Los Alamos National Laboratory | Creative Director
Los Alamos National Laboratory website
Established in 1943 to conduct scientific research for the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory now specializes in a wide range of progressive science, technology, and engineering across many fields, including space exploration, geophysics, renewable energy, supercomputing, medicine, and nanotechnology.
Immediately following the introduction of LANL’s One Lab, One Voice rebrand, I was challenged to lead a redesign of the lab’s digital products that put their brand values into action. We redrew the lanl.gov sitemap, modernized our tech stack, and created a new design system to significantly enhance speed, functionality, and usability.
The challenge
LANL’s preexisting website was deeply fragmented and outdated. It was not an effective platform for interactive media, contained too much low quality content, and had poor SEO. There was no standard UX, infrastructure, or information architecture.
The opportunity
We began rebuilding lanl.gov from scratch. We migrated to a headless CMS, introduced a new sitemap, improved our SEO, and created LANL’s first design system, Mesa. Mesa is named for the bedrock on which the lab is built, and is visually inspired by the beauty of New Mexico’s high desert.
Flexibility and collaboration
Mesa is a collection of components, patterns, guidance, and code that delivers consistent UX, branded UI, reliable implementation, and accessible digital experiences at scale.
Though released with an initial focus on React.js components, we built Mesa to support multiple code implementations, and it is extendable for use in other frameworks and languages. This allows Mesa to also be a catalyst for collaboration and coordination across previously siloed IT teams.
Researched solutions
The implementation of Mesa and our website redesign was the result of a year of rigorous testing with both internal and external users. We gathered internal focus groups to participate in exercises to inform our new sitemap, and we subscribed to UserZoom to test various UX patterns and UI styles with external audiences, totaling over 2k participants.
By involving stakeholders in our testing, and sharing our analysis with leadership, we built transparency into our process and validated our decisions with data. It was through our research that we confirmed an expanded brand color palette would be necessary for specialized applications, and determined the format of our improved navigation.
Primary audiences then and now
From the data we collect, we know that LANL has three primary web audiences — job seekers, who primarily visit Careers pages; DOE customers and the community, who primarily visit News & Media pages; and researchers, who primarily visit Research Library pages.
Our efforts prioritized enhancing the user experience for each of these key external audiences. The first redesigned pages to launch with our new visual language and in our new infrastructure were lanl.jobs, discover.lanl.gov, and researchlibrary.lanl.gov.
These new pages present visitors with a dynamic and engaging experience. The improved usability, active multimedia content, and cohesive style and voice project authority and inspire trust.
News & Media
Discover.lanl.gov is a one-stop-shop for all lab stories. Built to amplify the lab’s cutting-edge research in fields such as high-powered computing and artificial intelligence, the News & Media site hosts a range of inspiring content, including news posts, magazine features, interactive experiences, podcasts, and videos.
Eight months after launch, All News page unique visits increased 13-fold.
Careers
Lanl.jobs is the lab’s Careers website. I partnered with an external agency to launch this new site as part of a robust employer branding campaign. The site includes sections on inclusion, diversity, and benefits; resources for veterans and students; and advanced functionality, such as the option for job seekers to search by skillset or join the talent community.
In one year, we progressed the application completion rate to an industry-leading 50% and advanced the average time spent on site from two to 14 minutes.
Specialized applications
In addition to communications products like lanl.gov and the lab’s intranet, our new digital infrastructure can also power specialized software products, interactive experiences, and dashboards.
One of the joys of working at an institution like LANL is that you’re often challenged with exciting edge cases that may not exist anywhere else in the world.
The outcome
New and improved results require new and improved ways of working, and as the lab’s Creative Director and manager of the Multimedia Production group, I implemented a number of organizational improvements to sustain our efforts for the long-term.
In addition to upgrading our web infrastructure and design, I reorganized the lab’s media teams as a full-service internal agency, successfully proposed an institutional funding increase of more than $3M annually, and spearheaded my teams’ migration from a ‘shared hosting’ web management model to a ‘content stewardship’ model.
This resulted in significant, measurable improvements to our website, including an SEO site health increase from 28% to 91%, Section 508 accessibility score increase from 61% to 85%, and Google Lighthouse scores in the high 90s.