Bloomberg Government
Federal Directories Redesign
Modernizing one of Bloomberg Government's highest-traffic workflows into a fully responsive search and profile experience to help government affairs professionals, lobbyists, corporate, and federal users find members, staffers, committees, and district context more efficiently.
What is this project?
Federal Directories is one of the most important discovery surfaces on Bloomberg Government. It helps government affairs teams, lobbyists, associations, corporations, and federal users locate the people and organizations they need to influence, monitor, or engage with — including Members of Congress, staffers, committees, and related district information.
The problem was not that users lacked access to directory information. The problem was that the experience had not kept up with how they worked. Directories was the second most-used feature on bgov.com, yet users were frustrated by a non-mobile-friendly experience and wanted to find people and related information faster through a less complicated UI.
The product goal was clear: evolve Federal Directories into a fully responsive web experience that would help users find people and related entities more efficiently, while also surfacing district data in context.
The redesign focused on the core people-discovery workflow across three high-value surfaces: Members of Congress, staffers, and committees. The work also created a responsive foundation that could support future mobile-container use cases and reduce reliance on a separate native app experience over time.
Before & After
The legacy experience was designed around desktop search behavior. It supported important workflows, but it made users work too hard: the UI felt complicated, mobile access was limited, and related information such as district context was not surfaced in a way that supported quick scanning and decision-making.
The old search experience was functional but dense. Users relied on it heavily, yet the interaction model was not optimized for mobile or for quickly moving between members, staffers, committees, and related contextual data.
The redesigned experience prioritized responsive search pages, clearer result scanning, preserved saved-search behavior, and contextual relationships so users could move through directory research with less friction.
The biggest shift was making the core Directories workflow work across devices. The MVP included fully responsive search pages and detail pages, with a new UI experience in production, staffer headshots, and district data added to Member of Congress profiles.
Because Directories is a high-frequency workflow, responsiveness was not a cosmetic upgrade. It expanded when and where users could look up people, validate relationships, and act on directory information.
What I did — and why
As Lead Product Designer, I translated a broad modernization goal into a scoped, shippable UX strategy. The challenge was to improve a heavily used product area without trying to rebuild every part of Directories at once. The team needed to make the experience meaningfully better for users while respecting engineering constraints, preserved functionality, and phased delivery.
I focused the design work around three product outcomes: make Directories usable across devices, help users find people and related entities more efficiently, and introduce district context in a way that supported the existing research workflow instead of overwhelming it.
- Responsive Search Experience: Designed fully responsive search experiences for Members of Congress, staffers, and committees, ensuring the highest-value directory workflows could scale from desktop to smaller screens.
- Workflow Simplification: Reduced interaction complexity by restructuring search and result patterns around faster people discovery, clearer scanning, and less friction for high-frequency users.
- District Data Integration: Designed how district data would appear within Member of Congress profiles, helping users connect people discovery with geographic and constituent context.
- Relationship Context: Incorporated relationship signals into search results where feasible, helping users understand relevant member, staffer, and committee connections without requiring a separate lookup.
- Saved Search Continuity: Preserved existing saved-search functionality where in scope, balancing modernization with continuity for users who had already built repeat workflows around Directories.
- Production-Ready Specs: Delivered design updates, Figma specs, and interaction guidance to support engineering implementation across search pages, responsive detail pages, analytics instrumentation, and QA.
Trade-offs & constraints
This was not a blank-slate redesign. The team had to modernize a high-usage workflow while working through release timing, engineering standards, legacy search behavior, and scope decisions about what belonged in the MVP versus later iterations.
The MVP scope explicitly excluded backend search changes, which meant the redesign needed to improve perceived speed, clarity, and usability without changing the underlying search relevance model.
I focused on the parts of the workflow design could directly improve: responsive layouts, clearer result structure, more useful context at the point of scanning, and reduced UI complexity.
All three fully reinvented detail pages for MOC, staffer, and committee profiles were out of scope for the first release, even though detail-page modernization was part of the broader product vision.
I designed the search-to-detail experience as a phased system: ship responsive search and responsive click-through pages first, while leaving room for deeper profile reinvention in future iterations.
Relationship data was valuable, but the first release could not show the full relationship model. Committee relationships were limited to specific member-name search scenarios, such as chair or co-chair members.
I treated relationships as contextual support rather than the center of the interface, surfacing them where they added confidence while avoiding UI promises the data and scope could not yet support.
Outcome
The redesigned Federal Directories experience launched through a phased release: internal release on January 6, 2025, production release with switchback on February 11, and switchback removal on February 26. The shipped MVP introduced fully responsive Directories pages, search and detail pages, a new production UI, staffer headshots, and district data on Member of Congress profiles.
The product success metrics were intentionally tied to behavior, not visual polish: increase mobile use, improve discovery of district data, and broaden usage across Members of Congress, staffers, and committees — with a specific focus on increasing committee use.
With this project I improved a business-critical workflow, defined success metrics, while working within real delivery constraints, and making pragmatic scope decisions that shipped a better user experience.