UX Leadership on AAMVA Website Redesign
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, 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.
By conducting user research early in the project, we learned that we needed a new navigation scheme in the new website, to fit the way people thought about the information they needed on the website. People who use AAMVA’s website primarily seek information related to their job responsibilities or “disciplines,” and primarily “see” content through the lens of those disciplines—for example, people in charge of vehicle registration wanted to find information under a heading of Vehicles, and people who dealt with drivers tests and licensing wanted 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 all have landing pages on which people who work in those domains can find all the content relevant to their jobs. The disciplines’ navigation paths were not available in the old website.
There are also subject-matter navigation categories available in the new site’s navigation (e.g., https://aamva.org/publications-news), just less emphasized than the disciplines navigation. The subject-oriented categories are matrixed with the disciplines.
Prior to designing the new site, the proposed navigation scheme was tested and refined with site users.
Taxonomy and the search engine are used to 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.
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.) Taxonomy also allows users to 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.
To help ensure web-friendly writing, easy content findability, and successful maintenance of the new website, Olkin Communications Consulting providing 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.
