Sunlight Labs

Find loan forms confusing? Wish there was a team out there that was working to make them easier for you? Well, you're in luck! The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has set out to redesign mortgage disclosure forms, making them easier for citizens to understand the loans they're accepting when purchasing a home. The CFPB team should be commended for making their design process transparent and involving the public as much as possible. The more importance that is placed on design, the more informed citizens will be — hopefully this will lead to a stronger mortgage lending system.

In August of 2009 we over at Sunlight started the challenging task of rethinking FCC.gov as part of our Redesigning the Government series. We made mock-ups, gave suggestions and since that time we've been fortunate enough to have had a number of back and forth conversations with the people over at the FCC. We've talked about the problems with their current site, the challenges and possible solutions. Since that time the team put in charge of rebuilding the site at the FCC has made great leaps. They started by launching reboot, which served as a good brochure site while the team tackled the more difficult content. This last November they pushed out some decent wireframes and Tuesday they excitingly released beta.fcc.gov. Through this whole process they've been incredibly transparent, and have consistently asked for feedback from the public, which should be applauded.

As some of you might recall, we took a stab at redesigning the FCC site a little over a year ago. Since then the FCC has been reconsidering their online presence. A few days ago they released some interesting wireframes of a reimagined FCC.gov site. Looking through those wireframes, it seems like quite a good attempt at organizing their content and really trying and make it more understandable to the general public.

There are a few small things here and there that I can nitpick. For example on the "Search Results" wireframe it would be nice to have a title at the top to say what the user had just searched for. I'm also a bit perplexed as to why on a search results page there would be a section for videos that breaks up the main results. If they want to have results by category they should group them as such and then have links to see full results in each category. Also, please FCC, we're begging you: make things like press releases available in formats other than word and pdf.

USA.gov, the site that conveys official information and services about the U.S. government, just launched the new design of their website. Since we took a stab at redesigning it ourselves back in January of '09, we thought we'd see if they took any of our advice.

A couple of months ago, as part of our Redesigning the Government series, we took a stab at redesigning and rethinking the FCC website, which resulted in some good discussion between our organizations. Yesterday the FCC released their long awaited Reboot site, which by their definition is an attempt to be “your portal to take part in improving citizen interactions with the Federal Communications Commission”. The questions we've been asking ourselves while evaluating their new site are: what exactly does the above statement mean, what have they done well, and what are the things we think they still need to consider while moving forward.

Last month President Obama unveiled his Open Government Directive to create further openness within the executive branch. This directive requires federal agencies to show how they are working toward transparency, public participation, and collaboration by requiring the addition of new web pages – "/open" pages – onto their existing sites. With the first deadline in the directive quickly approaching, we've put together our thoughts on what these pages should look like.

A couple of days ago I was pointed to a slideshare presentation that was done as a Webmanager University New Media Talk on user centered design. Yes, there is actually a University for the people who manage federal, state and local government websites. While making my way through the slides I discovered that the Government has two separate resources dedicated to how their employees should implement user centered websites; usability.gov and usa.gov/webcontent. These sites are filled with content written by knowledgeable phd's, which is great, but when government websites seem to be falling further behind in web design and usability, it begs the question of why they're creating their own resources and not just using the myriad ones that exist in the private sector.

The day after the reveal of our conceptual FCC comps, the FCC invited Daniel and I over to discuss the redesign. They were very receptive to our suggestions, and indicated a strong desire to implement some significant changes to the site in the relatively near future. We haven't seen anything with our own eyes – yet – but they asked smart questions and gave good answers to our questions. We're hopeful that there's some good work to be seen in the near future.

Over the last few weeks there's been a lot of discussion concerning the redesign of the FCC website. We've discussed problems and potential solutions, with many of you helping us to identify a usable navigation structure through our card sorting tool. Now it's time to move onto the design.

Sunlight Labs is looking for talented people to fill two open job positions: Graphic/Web Designer and Data Visualizer. Check out our job descriptions below and apply or spread the word.