IES/NCES Designs

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the statistics, research, and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education. It houses four other major educational science centers, each with its own distinct purpose and unique requirements for their online presence.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) stands unique amongst these centers as the oldest of them all. NCES was founded in 1867 as a federal agency to collect and report on statistics and facts about education for the nation. It has changed names and parent agencies over the years, from the Department of the Interior to Health, Education, and Welfare, before finally being placed under IES after The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002.

IES had no web presence until 2006 when both it and NCES had companion sites developed including new complementary branding. NCES had slightly more autonomy due to its longstanding history, whilst the other centers were organized under the IES website.

Both websites were redesigned in 2009 and received minor refreshes for the next seven years.

The Challenges

  • The scale of this project was massive - at the time NCES alone housed over 80,000 static web pages and there was no way a team of our size would be able to address each one individually

  • The environment is shared between various in-house teams as well as a host of external contractors, so any global changes had to be coordinated between a large number of stakeholders

  • The homepages of each center, along with various program and survey areas, featured a 50/50 split layout which made it challenging to establish a clear content hierarchy

  • Users had reported finding it difficult to navigate the site via the main masthead controls, as it only featured a single level of dropdown categories and relied on disparate methods of navigation once the user begin to dig deeper into the site

  • Assets across the site included images with embedded text, a potential cause for accessibility concern

  • Mobile access was never considered for the site and retrofitting the existing structures for a responsive layout was not realistic

The Results

  • The homepages now use a structured template that highlights key content and includes dynamic lists of the latest news and events, eliminating the need for frequent manual updates, with this layout serving as the basis for most new large programs and surveys for several years

  • The navigation includes a more comprehensive tree of options, enabling individual surveys and programs to be highlighted, along with the ability to incorporate small content buckets directly within the menu, and allowing users to freely navigate throughout the site without having to use multiple control schemes

  • Our developers produced a new dynamic system to control the header and footer of the entire site, injecting structures into each of the 80,000+ static pages, allowing for responsive layouts to be integrated to all legacy content

  • The branding was in transition at the time of the redesign, so a simple logotype was chosen to replace the original logos with a carrot denoting each center, reminiscent of the old IES “dots” (this tiny embellishment was a hit with staff!)

  • Unique color schemes were designed for each center, allowing users to instantly recognize their location on the site through interaction with the content

  • Several media heavy pages were significantly overhauled to remove any accessibility issues, some had both front and backend updates to allow for new features like the inclusion of new infographics on the Fast Facts page

  • Common templates were rewritten in a way to allow for modular use of key components and improve ease of updates

Some Missed Opportunities

  • A lot of legacy tools were left with minimal updates done due to the sheer scale of content that needed monitoring, and continued to suffer poor mobile functionality until future work could be done as time allowed

  • The site is incredibly complex and we would have greatly benefited the users if we created a more robust search feature within the navigation menu, the plan was discussed but scrapped due to time constraints

  • We would have benefitted with more user research opportunities, as after launch we were present with a variety of desired changes from the staff that we did not conceive of internally