Social Security Administration
Services
Leadership of information architecture and content strategy efforts
Metadata analysis and implementation
Search engine analysis and optimization
Content governance
User research
Team building and mentoring
The Project
Serving more than 180 million US citizens, this human services government agency relies on PolicyNet, a vast repository of more than 250,000 web pages, to determine benefits, eligibility, payments, and much more. Once towering stacks of printed reference materials, the policy library was first digitized more than 30 years ago with little focus on taxonomy and governance.
As part of the agency’s digital transformation mandate, PolicyNet is slated to be rebuilt using modern principles with a focus on human-centered design.
This highly visible and critical product is used by more than 60,000 employees from benefits administrators in field offices to attorneys and legislators researching existing policies and drafting new ones.
My concentration is on improving the internal-facing policy library so that employees can find policies more easily and make decisions on benefits with as little friction as possible.
The pages in PolicyNet lack any structure or descriptive metadata making it extremely challenging for users to find information.
Following a comprehensive audit of the pages, I recommended a metadata collection strategy that engages users and utilizes modern, efficient machine learning tools to improve the overall quality of the content.
To address gaps in the content needed for search engines to deliver accurate results, I studied and tested automation tools and advocated for their use. These include chatbots, comment boxes, and surveys.
A legacy version of SharePoint Search is currently used as the front-end search engine for PolicyNet.
Research for a replacement is underway but in the interim, I recommended a series of improvements leveraging the newer capabilities found in SharePoint to improve the user’s experience and impact search results.
Navigating through a series of crowded mega menus is a frustration shared by users.
User research is the first step in understanding what improvements are needed for employees to find policies more quickly.
Through observational interviews, timed tasks, and card sorting activities a framework to identify and establish priorities for future development work is emerging.