News and Updates

By the time this is published, the United States, along with 160 other countries, will be celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week 2015. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) IDEA Lab is an outstanding example of a federal agency using open data to foster economic growth through empowering federal employees with innovative ideas and opening health data to the private sector.

GSA unveiled a refreshed GSA.gov website yesterday with a more crisp design layout, improved usability, and features geared more toward mobile users. Increasingly, website traffic is coming from mobile users. With this in mind, GSA unveiled a newly refreshed GSA.gov website on Nov. 16. “Our ultimate goal for the refresh

One of the challenges UX practitioners can face is how to communicate much of the data that’s out there. The key word is “communicate.” Since many of us are used to qualitative findings, making the jump to “hard data” can be a challenge. There are tools out there that make this easier, but we still

Pew released a recent report tracking trends in digital device ownership and found smartphones and tablets have continued to grow in recent years, while other devices have stalled. The big headlines from the report are: Cell phones are now in the hands of more than 92% of U.S. adults, although this trend started to flatten

Twitter polls allow you to tweet out simple A or B style opinion polls. These polls can spark some great engagement, but you’ll want to keep a few things in mind before getting started: To stay within the social media

My office is preparing to embark on a complete redesign of a 10-year-old system that averages 20,000 users a month. The success and adoption of the new system design and the product as a whole will be heavily determined by how well our team translates users’ needs. Providing a good user experience will also play

The power of using social media to find and create images can be overwhelming. What image do I post? How can I get more followers when I don’t have animals or pretty pictures to share? All good questions. The fact is, no matter what your agency does you can find a visual way to tell

Technology has become integral to our lives, and now many of these familiar postal services are available at our fingertips on our mobile devices.

Josh Clark, one of the pioneers of touch Web design, and author of Tapworthy and Designing for Touch, published an excellent article on A List Apart analyzing How We Hold Our Gadgets that has a wealth of data and graphics about this interesting and emerging design challenge. Below are 5 notable lessons from the post: 1. Portrait (vertical) orientation dominates

I’ve been thinking a lot about Instagram lately. It’s pretty big, especially among the younger populations (AKA. Millennials). Actually, from what I can tell, it’s pretty big with lots of different age groups, genders, and ethnicities; and it’s growing every day. Full disclosure: I use Instagram in my personal

Over the past few years, many agencies have learned how to do user experience (UX) with few resources. And while that’s still a problem at many agencies, many UX initiatives have been gaining momentum and attracting new stakeholders. Federal-wide efforts like the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (SBST) and the U.S. Digital Service’s (USDS) promotion

A recent DigitalGov webinar on syndicated content and the recent achievements of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention helped open my eyes even wider to the possibilities of open and structured content. By offering critical health information via syndication, CDC and other Department of Health and Human Services agencies are helping resource-strapped local agencies share

On September 1, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) hosted our first Twitter Office Hours, a Twitter chat for USCIS customers. The purpose of this pilot event was to offer our customers a different way to engage with us. We aimed to leverage Twitter to answer questions on our agency’s programs and policies and to

Hispanics are one of fastest growing demographics in the U.S. But like any demographic, there are important nuances to consider when connecting with this audience. Insight into your audience’s motivations, behavior and preferences is key for anyone trying to engage with the public. We know every day that more and more Hispanics are on social

The Department of Defense CAP app allows U.S. government employees to use their mobile devices to look up information about services and resources.

I (virtually) attended the Third Annual Safety Datapalooza last Thursday and was greatly impressed by the projects and initiatives for public safety. This was a great event, and I am glad that live streaming was provided for those who could not attend in person but have a great interest in using government data for disaster

Looking for health or science related images? The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently launched the NIH Image Gallery on Flickr. The Image Gallery offers a wide variety of scientific, biomedical and disease related imagery as well as photos of NIH

An industry group tracking the growth and production of the “Internet of Things,” a term given to Internet-connected devices and accessories, is predicting that growth will slow over the next 6 months, but then surge 3 times as fast, over the following year. The research was organized by the IoT M2M Council, which is made

Summary: Today, the Administration directed a series of actions to continue strengthening Federal cybersecurity & modernizing the government’s technology infrastructure. Strengthening the cybersecurity of Federal networks, systems, and data is one of the most important challenges we face as a Nation. Every day, public and private sector leaders—my team included—are directing significant resources to address

Many of us depend a great deal on subject matter experts (SMEs) to generate content that will eventually end up on our site. These are men and women that have critical knowledge to share with our audiences, and it is our job to make it match our various editorial and content guidelines. Using a simple