Context: DAU – short for “Defense Acquisition University – is a corporate university in the Department of Defense (DoD). DAU helps educate the acquisition professionals who are buying things for the DoD. My team supports the DAU website. The legacy version is built on SharePoint…which is not necessarily user-friendly or ideal for serving as the backend for a website. The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (“IDEA”) from Congress stipulates that all executive branch agencies must modernize their websites. DAU began this process in late 2021.
Skills and Tools Used:
Narrative: I started working for DAU in February 2022. I was brought on to assist our small web content team in a massive migration effort. We are working closely with a web development team to take the legacy site from SharePoint to Drupal. My official job title is “Knowledge Management Specialist,” but, really, I still perform a lot of user experience and information architecture-focused tasks. I am also the government lead for our content auditing effort for the legacy site. In addition to all of the work on the migration, I help with maintenance of the existing site, including working with faculty and providing customer support for updates to the content of site pages. This role involves a number of projects, all happening simultaneously, and in the sections below, I’ve detailed several of them.
Mission Assistance
One of my first efforts at DAU was meeting with team members of the DAU’s Mission Assistance group and helping them work towards a vision for how their existing page layout and content structure could be updated. We met regularly over several months, discussing needs and their ideal vision for what the section ought to look like. When we first began working together, we thought that the actual migration would be happening in August of 2022. Ultimately, this did not happen, but it shaped some of my initial design decisions.
Knowing that we wanted to meet the standards of the IDEA in the future, I deliberately tried to structure the new page designs as best I could to keep with the United States Web Design System, or USWDS, which is a wonderful resource for best practices designing federal websites. I used Adobe XD to create a clickable prototype of wireframes for the team to reference. The photo on the left is the Mission Assistance homepage as it was when we started working together, and the photo on the right is the updated version, based upon my designs.
In addition to the visual and wireframe support, I also created a site map during our meetings as a tool that we could talk to. This helped to ensure that we were covering all of the necessary content links.
Our support for Mission Assistance is still in-progress, and I hope that we are able to recommend even more user-friendly, USWDS-based tools for implementation as we move into Drupal.
User Research
We have several user research efforts underway in advance of the migration. I have led efforts to write several usability testing scripts for moderated testing events. We have also been lucky enough to use Optimal Workshop for several tree testing and card sorting efforts, as well as some un-moderated click-based tests with wireframes. Our research team works closely with each other, as there are many moving parts and deadlines ahead of the migration.
Through the several rounds of tree tests and card sorts, we are gradually refining the navigation system of the new site.
Content Audit
One of my other significant efforts at DAU has been leading the content auditing effort for the legacy site.
The content on the legacy site is all supported by SharePoint lists on the backend. Our content owners are varied and across DAU. It is not uncommon for them to retire. We have spent a lot of time exporting spreadsheets of this content and asking them to identify if they would like to migrate, archive or delete their content.