FCC.gov Wireframes for Your Review
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, October 28 2010
Not that this is about me, but if you know me well you'll know that a basic tenet of my faith is that the Federal Communications website is a veritable extravaganza of bad government information mangement, which, importantly, serves to exclude too many people from the incredibly important world of public policy making in the communications and media space. Steven VanRoekel agrees with me (and the many others of people who have advanced the same idea). Why that matters is that he happens to be the guy running the FCC on a day-to-day basis. VanRoekel's leading an overhaul of the FCC website and, today, he has some initial site wireframes he'd like your opinion on:
These wire frames are just the first stage in the design process that show us how and where our information will be laid out. Rather than waiting for the release of the 1.0 version of the site, we wanted to give you-the users of FCC.gov-the opportunity to tell us directly what you think about the current ideas.
These sketches show how, at a fundamental level, we're moving towards a new FCC.gov. Built on a layout that speaks with one agency-wide voice, we're building a stronger consumer resource that's intuitively organized -- not based around an FCC bureaucracy that's unfamiliar to consumers.
We will soon be testing this and other wireframes with consumers in a usability setting using scenarios most common to the FCC.
VanRoekel's write-up hits on the key point that the FCC website should be designed in a way that makes sense from the outside, not merely from inside the bowels of the organization. How'd he do in the execution? You can let him and his team know here.