VTA is beginning to redesign VTA.org, which hosts information about transit service, projects, programs, governance, employment, and more.

Our strategy is user-centered. Our design decisions will be focused on the needs of actual and likely users—like you! We will discover and document needs through primary user research like the survey summarized below and individual usability testing.

Our strategy is data-driven. We will ask questions, conduct research, gather data, and analyze facts to settle on the best design and content. We expect this strategy to help us navigate through opinions and preferences to the best solution.

We have support from an experienced website design consultant team that will help us upgrade to the latest in free and open-source web technology: Drupal 8.

User Survey Results

We’ve analyzed more than 1,400 responses to a user survey conducted earlier this year—thank you to those who responded! We’ve also analyzed website traffic data.

The infographic at the end summarizes key takeaways:

• Users rated VTA’s navigation and information moderately easy
• Users rated VTA’s design moderately appealing
• More than 55% of website users are younger than 34 and 60% are male, matching the makeup of our transit customers
• VTA.org had 9.8 million pageviews in 2017, more than 70% focused on transit service
• Of the 4.27 million sessions on VTA.org in 2017, 69% were on mobile devices

Next Steps

Based on our research, we’re finalizing user personas and user journey maps, which, respectively, capture the traits of key user groups and how they interact with our website.

Our consultant team will use those documents to create wireframes—simple layouts that get more detailed and stylized as the design is refined. We’ll conduct moderated individual usability testing on an interactive prototype based on those wireframes.

Then our consultant team will program a public beta site based on the final wireframes. At that point, we’ll conduct further usability testing and invite broader feedback.

You’ll have a chance to provide feedback when we release the beta. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe to the topics you care about if you’d like to be notified.