Our redesign of the California DMV site doubled online transactions and hit 34M views in its first week.
Residents visit the California DMV website more than six million times each month, completing nearly 2.1 million transactions, yet the website was widely considered to be difficult to use by visitors and employees alike.
With the impending compliance deadline for the Federal REAL ID Act and a call to action by Governor Newsom, the DMV urgently needed a more user-friendly and WCAG 2.1 AA compliant web experience. It was crucial for the DMV to see progress in these areas:
- Increased awareness about REAL ID
- Residents completing more tasks online or through self-serve kiosks and DMV business partners
- Increase in field office capacity, so they could focus on REAL ID services
Research-informed and Data-driven
Fueled conducted a robust discovery phase, so that every design and implementation decision would be data driven. With a healthy amount of organizational information and context about the competitive landscape, we began iterating on designs. UX designers conducted user tests throughout the design phase, adjusting the strategic approach according to real feedback. Content designers took an exhaustive look at the current website, including 30,000 pages and pdfs. We evaluated every piece of content across the site and identified what needed to be updated, rewritten, merged, and deleted. Through these efforts, we were able to develop a set of distinct content types and accompanying taxonomies that would improve user experience and simplify the publishing process. Visual designs, including a custom illustration library, brought the content to life.
When the project began, the DMV’s data gathering lacked continuity and session unification across the site, apps, and integrations, which created drop-off points and data black holes. Fueled engineers helped straighten out the client’s Google Analytics configuration and established a reliable source of truth for data across the website, applications, and other third-party integrations. We also implemented an SEO strategy that addressed issues with referring domains, subdomains, and content challenges.
Efficient Engineering
At Fueled, we prefer to avoid reinventing the wheel, and leverage existing research and code whenever possible. With such a large amount of content and a dispersed publishing team, the DMV needed support maintaining accessibility standards in the long term. Fueled repurposed a custom Accessibility Scanner that we originally built for a previous State of California website project. This tool flags errors based on level of severity and prompts publishers to amend before publishing.
Agile Pivots
Alongside the redesign of the primary DMV website, Fueled also created a microsite to support REAL ID communication strategies. Later, when COVID-19 unexpectedly hit California mid-project, Fueled would also pivot to collaborate with DMV and its partners to swiftly roll out a Virtual Field Office to facilitate continuity of services.
AWS infrastructure
To modernize their infrastructure and migrate the DMV website off of in-house servers, Fueled engineered a custom managed hosting solution powered by Amazon Web Services. The architecture included considerations for DMV APIs, existing firewalls, and third-party provider security layers, as well as services like Qmatic, WebSeal, and SilverLine.
Fueled’s unique infrastructure management tools allow for the continual iteration on hardware setup and configurations for maximum flexibility and cost effectiveness. Further hosting measures included:
- Restricting Access to the WordPress Admin to Specific IP Addresses
- Establishing a CDN and caching all images at the CDN level to ensure that all static assets remain available to other tools and applications if a DMV server goes down.
- Creating a mechanism that automatically opens a pull request whenever WordPress or a plugin has an update so the DMV engineering team can review and merge the update.
- Developing a custom WordPress plugin — CA Password Policy — that enhances WordPress security rules to meet documented state password requirements and strict government regulations.
Location Finder
Fueled engineered a new location finder feature that provides a highly-customized user experience including a Google map of all locations — kiosks, partners, and field offices — with fully accessible map pins navigable by keyboard. This feature empowers visitors to find the best location to accomplish a task in the shortest amount of time. By highlighting field office service alternatives, this tool accomplished the goal of freeing up field office capacity for REAL ID tasks. Fueled also kept sustainable content management in mind when developing this tool. For select, third-party DMV partners, extensive editorial controls allow for the direct management of their partner data.
