How Do You Design a Website for Every Citizen?
10 million people. Some of them grew up with the Internet. Others were retired when Google became a commonplace verb. But these 10 million—the population of the state of North Carolina—all needed easy digital access to state government services on NC.gov.
And the existing web interface wasn’t cutting it. The legacy NC.gov site offered an extensive catagory of links rather than mobile- and user-friendly navigation. While some citizens were able to find what they needed on NC.gov, the larger share of the population became frustrated with the legacy website. This led them to call the NC agency office directly rather than searching for the information online—taking up the valuable time of state workers and taxpayers.
In short, the state of North Carolina needed a complete overhaul of their digital home on NC.gov. And Atlantic BT was the digital partner chosen to do the job.
Designing and Developing the New NC.gov
Creating the new NC.gov was a huge undertaking—Atlantic BT needed to analyze 75,000+ webpages across more than 10 different agency sites, then collate this content into a unified structure which was easy for citizens of all backgrounds to consume.
This took persona workshops. This took content strategy. This took UX design, iteration, testing, and development. By leading with content strategy and persona-based discovery, Atlantic BT crafted a mobile-optimized experience for NC.gov while empowering state employees to own and update content on their agencies’ sites.
A New Site Design and a Lasting Partnership
Thanks to NC.gov’s new Drupal-based content management, stakeholders across NC government can now update site content themselves to serve citizens faster and more effectively. The new NC.gov not only saw a 6% increase in page views across the site, but also improved site bounce rates by 38% for organic traffic.
