IRS hopes for happier returns with redesigned Web site

Computerworld - As the 2006 tax-filing season swings into full gear, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is touting a redesigned Web site that agency officials said will better assist taxpayers and tax preparers. The redesign is the first overhaul since 2002, IRS officials said.
"Our primary focus was to really help our customers be able to self-serve and get what they need to fulfill their tax obligations in the most customer-friendly and efficient ways," said Susan Smoter, director of Internet Development Services at the Electronic Tax Administration branch of the IRS. "We wanted to introduce some best practices into our site by allowing people to get the information and/or services that they wanted with front-page visibility and the fewest click-throughs. We wanted to be able to actually promote services that we knew that people were looking for proactively, and that's how we designed the site."
Smoter said the redesign project was launched two years ago to address users' concerns about the site's search capabilities and navigation. These concerns were reported to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which measures user satisfaction with Web sites. The site overhaul began with surveying taxpayers and internal users about their goals for using the site, she said. Then, the agency sent several prototypes to a usability lab, while also actively working with employee user groups, such as call center representatives, who point callers to the Web site to ensure internal user needs would be met with the redesign. The new site went live in mid-November.
Using Vignette Corp.'s content management system and portal tool, the IRS has been able to fix one of the most vexing problems for users -- not being able to quickly access forms. To change the search function, the agency combined its forms collections with its other HTML content, said George Coffin, chief of the public portal branch in Internet Development Services.
"[Before, if users] went into the search engine and entered the form name, but didn't choose the forms and publications collection, they were getting information about the form," Coffin said. "By combining the collection and tweaking the back-end search information in our thesaurus ... one can enter a form number or a term into a search, and they get the most relevant piece of information. If they enter a form number, they will find that form as one of the top results."
While the portlets that power the new home page still have to be managed through the content management application, the agency envisions developing a Web service in the future