The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) is the formally chartered, nationwide network of over 300 federal laboratories, agencies, and research centers that fosters commercialization best practice strategies and opportunities for accelerating federal technologies from out of the labs and into the marketplace.
Through American taxpayers’ investment in our federal laboratories’ research and development (R&D) efforts, scientific and technological breakthroughs can take place and return dividends to our economy. The new industries, businesses, and jobs that can be created when a new technology is brought to market are just a few of the successes that take effect through technology transfer (T2), and the FLC is here to promote, facilitate, and educate labs and industry about that process.
Our goal for Discovery was to learn more about the Federal Lab Consortium (FLC) and assess the different components of its website against FLC’s mission and business objectives. The outcome of our work are recommendations and a strategic plan to effectively and efficiently optimize the website user experience and FLC’s digital presence, ultimately setting them up for measurable, scalable growth. We assessed the platform utilizing a number of different user experience methodologies.
To better understand the market, we researched and analyzed competitor website. Content, benefits, usability and positioning were compared for strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. We also took note of best practices that can apply to FLC.
To evaluate the appropriate recommendations for the FLC, we also conducted comparative research on 16 other sites across different industries, focusing on five major features. Looking at how other complex systems and tasks are built will allow us to provide appropriate design solutions that adequately consider all alternatives.
Our team conducted a heuristic evaluation of the FLC site, which is a usability method that helps identify problems in user interaction design. They are called “heuristics” because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines. We put together our recommendations based on this evaluation combined with insights gathered during our discovery and research process.
