January 2001

Rural Health Care New Look (1/29/2001)

The new Millennium release of the Rural Health Care Program web site introduces a new design and modified organizational structure. These changes result from extensive usability testing and customer feedback. USAC has performed a range of usability testing on all sites including formal and informal user questioning. The new design retains many elements of the previous site, but now features four noticeable changes.

Consistent Navigation Layout and Color Scheme Throughout
Consistent navigation and layout is critical to the usability of a site. The Rural Health Care web site now features a global navigation system. The use of a global navigation system enables visitors to more easily locate the information they are looking for and reduces the likelihood of getting lost. The Rural Health Care navigation system is consistent across all pages and can be located in the same place on each page. The top navigation bar enables visitors easy access to other USAC programs while down the right side of each page the seven Rural Health Care categories are listed and sub-categories that change to reflect category specific information. To reduce the need to scroll side-to-side, every page on the Rural Health Care site, except for the home page, is now "auto-adjusting", meaning that the width of the top banner and body content will shrink or expand to your browsers width.

Four New "Assistance areas" available from every page
The following four Assistance areas are found in the gold navigation area at the top of the home page:

Site Tour - This area of the web site was created to offer our Rural Health Care Program participants assistance in navigating the Rural Health Care area of the USAC web site.

FAQs - More commonly known as "Frequently Asked Questions." Responses to the Rural Health Care Program FAQs are located here.

Contacts - Contact information for the Rural Health Care Division is provided here. (E-mail, fax numbers, toll free numbers and mailing addressees)

Get Help! - A new section of the web site that can be used for obtaining programmatic or technical support. Contact information such as toll free numbers and fax support can be found here for obtaining programmatic help. The online form found on this page is used only for reporting technical problems with the web site, such as "page not found" errors and typo's.

A search box on every page
Most web sites offer a search box on their pages and usability testing showed that customers expect this feature, especially on the home page. The Search function enables you to find records by entering keywords or phrases.

Consolidation of the funding years
The Rural Health Care Division has consolidated program information for funding years two, three and four into one location. This eliminates the need for users to choose between funding years prior to obtaining program information. Information that is specific to a funding year will be flagged with one of the following icons:

Indicates information is specific to funding year 4 participants

Indicates information is specific to funding year 3 participants

Indicates information is specific to funding year 2 participants