The discovery and research phase kicked off in July of 2023. During this time we hosted stakeholder interviews and met with DOE teams to better understand the site’s goals, priorities and success metrics.

The team conducted research to consolidate all available information across multiple government sites into easily digestible and actionable language. We also conducted a heuristic evaluation of energy.gov and all other sites within the DOE’s ecosystem.

Usually at this point in the process we would move to Information Architecture and mapping out user flows - however - this project was a little atypical in that most of the content, guidance, and information that would end up populating the site would not exist until new legislation came out in the following months - but the mark of a good designer is knowing when to zig, and when to zag. So we zagged! And kicked off the design phase with the information that was found during our research and discovery.

At the beginning of the project - we had the green light to design and build out completely custom layouts and components that would all be implemented within the Drupal CMS through the use of CSS overrides that would lay on top of the pages - this would later be revoked on account of a site-wide redesign.

Wire-frames were built out using Adobe XD which were then turned into more advanced, high fidelity mock ups and prototypes.

User testing was conducted using volunteers within Accenture (the government does not do user testing.) Adjustments were made according to feedback and the designs were documented and handed off to the dev team.