During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with several Federal Government agencies including The Executive Office of the President and the Department of Transportation. In addition, I worked with various other agencies during my tenure at Monster Government Solutions. I specialize in providing user experience strategies for enterprise software. Every web application that I’ve had the privilege of designing has had more than 100,000 subscribed users. While designing for such large applications may challenging, I find that it can be very rewarding in the end. Just think about it…your design improvement may touch the lives of more than 10,000 users in a single month. That is Huge. Your application can be a daily part of someone’s life. Here are some of the challenges I’ve faced along the way:
- Many government websites are outdated. Don’t be alarmed if you still find some table layouts.
- Clients are very resistant to change. Even though their web application may have obvious UX problems, they are familiar and comfortable with it and do not want a major overhaul.
- Clients are often happy with very small improvements to a UI.
- It takes forever to make a change. Lots of red tape.
- Designing for 508 compliance is mandatory.
Here is some of the good stuff.
- When you design for 508 compliance, your site will be accessible to everyone!
- Government employees are process-driven.
- Contrary to popular belief, Federal Government employees are often very hard-working.
- Government leaders tend to be very stable and have many years of experience.
- They know what they want, you just have to guide them in the right direction.
- There is a lot of room for improvement, therefore, they need UX/UI designers!
- It is very likely that many of you will be approached with jobs that are Federal Government contracts. If you decide to work for a Federal Government agency, be optimistic and understand that you are making a big difference for your clients.
