Research

News and Events on Research

226 posts

An introduction to usability testing, why it’s important, and how to talk about things that aren’t required to do a usability test.— via 18F

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Dec 10, 2018

Code.gov User Interviews — What We Learned

This post was originally published by Code.gov on Medium. It’s been a year since the federal government published the Federal Source Code Policy, which created the foundation for Code.gov. In honor of the policy’s anniversary, we checked in with our users to learn more about them, their needs, and the challenges they face. Our users

Sep 05, 2017

Shedding Light on Underserved Users through Research

How user interviews helped spotlight the needs of a previously forgotten group. We may not like to admit it, but, most web services or sites have users that (for whatever reason) just aren’t well understood—and in turn, not well served. Conducting user interviews and making sure you get good participation from those groups can help

Aug 17, 2017

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

Jul 03, 2017

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

Jun 20, 2017