CMS (Center for Medicaid & Medicare Services) has requested a new look for its current CMS Cloud website. Deliverables would include a new website design and a new branding kit (consisting of a logo, branding guidelines, and branding assets). This website is restricted by government access and not available to the general public. For this project, I worked on a team including another product designer, technical writers, and developers. My responsibilities included creating the new brand logo and guidelines, conducting user testing on the structure of the new website, and designing some of the website pages and assets.
KICKOFF (LOGO + BRANDING GUIDES)
To start with the rebranding of CMS Cloud we went through a naming workshop with the team at CMS, conducted in the form of an affinity diagram. After a few rounds of discussion and voting, we had decided on the name "CMS Hybrid Cloud Hosting Services".
After we had a new name for the cloud service, I started sketching out different concepts for the cloud logo and created our first round of designs, which I then presented to stakeholders in a slide deck. After this we had them vote on logo concepts and give feedback in a survey which I used to refine our first designs. The selection process took two rounds of designs before we settled on the final logo design.
After the logo was packaged for final delivery, I started on the branding guidelines. Inspiration was taken from the original CMS branding guidelines to make sure that the logo and assets were being used in accordance to the parent brand's standards as well as staying true to Hybrid Cloud's new identity. The guidelines contained the following; Brand Mission & Vision, Brand Architecture, Logo Usage, Colors and Codes, Typography, Visual Accents, Iconography, Voice & Tone, Grammar and Mechanics, Media Usage, and Accessibility.
KICKOFF #2 (WEBSITE)
As well as a new identity, CMS requested our team to help build a new website based on the information on the current site. Their pain points consisted of difficulty finding information, information not being up to date, and the website being overall difficult to navigate for users who are not familiar with the site or everything that CMS Hybrid Cloud has to offer.
To start, our team put together a bird's eye view of the current infrastructure of the CMS Cloud website.
After this, our team worked out the infrastructure of the new site, and started the design process. Throughout this whole process, our team made sure to check back on our notes and work closely with the CMS team to ensure that we were solving our main pain points with this new design.
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After the final design is approved by CMS, our team then began the next steps towards development. After working closely with our team of developers, we then conducted user testing to ensure that the site was solving the main pain points from the previous design.
USABILITY TESTING
Before deployment, it was important for our team to test the new website design. There were a total of 5 users that participated in the testing; 4 ADOs and 1 IUSG Advisor. During this study, each user was asked to perform a series of tasks on the website while they share their screen. The were assessed on their ability to use the site successfully to complete the tasks, as well as their satisfaction or attitude towards the design of the Hybrid Cloud website.
KEY FINDINGS
HIGH-LEVEL RECCOMENDATIONS
USABILITY TESTING CONCLUSION
This study provided vauluable insights into user interations and perceptions of the new website. Issues with the news, Support, and Learning Center were highlighted. Reorganization of content and redesign of page are being inmplented to address these areas of improvement. Test participants also appreciated improvement in visual design and how much more intuitive the website felt when compared to its pevious state. While to quantitative results show that the website ranks above average with its SEQ and SUS scores, it is important to note that these results are not statistically significant due to the low sample size. However in our case, this test was run as a rough analysis of the new Hybrid Cloud website.
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