The United States Patent and Trade Offices came to Accenture asking for a new, modern portal to help consolidate their data. This portal needed to organize detailed information, make it easier to browse, find, and obtain the right information that the user needs. It needed to robust, smart, and—most importantly—save the agency money.
Problem: The terabytes of patent data the USPTO manages is fractured, unorganized, and impossible to search. Also, the API is outdated and unreliable, causing headaches for the millions of users who leverage open-source USPTO data in their jobs or companies.
Solution: Rethink how USPTO makes their data available to the user by making the site faster, smarter, and better organized.
Every week, the USPTO’s online databases handle millions of requests from businesses, lawyers, and academics seeking the latest patent information—quickly and accurately. Unfortunately, the current applications are outdated, disorganized, and often return inaccurate results.
For the new Open Data Portal, we set out to create an interface that combined a clean, professional design with advanced filtering and customizable download options. It had to be approachable for novice users while offering the depth and control required by experienced developers.
Good products come from good research. Our team interviewed dozens of USPTO users, clustering their feedback into clear themes and prioritized areas for improvement. We also mapped the entire patent and trademark process step-by-step, charting the complex relationships between USPTO’s various cloud services.
This research provided critical, human-focused insight that helped guide our design team’s design decisions. It also was a great resources that our client, partners, and internal team used throughout the project.
The Open Data Portal has to satisfy two types of consumers. You have non-developers, who just wanted a simple way to find and download patent information. And then you have developers, who needed powerful ways to access, customize, and connect that same data.
That means that we needed to build a two-part application: a user-friendly front-end portal for non-developers and a comprehensive back-end with APIs, code examples, and support for developers.
We wanted the Open Data Portal to be visually and functionally deep without being overwhelming to the user. Leveraging the USWDS design system, we built a portal that uses filters, slide-out panels, and customizable tables to better organize information, simplify the design, and let the user control how much information they want to see at one time.
The USPTO oversees hundreds of millions of patents and trademarks, each one detailed and unique. Leveraging natural language processing, proximity, and vector searchin users can now input a simple sentence, and the system automatically filters and highlights the most relevant patent content.
We also prompted user’s for feedback on the AI tool. This helped us measure the usefulness of the tool and identifying improvements that users wanted.
Being a developer isn’t easy—you write code, design an application, and suddenly the underlying API your company depends on changes. That’s why we designed the ODP site not only helpful to our new developers but also essential for current developers who are transitioning to the new platform. We created transition guides, a Swagger page, and comprehensive documentation to ensure any developer can get up and running with the new API quickly and painlessly.
In any long-term project, regular check-ins with the client are essential. I facilitated multiple workshops to celebrate key milestones, as well as to ideate, prioritize, and plan for future improvements to the portal.
As UX Lead, I value open, transparent communication and view my teammates as equals working toward a shared goal: delivering the best possible experience to our users. I foster a culture of feedback, collaboration, and mutual support—ensuring my team feels empowered not only in the project but in their professional growth.
I designed social posts and produced promotional and tutorial videos to build awareness of the Open Data Portal and drive engagement. I also redesigned its homepage, enhancing the user experience, improving visual clarity, and increasing accessibility.
These efforts boosted the project’s visibility, reinforced USPTO’s brand identity, and made the platform more accessible and welcoming to all users.
