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Civic Tech

Digital Transformation for Public Health

The project for USDA aimed to revamp the digital presence for the agency's food safety and inspection service, crucial for safeguarding public health by protecting the food supply. This involved creating a user-friendly and informative website to build public trust and aid policy formulation.

A set of paper-based representations of areas of content on a given page.
Clients/Partners
USDA, Bixal
Roles
Design Manager, Federal Projects
Industry
Civic Tech
Deliverables
Agile Design , Card Sorting , Content Strategy , Information Architecture , Research Planning , Service Design , Stakeholder Interviews , Usability Testing

Overview

01 / Problem
FSIS, the USDA agency responsible for meat, poultry and egg safety, needed fsis.usda.gov moved from an IBM platform to Drupal and rebuilt around its audiences. Consumers, industry and other agencies all arrived asking the same thing: does this apply to me?
02 / Design Challenge
Russ was Bixal's Lead UX Designer and Researcher. He set the research strategy before kickoff in "Planning the Plan."
03 / Approach
The IA collapsed five audiences into two and made recalls the core content object, mapped from news report to the consumer's kitchen. Paper prototypes tested a ZIP-code recall lookup.
04 / Outcome
A metrics plan and a 5-vs-5 impression test of the new homepage, whose weak sample the team named in writing. No measure of the shipped site survives.