GSA Blog

How new web improvements are helping federal employees look up per diem rates

Did you know per diem content is one of the main reasons people navigate to GSA.gov?

GSA develops and publishes per diem rates federal agencies use to reimburse their employees for subsistence expenses incurred while on official travel in the lower 48 United States and the District of Columbia. This information is the most heavily visited content on the site, with 59% of all GSA.gov pageviews being per diem related. It’s clearly the top task so it’s important to ensure this information is easy to understand and use.

Though the per diem lookup has a higher satisfaction rate than any other task on the site, there's always room for improvement. Analysis of the performance metrics revealed an unknown stumbling block in the lookup process. 

The problem

When users looked for per diem rates for their travel destination, the results page did not show a daily breakdown for the meals and incidental expense allowance. This was information travelers needed. A link to the daily breakdown was available in footnotes, but it was often overlooked, and those who did find it were confused by how the breakdown was presented. Users ended up stuck in a loop as they hopped back and forth between the two pages trying to figure out the exact breakdown of rates.

The solution

To fix this, GSA’s digital communications team redesigned the experience to eliminate the extra clicks, pages, and tables, and present all of the rate information up front. By changing how the daily breakdown was presented and adding it to the original results page, we improved the user experience.

The results

The results showed major improvement in usability, and emphasized the importance of having and maintaining user-centered content. The team used a combination of usability testing and A/B testing to understand how users were impacted by the change, and saw significant improvements.

• The success rate for customers to find the total per diem rate for a certain location and date increased from 50% to 70%, and the average time to complete this task went from three minutes to one minute.
• The success rate for customers to find a specific meal allowance jumped from 37% to 100%, and the average time to complete this task went from over one minute to just 15 seconds.

This project highlights the benefits of applying user experience principles to successfully fulfill customer needs. We’re continuing to use these principles to guide our projects and reshape GSA.gov to deliver more accessible, consistent, and user-centered content.