Ohio EPA: online forms instead of PDFs, on a site organized around what people come to do

The operator of a seasonal public water system has to certify it is ready before it opens to the public. A driver whose car failed its E-Check emissions test needs a hardship extension. A business has to keep up with the air, water and waste rules that apply to it and its permit, and a neighbor wants to speak at a public hearing on a project nearby. All of them start at epa.ohio.gov, the site of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2021 the agency moved the site onto the State’s InnovateOhio Platform, with years of rules, program pages and documents from more than a dozen divisions and offices to carry across. Two years later it wanted the site to work harder for the people using it: its goal was that they find what they need in three clicks or less. Its forms still lived as paper, Word and PDF files, and its educational and how-to material was spread across its regulatory programs, where people struggled to find it (Ohio EPA, October 2023).

2021: One site on the State’s platform

We started in April 2021 with requirements and design workshops with agency staff, and tested the new structure with a tree test. On the platform we set up the agency’s own taxonomies, section and division pages and data tables, exported, cleaned up and migrated the content, moved its documents to the platform’s cloud storage and trained its authors. The new epa.ohio.gov went live on December 3, 2021, and in late 2023 took the State’s new “Ohio, The Heart of it All” brand in the statewide rollout we led.

2024: Listening first

We surveyed the public through the agency’s email lists and its staff through an internal survey, mapped its audiences, and inventoried and audited every page and file on the site against its analytics. Asked what they need most from Ohio EPA, 82% of the 45 people who answered the public survey picked the forms they have to fill out, ahead of updates on changing regulations and available training (67% each). Of those who used the agency’s separate Resource Hub, about half said they went there when they could not find what they needed on the main site.

A structure tested with the public

From that research we reworked the site’s information architecture: the main navigation, where forms live and a place for a new office. We built it in July 2024 and tested it with 62 people from outside the agency in an eight-day tree test in August. The result: effective, with minor revisions, and we advised waiting on them until people had time to get used to the new forms catalog.

Forms people fill in online

A survey of staff found the agency’s forms, and we cataloged each one by division, audience, complexity, signatures and payments. We compared digital forms tools, then built online forms on Form.io, the State’s forms platform, in five groups through the spring and summer of 2024, each division testing its own before they went live. They sit in one catalog under Stay Compliant, searchable and filterable by division. We trained the agency’s staff to maintain the forms and build simple ones themselves.

Content the agency can keep right

We wrote a web content strategy and a governance model the agency can run: roles from subject matter expert to approver, a content lifecycle, a regular audit cycle and an authoring dashboard for administrators. For the Resource Hub we analyzed its content and technology and recommended bringing its answers and publications into the website’s Help Center, where people already look.

In September 2026, someone who needs to report a new owner for a public water system, certify a seasonal water system or apply for an E-Check hardship extension finds the form under Stay Compliant and fills it in online. The catalog lists 52 online forms across seven divisions and offices, and the agency says it is converting more (Ohio EPA, September 2026).

We built 36 of them in 2024 and trained the agency’s staff to keep the catalog growing. Nearly five years after launch, epa.ohio.gov still runs on the platform we moved it to, with the main navigation we designed and tested in 2024, starting from what people come to do: Stay Compliant, Get Involved, Monitor Pollution, Get Funding and Find Regulations.

We ran both projects for the agency on the State’s platform, from research to go-live and training. How the platform itself came together is told in the foundation under Ohio’s digital front door.