By: Chris Mulieri
Since January 1, over 30 million visitors have come to FDA’s website. We know that they come to FDA.gov to get reliable and up-to-date information on everything from food and drug recalls to medical product alerts to regulations and guidance for industry…and the list goes on.
We also know that an increasing number of our visitors use mobile devices to get this information. In the last year alone, the number of mobile visits to FDA.gov has nearly doubled, and now 25 percent of our visitors use a tablet or smartphone to access the site.
As director of web and digital media for the FDA, I lead a team that is committed to providing a positive experience for visitors to FDA.gov, including our mobile visitors. We are also responsible for supporting the Digital Government Strategy, issued by the White House, which calls for federal agencies to provide government information on demand and on any device.
In plain English, that means that we need to provide a single FDA.gov site that’s available anytime, anywhere, on any device.
To meet the needs of our mobile visitors without creating a separate mobile website, we turned to a proven web development approach called responsive design. This approach uses special code to ensure that web content is easy to read and scroll across a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to mobile phones. Since the first of the year, mobile-friendly responsive designs have been implemented successfully on a number of large non-government websites, such as NYTimes.com and NPR.org. And now, on FDA.gov as well.
We are excited to announce that our first responsive pages on FDA.gov launched on November 15. If you are using a smartphone or tablet, go to FDA.gov and check it out. You’ll see our most popular content, such as recalls, news, and safety alerts, is now formatted to fit your screen. We’ve also made it easier for mobile visitors to tell us about a problem with the products that FDA regulates, such as food, drugs, medical devices, and animal food and drugs.
This is just the beginning. In keeping with best practices in web design, we are taking an iterative approach to mobile on FDA.gov. In other words, we will apply the lessons learned from our visitors’ experiences to share more mobile friendly content as it becomes available.
Our ultimate goal is to create one website that will provide a quality experience for all visitors who seek information that will benefit their health and safety.
Chris Mulieri is the director of web and digital media for the Food and Drug Administration