Category: User Research

Colorful Options in Lighthouse

It can be a challenge to inject a little color into a government website! Now try to do it while maintaining a common look and feel across an entire state of diverse departments, agencies, and commissions. It’s enough to send a person searching for unexpectedly captivating entertainment to zen out on! One of the main […]

April 30, 2025

A Call for Feedback Partners!

We’d like to take a moment to renew our call for Lighthouse feedback partners! Lighthouse is now fully available to explore, and we invite developers and agency web editors to dig their hands into the sand and begin to envision their own new Lighthouse websites. This effort is about building a community to provide criticism, […]

April 23, 2025

Conducting Your Own Competitive Analysis

The idea of redesigning an existing website can be daunting. It’s hard to know where to begin. Fortunately, the GIC is here to help Delaware agencies through the process of migrating to the new Lighthouse design system. Lighthouse takes care of a lot of design decisions, because its components have already been built with usability […]

April 15, 2025

Why We Updated Our Logo

Logos serve as the visual foundation of an organization, creating instant recognition, building brand identity, and hopefully making a strong first impression. When it comes to government seals and logos, the primary goals are fostering trust and familiarity. And while there is some benefit to continuity, there are other concerns to consider these days: Evolving […]

March 6, 2025

Top Ten Things Agencies Can Do
to Prepare for Lighthouse

Many Delaware state agencies the GIC works with have been asking how they can prepare to have their sites eventually placed into Lighthouse. So, we thought it made sense to go through some of the steps we ask all agencies to consider in advance of moving over to the new website! The design parameters of […]

February 20, 2025

Things Lighthouse Won’t Have

Intentional Decisions to Omit Problematic Features As we’ve rolled out our new Lighthouse website design system, we’ve been sharing lots of its cool new features through this blog. But we haven’t discussed the fact that there are also quite a few things that are currently being used on state websites that we’ve deliberately excluded from […]

February 6, 2025

There Goes My Hero!

Super Delly is the hero we all need. He’s here to save the day, as it pertains to making your homepage as inviting and accessible as possible! For the sake of clarity, the hero section that we’re actually going to be talking about is the large image and text beneath the header; essentially, your homepage’s […]

December 12, 2024

Using Lighthouse …to Navigate!

We chose the name Lighthouse for our new state website design system for several reasons. It’s a nod to the many Delaware lighthouses that dot our beautiful coastlines, like the Harbor of Refuge Lighthouse in Lewes, seen above. Symbolically, a lighthouse is a comforting landmark to help sailors orient themselves, avoid trouble and find their […]

November 15, 2024

State vs. Agency Notifications:
Let’s Divide and Conquer!

Notification banners are a valuable way to alert website users to important information. However, these features are often used inconsistently across Delaware agency sites. Banners intended for emergency notifications are often used for non-emergency information, like event notification or links to existing pages on their sites. Here’s an example of useful and important information that […]

October 4, 2024

Choosing New Fonts for Lighthouse

One of the GIC’s main goals is to put accessibility at the forefront of our process. We always want to keep in mind those with visual, hearing and other disabilities as we make each website design decision. This approach calls for reconsideration of colors, backgrounds, and the text itself that we use. Many different fonts […]

September 19, 2024