 compliant. In fact, Macromedia has invited the portal's multimedia producers to speak at its developers' conferences on their methods for making Flash 508 compliant.
Evaluation and Metrics
The site is continuously re-evaluated through active user testing and analysis of log files, search queries, e-mails and customer-satisfaction data. Analyses are applied directly to site improvements. Recently, dissatisfaction with our search engine led us to install a Google Search Appliance and create "forced matches" for the most popular queries. Satisfaction with search increased immediately, as did the number of users who explicitly said they found what they were looking for. Similar data and recent usability-testing results are the foundation of an ongoing redesign, which will include at least two more rounds of user testing.
Wildcard Category
The portal's signature is live, interactive content. In the Flash "Astronaut Flight Lounge", users can hear directly from astronauts about the experience of space flight. Streaming NASA Television allows us to take visitors out to the launch pad for the full experience of launch, not just the 2 minutes they can see on CNN. Our webcast of the space shuttle's 2005 return to flight was, we believe, the biggest live event in Internet history. At launch we were sending out 430,000 streams of NASA TV; for the 13-day mission, we sent out nearly 3 million streams.
