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Making it easier to find government agencies

USA.gov Blog: “Finding contact information for a federal department or agency is a top task at USA.gov and USAGov en Español. Our A-Z Index of U.S. Government Departments and Agencies directory is a popular feature and the result of many years of user testing and website user metrics. Over time, we’ve noticed a pain point when people search to find a government agency on our site. If someone searches for a federal agency using the USA.gov main search box located in the header, our agencies directory content doesn’t always appear high in the search results. Search.gov powers that search box and many others across the federal government. We consulted with them to find out how to change the situation. There were no short-term changes we could make to improve the search results, so we began looking for other options.We decided to try adding a second search box to our agencies directory pages. It would search our agency content only. But two search boxes on a page can sometimes be confusing instead of helpful to users. Before this additional feature went live, we did user testing with a working prototype in one of our development environments…” [h/t Pete Weiss]

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