Product: USDA Field Office Technical Guide (FOTG) — a public-facing platform used by farmers, planners, landowners, and field staff nationwide.

Overview

The USDA's Field Office Technical Guide (FOTG) is the primary resource for conservation practices across all 50 states, relied on by 16,000+ monthly users. Our goal was to modernize the mobile and desktop experience to improve information architecture, search clarity, and accessibility.

Check out the product at https://efotg.sc.egov.usda.gov/#/

Challenge

Farmers, planners, landowners, and field staff rely on the Field Office Technical Guide (FOTG) for decades of critical agricultural and environmental guidance. However, the platform’s structure was working against them:

A complex taxonomy made it difficult to locate relevant guidance
Limited search functionality forced users into repeated, unproductive queries
No mobile support, despite a large share of field staff needing access on-site rather than back at their desk

Friction here directly hindered adoption of sustainable farming practices, since users who couldn't find the right guidance in a timely manner.

Role: Me (UX Designer + Mentor), alongside Amber Chen (UX/UI Lead on the project) and an Agile team of 12

Timeline: October 2022 - March 2023

Methods + Tools: User Flow Diagrams, User Interviews, Usability Testing, Figma

Objective

Modernize FOTG's information architecture, search experience, and accessibility through responsive design leading to improved search accuracy, speed, and trust, while ensuring the platform could scale and integrate cleanly with USDA's broader internal systems.

My Role & Approach

I worked alongside Amber Chen and a 12-person Agile team, focused on user research, mentorship, and interaction design across the redesign:

Research & Problem Framing

Conducted user interviews and mapped the existing user flow to pinpoint exactly where the taxonomy and search experience broke down for real users
Prioritized mobile-first flows early, since field-based users, the group most affected by the platform's failures, were also the least served by the existing desktop-only design

Information Architecture & Prototyping

Restructured the underlying taxonomy into a clearer tree-view navigation, moving from a lo-fi to hi-fi prototype through iterative rounds of testing rather than a single redesign pass
Iterated search and filtering through multiple versions (v1 → v2 → final), using usability testing between each round to catch where users still hesitated or backtracked
Chose to preserve and extend USDA's existing design language in the hi-fi prototype rather than introduce a fully new visual system, prioritizing continuity and integration with internal systems over a more dramatic visual overhaul

Validation & Handoff

Ran usability testing across the redesigned flows to validate that search and navigation changes actually reduced the friction identified in research, not just in theory
Finalized the user flow and handed off a system built to integrate with USDA's internal tooling, not just work as a standalone public site

Impact:

• 37% increase in mobile usage
• 33% decrease in search page bounce rate
• 21% increase in average session depth
• Lower rate of repeated searches per session

Tradeoffs

We chose to extend USDA's existing design language rather than introduce a new visual system. This traded some creative latitude for faster stakeholder buy-in and easier long-term integration with internal tools. We also prioritized mobile-first flows for field users over a simultaneous desktop overhaul, betting that the highest-friction use case mattered more than parity across platforms in the initial release. Both tradeoffs meant a less visually dramatic launch than a from-scratch redesign might have produced, but they kept the project aligned with USDA's technical constraints and shortened the path to measurable impact.

Key Takeaways

This project reinforced how much structural problems (taxonomy, search, information architecture) can quietly undermine even well-intentioned public resources. Solving it required grounding every design decision in direct user research and iterating through multiple rounds of testing instead of betting on a single "right" redesign. It also reinforced the value of designing for integration, not just usability in isolation. A public-facing product still needs to work within the technical and organizational constraints of the system it lives in.