Consumer Experience Information Architecture
The Consumer Experience Information Architecture Project is a long-term endeavor to redesign the organization and information architecture of significant portions of the CFPB website. It included multiple rounds of initial research to understand consumer and intermediary (front line professionals who work with consumers) mental models and needs, migrating thousands of pages to our new content management system, and launching and redesigning dozens of new and existing pages to support the ways our users want to access information on the website.
Research phase
During the initial research phase, my team conducted (and I participated in) interviews and card sorting, then we put togehter a proposal for an information architecture, then validated the IA with tree testing.
As a part of the research phase, we developed cards that captured consumer mental models, with the goal of keeping our research insights fresh and sharing those insights with other teams who create content and tools for these same audiences.
Designing the money topic page template
Coming out of the research phase, we identified the need to re-organize our navigation and content to create new “portals” that focus and organize information around a particular financial topic (for example, mortgages or student loans).
We designed a couple versions of the page and brought them into usability testing.
Designing a set of images for the new pages
Since we were creating a set of new landing pages, we had the opportunity to develop a series of images to orient users and set the tone on each page. This project addressed a very different audience than much of the existing CFPB web resources—focusing on consumers who were in financial crisis, rather than consumers planning for a major financial goal or purchase. Consequently, we wanted to used photography to create a very different tone than much of the existing CFPB brand imagery and illustration used on the site.
This photography project was a collaboration between myself, Jenn Hueting, and the CFPB multimedia team. Together, Jenn and I developed the vision and concepts for the photos. Jenn art directed the photoshoot with the CFPB multimedia team and was responsible for final retouching and execution of the images.
The CEIA project is still in progress. See the redesigned menus and some of the photographs on the auto, credit reports, and debt collection pages.
This project was completed as a part of a team of in-house CFPB designers and developers that I led as scrummaster.