Anyone looking for a fresh dose of frustration could always go to the FCC website and try to find something useful. But it looks as if that might be changing. A long discussed effort to revamp the site is almost finished, and a new FCC beta website is now active.
My first impression – seems a little dark. To their credit, the FCC is inviting users at the beta site to offer improvement suggestions and also allowing others to vote on those suggestions.
“The new FCC.gov comes from you: the citizens who commented on our blog posts, who submitted suggestions on our citizen engagement platforms, who answered our surveys, and who use the site day in and day out to make American technology work,” states FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel
More important than look and style, the FCC is hoping the revamped site will let users find the data they need more quickly. Some of the improvements according to the FCC include:
- One voice of the FCC: Intuitive design and layout optimized for the everyday citizen who isn’t familiar with the FCC’s own organizational chart.
- Top tasks: Surveys, testing, and analytics showed us what FCC.gov users do on our site. Those tasks now follow visitors throughout their FCC.gov experience in the “Take Action” bar.
- Great search: A powerful shortcut to help users get in and get what they need. For business users, powerful search filters make finding documents easy.
- Tech-forward: Built in the cloud, and developed with open source software, the new FCC.gov lowers barriers to future development as part of a long-term IT cost-cutting strategy.
- Feedback everywhere: Putting citizen skin in the game to make FCC.gov work better for users, and holding us accountable to continual improvement.
Visit the site and tell us what you think. A great improvement or a veiled attempt to put ‘lipstick on a pig?’
It would sure be nice all of the FCC's research reports were in one place – perhaps in the Tools and Data section or under a menu category of its own and sorted by Bureau? For example, the new Beta site hides the Media Ownership data under "Bureaus and Offices" and under the "FCC Encyclopedia" I gave up looking for the formerly annual report on Video Competition – "search" won't find it.