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Sylized illustration of a laptop with browser, and three hands reaching for it, and a blue gridded background with many icons and a piece of paper and scissors, with text GSA Technology Impact

How GSA worked with stakeholders to improve federal ID website usability

| Identity Assurance and Trusted Access Division, GSA OGP
Post filed in: Technology

This week, the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management (FICAM) unveiled a new website look for idmanagement.gov! FICAM’s updated site provides the best management practices for federal agencies to enable access to systems and facilities.

Idmanagement.gov ensures that the right products and services are being used to provide access.  Built for vendors, federal acquisition professionals, and program managers, idmanagement.gov provides approved product lists, vendor approval processes and FICAM playbooks.

FICAM makes sure that federal agencies authorize access to systems and facilities for the right person, at the right time, for the right reason. The new Federalist site provides a similar look and feel to many other federal websites, like cio.gov, fedramp.gov, and performance.gov, while also updating relevant content, navigation, and overall stakeholder usability.

Learning Our Audience

We conducted user-story sessions to understand who visits idmanagment.gov and why. These sessions helped us visualize the experience of our website from beginning to end. We determined we have three main audiences:

  1. Vendors interested in meeting government requirements, selling products, and selling services through various GSA acquisition vehicles.
  2. Acquisition professionals interested in identifying Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) products and services to meet their agency’s mission needs.
  3. Government program managers interested in adopting, governing, and operating federal ICAM-compliant systems and services.

Addressing Our Challenges

While talking to our stakeholders, we found users experienced three main challenges interacting with our content (as shown in the table below). Based on these challenges, we worked with the U.S. Web Design System to reduce the issues people encountered while attempting to find and use our content.

Stakeholder Challenge

Our Solution

It is difficult to find content, even when searching.

We conducted a content review and combined similar content with fewer cross-references. This resulted in a 50% page reduction. We also implemented a document library for Federal Public Key Infrastructure documents.

Some content hasn’t been updated in a decade. 

As part of our content review, we determined we could deprecate or convert several PDFs and documents to web pages. 

 

We reduced the number of PDFs on the site by almost 75% which allows for more relevant and timely content updates. We are also researching a feature to convert multi-page content into a single downloadable PDF.

It is difficult to navigate between pages, without going back to the home page

We aimed to have all content within three clicks of the homepage which entailed consolidating and reducing the number of overall and nested pages. This also meant implementing a top and side navigation bar for smoother access across the site.

Continuing to Improve

We appreciate user feedback and want to continue improving! In the spirit of continuous improvement, you can now access and comment on content before publication at our new public beta site, https://qa.idmanagement.gov. 

Check out the new idmanagement.gov and leave a comment on how we can improve, add new content, or update existing content. If you have any questions, reach out to icam@gsa.gov.

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Last updated: Mar 8, 2024
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