One of the ongoing projects that I have been a part of at NCI has been the revision of two websites, seer.cancer.gov and surveillance.cancer.gov, for two different purposes. For the seer.cancer.gov, the purpose has been to make sure the user is able to find relevant information about our branch as well as identifying current and future uses for this website. For surveillance.cancer.gov, the purpose was to instead find possible areas where new information about our work (such as the usability initiatives with Nielsen Norman Group) can be integrated into the existing site.

While the purposes and process has been different for both of these projects, I have built documentation and methodology when examining seer.cancer.gov which has helped to inform my future work with surveillance.cancer.gov. I helped to create a user types document of major stakeholders based on observation, documentation, and interviews with leadership at my branch. As a result, one of the things that I had initially struggled with on the first website, which was trying to figure out user needs without directly talking with stakeholders, was much easier when working on the second time around.

I learned from the organization of information architecture from my work on the Annual Report to the Nation as well, and have employed card sorting and categorization as part of trying to organize the relevant information. I also was able to refine my sketching skills greatly throughout this process, generating paper prototypes during meetings based on stakeholder suggestions in order to provide tangible and visual artifacts which could then be modified on a very granular level. Lastly, I presented findings based on evidence gathered to stakeholders, not only ones catered towards usability but also taking specific aspects of user experience and providing actionable next steps to our software engineers.