Redesigned Web Site: IRS Hopes for Happier Returns

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 say will better assist taxpayers and tax preparers. The redesign is the first overhaul since 2002, IRS officials say.

"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," says Susan Smoter, director of Internet Development Services at the Electronic Tax Administration branch of the IRS.

Smoter says the redesign project for the IRS site 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.

Retooling

The site overhaul began with surveying taxpayers and internal users about their goals for using the site, she explains. 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 that internal user needs would be met with the redesign. The new site went live in mid-November.

Using a content management system and portal tool from Vignette, 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, says 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 notes. "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."

Better Search and Navigation

"One of the ... key issues we ran into was that we needed to improve search and navigation," says Bert DuMars, director of the IRS's Electronic Tax Administration branch. "We also had increasing volumes of use--this year we passed 178 million visits, [and] we had over 1.2 billion page views of the Web site. During the filing season, this is a top 50 Web site, and even in the nonfiling season, it's still very heavily used. The data is very complex, and it's hard to understand sometimes."

Coffin says that e-mail responses to the site so far are mixed but that the agency had not seen a "precipitous dip" in user satisfaction. The customer satisfaction index showed a slight trend upward in the first several weeks after the new site went live, he adds.