Predictive Wait Time Analysis
The DMV needed to dispel misconceptions about wait times — like the idea that the morning is the best time to visit — and encourage people to seek lower volume wait times. With no readily available APIs or data, Fueled engineered, from scratch, a new approach to collecting location wait times and calculating predictive wait times. These would now be calculated based on the last four weeks of data gathered. California residents can now make an informed choice of which field location to visit, and what time to do so.
Appointment Scheduler
During the course of the redesign, several legacy web applications were replaced in favor of extending WordPress to provide simpler, better editorial controls. A notable example is the field office appointment scheduling application, used for scheduling appointments for in-person transactions. Fueled designed and engineered an API driven, React based application, tightly integrated with Qmatic — DMV’s external system for managing and scheduling appointments. This, along with our other API driven applications, provides DMV customers with a mobile-first and intuitive experience.
Outcomes
A primary goal of the DMV redesign was to increase the use of digital self-help options and reduce field office demand. The redesign was a huge leap forward in advancing that digital transformation.
Fueled’s SEO efforts for the REAL ID microsite earned it a #1 Google ranking across the country for “REAL ID,” eclipsing even the federal REAL ID resources. In the first week post-launch, the new DMV website saw:
- 34 million + page views
- 2 million + visitors — a 12% increase in total traffic and a 4% increase in organic traffic
- An increase in completed transactions by 133.53% between November and December, 2020
When comparing Q4 2020 against Q3 2020, other notable gains include:
- Average session duration per visitor increased by 10.28%
- Pages viewed during sessions increased by 14.03%, which means visitors are consuming more content and staying on the site longer
- Bounce rate decreased by 3.35%
An Award Winning User Experience
Despite working through an unprecedented public health crisis, the full project came in on time and under budget. Most importantly, the new web experience fits perfectly into a broader customer service initiative. In the first week post-launch, the new DMV website effortlessly supported 34+ million page views and more than 2 million visitors. It would go on to win an award from the Center for Digital Government for “innovative and effective modernization to enhance services and citizen experience during the pandemic”.
Modernizing our website is one of many steps the DMV is taking to ensure our customers receive consistent, quality services wherever they conduct DMV business. We’ve redesigned our website with our customers in mind and I’m excited to offer this new and enhanced virtual experience.
Steve Gordon, DMV Director
The Right Content at the Right Time
During our content audit, we eliminated redundant and outdated content, taking the page count from 30,000 to just 400. This reduction makes it possible for users to find what they need more quickly, and with the new editorial features it will be easy for content authors to maintain this reduction over time.
“I was able to make a change in five minutes, on my own, that previously took three weeks to push through IT.”
Content wayfinding improvements also extend to site search. We extended the autosuggest feature to deliver two types of suggestions: search terms visitors can click on to see a list of corresponding search results (similar to Google’s autocomplete feature) and exact matches that take the visitor directly to the content. Search results are also highly precise, hand crafted by the DMV editorial team as they identify popular search queries.
Streamlined Content Management
The website redesign included a migration from a legacy IBM platform that was restrictive in features and functionality, to a flexible, scalable WordPress infrastructure. With this migration, came a suite of reusable content blocks and a curated set of content types that make publishing content less labor intensive. Custom features like document version control and a plugin that enables the editorial team to manage page editing and ownership status made the lives of the large, distributed content team easier.
Knowledge Transfer for Long-Term Success
Fueled provided a year of weekly engineering office hours to support the transition. The ongoing engineering training and support empowered DMV’s engineering team to assume ownership of and responsibility for the new WordPress platform and eliminate dependency on a single vendor.
Fueled also provided training materials and comprehensive digital guides to help the DMV train staff, maintain design consistency, work within WordPress, and manage the platform:
- A design style guide that any DMV partner or vendor can use to ensure all DMV assets are consistent
- A 100+ page WordPress Admin Guide, explaining all WordPress admin and custom functionality and breaking down all core content blocks and 22 custom content blocks
- A 100+ page Functional Spec Document to support DMV engineers
- A suite of WordPress training videos embedded within the WordPress admin, enabling DMV staff to refresh their skills on-the-spot, at any time
