Website redesign - Washington OIC
Lead UX content strategist @ Anthro-Tech
The Washington Office of the Insurance Commissioner (OIC) plays a crucial role in regulating the insurance industry and protecting insurance consumers in Washington. The goal of this project was to help the public more easily find and use the OIC services, support and resources on their new agency website. This multi-year redesign effort also coincided with a migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10 and the introduction of a new Commissioner.
Project highlights:
Audited, analyzed and restructured content across 1500 distinct pages, bringing the total pages after launch to approximately 1000.
Facilitated participatory design sessions with dozens of OIC team members to refine, stress-test and build buy-in for new page and component concepts.
Developed, tested and facilitated implementation for 12 new page types, six reusable components and seven controlled vocabularies alongside WaTech developers and data architects.
Introduced a new, structured framework for managing high-volume ‘Rulemaking’ content, which significantly streamlined how multiple teams contributed simultaneously.
Received a 2026 ClearMark Award by the Center for Plain Language in the ‘websites’ category.
The challenge
Facilitate a migration and redesign for a complex, ineffective and outdated website managed by dozens of team members across the agency.
How might we…
… create a website that serves the needs of both the public and the contributors who manage it so that users find and understand OIC services and information when they need it most?
Process snapshot
1. Discovery
Content inventory - One of our earliest activities set the stage for identifying redundant, outdated, trivial and incomplete information. Later, this would guide our recommendations for which pages to archive and consolidate and how existing content could migrate to a new, reimagined experience.
2. Definition
Participatory design and content modeling - Our content modeling and design efforts didn’t happen in a vacuum. We invited key stakeholders and subject matter experts to take part in. collaborative sketching and design sessions to refine content structure before high-fidelity designs began.
3. Design
Structured content design and annotations - I worked with our UX/UI designers and front-end developers to develop, test and refine the content structure through high-fidelity designs. Meanwhile, I added a layer of annotations to guide authors and stakeholders tasked with contributing to or managing content on these page types.
4. Delivery
Content production workshop - My process for designing an effective and realistic content production plan began with the people who would implement it. Our team worked together to facilitate a workshop to understand the current state of content governance — and define a vision for the future.
Outcomes
Our team’s collective work contributed to a successful launch a fully reimagined agency website with new, simplified information architecture and plain language content. The redesign effort took a total of 2.5 years to complete and involved the contributions of 3 visual designers, 2 UX writers, nearly 200 individual content contributors or subject-matter experts, and 6 developers.
Artifacts
Content audit report
Phased sitemap
Content models
Annotated page templates
Voice and tone guide
Content inventory database
Content production plan
Tools
Airtable
Excel
Figma
Drupal 10
ScreamingFrog
Miro
Award-winning work
This redesign project won the 2026 ClearMark Award for the ‘Websites’ category, an award presented by the Center for Plain Language.
“This site is a wonderful example of what thoughtful writing and design can bring to complicated subjects. It is clear that the creators spent time planning for, developing, and testing this site and felt a responsibility to serve their audience(s) with care.”
— CPL judge
