Minnesota Department of Agriculture
Challenge
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture’s (MDA) website is a portal to communicate important information to farmers, agricultural businesses, the general public, and employees. Internal and external feedback received from customers and stakeholders provided the business justification to support a complete redesign of the existing MDA website. As demand increased for completely seamless website experiences, MDA hired Nighthawk Marketing to reevaluate their web strategies in order to meet these expectations. Throughout the project, we worked closely with various internal stakeholders comprised of executive, technical, and division workgroup teams.
Solution
Our Contributions: Strategy Consulting Project Management UX - User Experience Research Content Audit IA - Information Architecture Wireframe & Prototype Website Design & Development Content Migration Testing & QA Analytics & Optimization Web Support Accessibility Compliance Technologies Used: Drupal 8 CMS Bootstrap Acquia Enterprise Project Highlights Roadmap and Planning A project plan is a roadmap for stakeholders navigating the tasks and deliverables necessary for success. Our roadmaps often begin with a GANTT chart and clearly define goals and timelines. Stakeholders involved and impacted by the project are identified and their needs defined during the initial project planning process. Content Inventory & Audit MDA has a large enterprise website with thousands of web pages and file attachments in PDF form. When redesigning a website, it's imperative to audit the content to identify obsolete or inaccurate pages. We created a content inventory of the MDA site prior to the redesign so key stakeholders could identify pages that would be kept, edited and deleted. This allowed content owners a jump start to begin the process prior to the content migration to the new site. Improve User Experience with Research One of the most important goals of the MDA website redesign was to improve the usability of the website so that site users could more easily find content and perform desired tasks. To this end, we conducted a series of needfinding user experience research in order to inform and create a new information architecture and navigation. We began by identifying key site information and tasks and conducted card sorting and personal interview exercises with external audiences. Data is tabulated and results analyzed using data science best practices. Wireframe, Prototype & Design Wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes are developed in order to represent the structure of information on the website and to visualize the content and demonstrate the basic functionalities in a static way. Rapid prototypes allow for first impression testing and online, collaborative review of the site mockup. Finally, high-fidelity design concepts are developed that represent the data in a visually pleasing and interactive manner. User-Centric Website Design & Development High-fidelity website designs are developed and converted into website themes and pages via HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Results
The end result was a newly designed and developed website that was designed with user experience front and center. The optimized, mobile-friendly website offers a customer-centric look and feel to make it easier to locate information and perform key user tasks. The new website is responsive and compatible with modern mobile devices and web interfaces.
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