The Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds (ETF) is responsible for managing the pension and other retirement benefits of over 630,000 state and local government employees and retirees in the state of Wisconsin. With approximately $98 billion in assets, the Wisconsin Retirement System is the 8th largest U.S. public pension fund and the 25th largest public or private pension fund in the world.

In addition to overseeing the Wisconsin Retirement System, ETF also provides benefits such as group health insurance, disability benefits, and group life insurance. Over a half-million people rely on the information ETF provides in order to make decisions that impact not only themselves, but their children, and their children’s children.

The biggest negative factor of the previous ETF site’s user experience was its confusing menus. The site presented too many options and pathways for people to find information such as which health insurance plan they belong to or how to apply for retirement benefits, and the pathways often led to different pages about the same topic. Frequently, people would give up or call customer support, which is only open during typical business hours.

Palantir knew the redesign would have the most impact if the site was restructured to fit the needs of ETF’s customers. In order to guarantee we were addressing customers’ most important needs, we used the Top Task Identification methodology developed by customer experience researcher and advocate Gerry McGovern.

Through the use of this method, we organized ETF’s content by the tasks site users deemed most important, with multiple paths to get to content through their homepage, site and organic search, and related content.

Our goal was to make content findable by both internal and external search engines. No matter what page a visitor enters the site on, the page should make sense and the visitor should be able to find their way to more information.

While the Palantir team was completing the Top Tasks analysis, the internal ETF team revised the website content by focusing on:

• Plain language: ETF had convened a “Plain Language” initiative before engaging with Palantir, and that team was dedicated to transforming the tone of ETF’s content from stiff, formal legalese to a friendlier, more accessible tone.
• “Bite, snack, meal” content writing strategy: The ETF team used this strategy to “chunk” their content for different levels of user engagement. A bite is a headline with a message, a snack is a short summary of the main points, and a meal is a deep dive into the details.
• Improving metadata for accessibility and search: Palantir provided guidance on standardizing metadata, particularly for ETF’s PDF library. The ETF content team made sure that all their content had appropriate metadata.

Once we had the results from our Top Tasks study, we worked toward designing a menu organized intuitively for customers. In our initial onsite, we conducted an open card sort with about 40 ETF stakeholders. Our goal was to have the ETF site content experts experiment with ways to improve the labelling, grouping, and organization of the content on their site.

We divided the stakeholders into six teams of five and gave them a set of 50 cards featuring representative content on their site. The ideas our teams generated fell largely into two groups:

• Audience-oriented: content is organized by the role/title/person who uses it. In this approach, main menu terms might include Retiree, Member, and Employer. This approach was how ETF had content organized on their site at the time of the exercise.
• Task-oriented: content is organized by the type of task the content relates to. In this approach, main menu terms might include Benefits, Retirement, and Member Education.

Accessibility and responsiveness are core requirements for ETF. Palantir used the a11y checklist from the very beginning of our design process, and continuously tested our visual designs for font size, color contrast, and general spacing of elements to ensure that accessibility was built into our design rather than retrofitted at the end.

We also conducted usability tests with real users, which helped us make accessibility improvements that accessibility checkers missed. In addition, the new design system is also fully responsive, which enables ETF’s customers to access the site from any device.

In addition to the efficiencies gained for site visitors, the new Drupal 8 site streamlines the content management process for the internal ETF site admin team. Previously, content creation happened across people and departments with minimal editorial guidelines. Once the copy was approved internally, the new content was handed to the webmaster for inclusion on the site. The process for updating content frequently took weeks.

With their new Drupal 8 platform, the ETF team has moved to a distributed authorship workflow, underpinned by the Workbench suite of modules which allows for editorial/publishing permissions. Now, ETF subject matter experts can keep their own content up to date while following established standards and best practices. The decision to publish content is still owned by a smaller group, to ensure that only approved and correct content is uploaded to the live site.