DHS REAL ID Usability Study
Introduction
The Society for Technical Communication (STC), which closed in 2025 due to financial difficulties, was a professional organization for practitioners within the Technical Communication field. At the time of this project, STC officials were deliberating different options for the redesign of the website. The reasons for this deliberation were due to the increase in complaints from users of the website at the time. These complaints included:
The website being out of date
Difficult to navigate
Overall poor user experience
The board solicited our team’s help in conducting a usability test of the current website, as well as providing wireframes and prototypes that solve these pain points.
Audience
With understanding and inquiring the needs for the website redesign for BBCH, a deep dive into the target audience of the website is needed. Understanding the target audience for BBCH will not only give insight on the needs of the audience, but insight on how the user will interact with the website.
The target audience of the BBCH website currently is current and prospective employees, current and prospective clients, and current and potential company representatives that BBCH works with.
Below is a user persona of Emmanuel Martin, a project manager that works for the company who finds himself frustrated with the outdated website in content and appearance.
Content Models
Content models are an essential piece of the content strategy plan, as it creates the structure and organization that the content will adhere to as the content is redesigned now and over time as the content is updated.
The content models that BBCH would receive is social media posts and the redesigned website templates/wireframes. These models will serve as the guide for the current redesign of the content and future content creation as well.
