Redesigning an Intranet Site: Final Stages, Launch, and Lessons Learned
Helpful lessons from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) on the redesign of an intranet.
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Why Your Team Needs Its Own Style Guide and Where to Start
Learn how creating your own style guide can help facilitate development for agency websites. Review best practices, lessons learned, and examples from the U.S. Web Design System, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Using Journey Mapping to Streamline Processes Across Agencies
How one team used journey mapping to improve the customer experience for newly naturalized citizens attempting to travel abroad.
Learn About the Updated IT Accessibility Standards
Effective January 18, 2018, the revised 508 standards modernize the federal government’s IT accessibility standards and bring us into alignment with governments around the world.
Making Customer Satisfaction Data Actionable at the Peace Corps
Learn how measuring customer experience helped inform and guide website development at Peace Corps.
In our next monthly users call, the U.S. Web Design Standards core team will share what they’re working on in 2018.
Hosted by Digital.gov and the USWDS
2018
Come learn how to create a simple, compliant government website, using Federalist, GitHub and the U.S. Web Design Standards.
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Hosted by Digital.gov and the Will Slack
2017
3 Ways to Manage Research Projects Remotely
Being a remote team doesn’t mean you should forgo any of your research rituals. It means finding different ways to do them.
A Conversation With ITIF About the State of Federal Government Websites
Since it’s been nearly six months since their report was released, we wanted to check in with ITIF and see what they’ve learned, what they’ve heard from agencies and what their future plans are to build on this research.
Design and Conflict: Do You Know Your Conflict Style?
Building empathy towards users is always a part of the UX process, but it’s not always common practice to build empathy towards our teammates. Here’s an idea to proactively address conflict and build empathy through understanding on your team.
CFPB Serves up Financial Tips to Seniors
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Meals on Wheels America have created multilingual educational resources about financial scams that target the elderly which can be easily distributed to seniors in the communities they serve, and downloaded or ordered in bulk for free by the general public. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) Consumer Education &
Walter Reed’s 3-D Printing Innovations Help Warfighters Get Back to Life
This is part of an ongoing series highlighting the innovations and research happening at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Wounded warriors who dream of returning to playing hockey, climbing mountains or simply brushing their teeth with ease can look to 3-D printing innovations at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to
The Data Briefing: Federal Government Pioneers in Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Training
When I was in the private sector, around the year 2000, I worked for an information technology (IT) consulting company as a project manager and developer. On one project, I provided support for early mobile devices given to medical students. I worked in a small office around the corner from the cardio-respiratory simulator (CRS). The
Have You Critiqued Your Critique Process?
DEMO Whenever I hear someone complain about the process of a design critique, I’m always a bit surprised. Blame it on the fact
Vets.gov: A Modern Software Development Environment in Government
When people think of government software, they often think of COBOL and PowerBuilder 5, with manual software deploys every three to six months on a fixed number of machines in a government-run data center. This perception is sometimes justified, but sometimes entirely wrong. Regardless, the perception makes many developers reluctant to work for the government
VA Innovators Network Program: Ahead of the Curve in Healthcare Innovation
VA Innovators Network Program Selected as FedHealth IT Innovation Award Winner This month, FedHealth IT announced that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Innovators Network Program was selected as a 2017 recipient of the FedHealthIT Innovation Award. FedHealth IT recognized 25 Federal Health
Improving Customer Experience with Digital Personas
Keeping the customer’s needs front and center is important when developing new digital tools. We recently developed a set of user personas as part of our work to establish a more robust—and data informed—understanding of the individuals that engage digitally with the National Archives (NARA). User personas are fictional, but realistic representations of key audience
Fractal and Federalist Join the U.S. Web Design Standards
We’ve recently added two powerful tools to the U.S. Web Design Standards development workflow that allow us to preview, test, and publish the Standards code more quickly and easily. Fractal Fractal is a powerful and flexible framework for building interactive component libraries. It’s similar to Jekyll (which we use to publish the Standards site) in
The New FEC.gov
Last week, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) unveiled their new website at FEC.gov. This new site is the result of a years-long collaboration with GSA’s 18F and features completely revamped tools for exploring campaign finance data. It provides user-centered content for understanding the reporting and compliance requirements for people participating in federal elections, redesigned tools
Federalist Is out of Beta and Open for Business
If you’re a program manager or a federal web developer you’ve probably been given a seemingly simple task: Create a basic website as part of a new initiative at your agency. The hardest part is often not crafting the content or designing the prototype, but getting the security and privacy compliance in order to launch
