What is Childcare.gov?
Childcare.gov is a resource that helps parents find and access services in or near their community to best suit the needs of their families. One of its missions is to support families of all kinds by providing access to affordable and accessible early care and afterschool programs.
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Team Setup
Challenge
Childcare.gov is a resource that helps parents find and access services in or near their community to best suit the needs of their families. One of its missions is to support families of all kinds by providing access to affordable and accessible early care and afterschool programs.
Homepage
One of the major challenges that was identified not only by users but also the client was the homepage and the functionality of the dropdown menu. For a user to search for state specific information, they had one of two options: use the search bar located in the top right hand corner or use the dropdown menu.
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Because of its prominence and location, most people chose the dropdown. The dropdown in itself was not bad but there was an extra unnecessary click of users. They had to choose the state, wait for a submit button to appear, click it, and then be taken to state specific resources.
States Pages
An even bigger issue were the actual state pages. Each state page was a long list of accordions separated by only headers. While these pages had great resources, there was no visual interest or hierarchy, making it hard to find specific links because everything was clumped together. From the headers, there were already obvious groupings for information but that was not translated to content structure.
Solution
The updated childcare.gov website aimed to improve the search experience of users by making it easier to find state specific information.
Homepage
The homepage redesign focused on above the fold presentation and functionality as the client did not want to make changes to the card section. In the previous design, there was a black box with a textured design that did not fit the brand of the Childcare.gov. Instead of using the black box, I created a light gradient that moved from left to right. This helped ensure that the blue text overlaid followed 508 compliance.
For the new dropdown section, I worked with developers to create a much quicker search experience. Now when a user clicks the dropdown, their selection takes them directly to the state page without needing to click a button.
We did weigh the pros and cons of this decision because there would be times when a user accidentally clicks on a state but having the same dropdown on each state page means that a user can make a new selection without needing to return to the homepage.
States Pages
For state specific pages, (once a user made their selection), the design was focused on creating a landing page for each state. On this landing page, users would see an image of their selected state, as well as a call to action link to a state specific provider search network. Based on previous headers already provided, I decided to create card components that would lead users to individual pages. Card components helped add visual interest to the landing page and also allowed our content team to brainstorm text to preview each section.
Once a user clicked one of the cards, they were taken to a resource specific page. Instead of having all resources on one page, we created more separation and breathability for content. On each resource specific page, users could find useful links within each accordion.
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In the "See More Resources" section, I advocated for adding a card functionality that would take users to the other resources for that specific state.