About www.eia.doe.gov
Our website, 
www.eia.doe.gov, is the primary communication channel for the
Energy Information Administration (EIA) and serves as the agency’s world-wide energy information point of contact for:
- Federal, State, and local governments
- The academic and research communities
- Businesses and industry
- Foreign governments and international organizations
- The news media
- Financial institutions
- The general public
From January – December 2008, there were 30.4 million visitor sessions to the site, averaging 2.5 million visits per month. The site consists of approximately 500K files of all types that support our 1,300 publications and products, 47 email subscription lists, and seven RSS feeds.
EIA has forged a tradition of excellence for its public website, thanks to a solid vision for a high-quality presence on the web and hard work throughout the agency. The EIA website has become the public face of the agency and its information, data, analysis, and services have informed policy and programmatic decisions at all levels in regards to energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. Key indicators of the site’s success in serving our customers include:
- 279,000 total subscriptions to EIA email update lists in December 2008.
- Major search engines (like Google and MSN) refer to us an average of 600K visitors a month searching for energy topics.
- 4640 websites linking to www.eia.doe.gov.
- Search engine rankings of EIA on Google indicate very strong performance on relevant key topics, as of December 2008.
- 90% of our customers say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the quality of the information on our website.
- 71% said they found what they were looking for on our site.
- The top three words customers used to describe EIA are informative, objective, and expert.
How to Link to www.eia.doe.gov
www.eia.doe.gov is a public domain Web site, which means you may link to it at no cost and without specific permission.
User-Centered Design
Over the past two years, EIA has developed a systematic and integrated set of research-based web design and development approaches to place the user at the center of the web development process. EIA is now using this strategy to continually assess and improve its website.
Developing User Personas
EIA is among a growing number of Federal agencies that have created “user” or “audience” personas to guide the development of their public websites. The goal of personas is to help ensure that our online services are tailored specifically to meet the core needs of the agency's most important user groups and are to be used to guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. Web product developers throughout EIA are encouraged to use these personas to help them focus on a particular audience, define that audience's needs, design appropriate features, and test key components of the feature.
Our personas are based on in‑depth interviews conducted with representatives from six EIA key target audience groups. These target audiences, determined recently through EIA’s ongoing Web Strategy initiative, are:
| Congressional Staff / Policy Analysts | Public Citizens | Journalists |
 |
 |
 |
| Energy Producers | (Commercial) Energy Consumers | Robots |
 |
 |
 |
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
EIA has a long history of measuring customer satisfaction, beginning in the early 1990’s. We have conducted at least one agency-wide customer survey each year for the past 14 years, the earlier ones being on the telephone or on paper and the more recent ones on the web. We ask about who our customers are, how often they come to our website, what they are looking for, whether they found it or not, how satisfied they are with the quality of our information, and other aspects of our site and data delivery.
We have used the customer survey results to benchmark changes in customers and perceptions over time, to identify needed improvements to our content and navigation, and to understand our different audience groups. Changes made as a result of customer feedback include the redesign of our home page to provide space to highlight featured content, changes in our navigation, new shorter energy briefs on relevant topics written in layman’s terms, and a planned new section explaining energy topics that brings together introductory and encyclopedic content that currently is spread across our website.
In addition to conducting agency-wide surveys, EIA also has done focused surveys of our Kid’s Page and of several specific products. In the future we plan to make more use of targeted one- or two-question requests for feedback that gather customer satisfaction information on specific pages or products. We are actively concerned with finding out who is using our content, whether it’s written at the appropriate level, and whether we need to make changes to better serve our customers.
Conducting Usability Testing
One-on-one user testing offers EIA web product developers a chance to see real users moving through content and applications while articulating the choices they are making. These user experiences are then used to refine our architectural choices (placement of labels and navigation, for example) and content choices (what to leave in, what to take out and how to better target information to achieve tasks). EIA has solicited potential participants for usability research and other types of product evaluations through the agency’s email newsletters, an advertisement placed on the www.eia.doe.gov page, as well as other channels. Sign up if you are interested in volunteering to help improve our site.
Providing Leadership
EIA’s National Energy Information Center (NEIC) is responsible for maintaining the content and design of the EIA home page, developing and executing web publishing policies and standards, and leading EIA-wide (corporate) web efforts. Within NEIC, the Web Services Division works closely with the agency's program divisions to manage and coordinate all aspects of the site's development and growth.
Strategic Directions for the Future
In anticipation of the release of EIA's new 5-year Strategic Plan (2008 – 2012), NEIC has launched an agency-wide initiative to develop an enterprise web content strategy. This initiative is intended to directly support "Goal Four" of the Strategic Plan, also known as the "Tools" goal, along with two of its supporting strategies:
"EIA is a model for the innovative use of communication and information technologies to enhance organization performance and efficiency, product quality, and service delivery."
- Develop and implement an EIA-wide plan to guide the development of the public website.
- Define and implement new online products that embody a “web-centric” approach to disseminating information.
NEIC's goal is to complete all major tasks associated with developing the EIA Web Strategy by the Fall of 2009.