UX Leadership on AAMVA Website Redesign
The Challenge
AAMVA’s website was out of date, out of sync with the organization’s desired brand identity, and difficult to manage. External website audiences had a difficult time finding the content they needed, through browsing and search; it was hard to even know that some content was available. Staff found the publishing templates restrictive, couldn’t find places to put their content in the outdated navigation scheme, and had no governance plan or editorial standards to reference in maintaining the website.
Our Work
Jacqui Olkin of Olkin Communications Consulting was the UX lead on a website redesign for the Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), an association of U.S. and Canadian professionals who work in motor vehicle administration and traffic law enforcement. Olkin was responsible for user research, content strategy, information architecture, taxonomy, and search strategy on the redesign project. The redesigned Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators website, www.aamva.org, launched in 2022 and has won multiple awards for excellence in digital communications.
User Research
To ensure the new site would be user-friendly and strategically aligned with AAMVA’s goals, Olkin conducted discovery workshops with staff and user research with website users. User research was conducted early and throughout the project. It included a survey, website audience interviews, and in-person and online usability exercises (card sorts, and later, a tree test) to ensure the new site would be usable to the various audiences.
By conducting user research early in the project, we learned that we needed a new content strategy and navigation scheme for the website, to fit the way website audiences thought about the information they needed.
Content Strategy
People who use AAMVA’s website primarily seek information related to their job responsibilities or “disciplines.” This colors the way they expect to find content on the website. For example, people in charge of vehicle registration want to find information under a heading of Vehicles, and people who deal with driver tests and licensing want to look under Drivers for all their information. Therefore, it was important to make disciplines a primary way of navigating the website: Drivers (https://aamva.org/drivers), Identity, Vehicles, Law Enforcement, and Operations now have landing pages on which people who work in those disciplines can find all the content relevant to their jobs. In the old site, it was not possible to use discipline-related navigation to find a complete set of relevant content.
There are also subject-matter navigation categories available in the new site (e.g., https://aamva.org/publications-news), just less emphasized than the disciplines navigation.
Taxonomy
A new taxonomy and search engine ensure that all the relevant content from the subject-matter categories also displays in the discipline landing pages—for instance, all the topics relevant to drivers are displayed on the Drivers landing page (see below), and all the events from the Events section of the site that are relevant to Law Enforcement are accessible from the Law Enforcement page. Likewise, a site visitor looking at the Events page can filter by Law Enforcement and other disciplines. The search is federated (FUSENext), so content from various platforms—including the main website, learning management system, and magazine site—can be displayed and filtered in a unified experience on landing pages and search results pages.
Taxonomy is also used to create topical collections for major topics. (See the Topics landing page and a single topic page below, and visit https://aamva.org/topics/automated-vehicles#?wst=4a3b89462cc2cff2cbe0c7accde57421 for an example of a single topical page.) Site users can filter their search results by topic, region, discipline, format of the content, and content type. This taxonomy and these search features were not available in the old site.
Governance
To help ensure web-friendly writing, easy content findability, and successful maintenance of the new website, Olkin Communications Consulting provided web writing training and worked with AAMVA staff to cull and revise content, develop a content strategy for the website, and produce governance documentation to guide the work of everyone who works on digital content for AAMVA.
