News and Updates

Trends on Tuesday: Focus on Mobile Performance to Provide Better Mobile Moments

The New York Times recently published a report evaluating the cost of mobile ads on news websites and found that on many of the major sites, the ads were taking as much bandwidth and time as the content (if not more, in some cases). This comes after the recent hubub over Apple starting to allow

Will Sullivan

Oct 20, 2015

National Customer Service Week Is Over, but Our Work Is Not!

Get your customer personas right, and you will improve the customer experience (CX) for the rest of your audience. That’s advice Rick Parrish from Forrester Research gave in response to an audience question during the September 29 DigitalGov University webinar on the state of CX in the federal government. Your key customers are those that are most important to the organization, and often most

Karen Trebon

Oct 20, 2015

5 Factors to Building a Successful Government-wide Digital Analytics Program

Launched just three years ago, the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) continues to drive the 2012 Digital Government Strategy’s mission to improve the citizen experience by streamlining the collection and analysis of digital analytics data on a federal government-wide scale. The DAP officially launched on October 15, 2012 with a release of its first version of

Gwynne Kostin

Marina Fox

Oct 20, 2015

The Content Corner: Helping Your Content Contributors

Recently, I shared some suggestions and personal lessons learned for agencies either shopping for a new CMS or preparing to revamp their content strategy and workflow. Let’s take things one step further and focus on arguably the most important parts of your CMS: the content creator or user. Arguments can be made that content is the most

Tyrus Manuel

Oct 19, 2015

Open Source Micro-Purchasing: An Experiment in Federal Acquisition

18F is an open-source team. We currently have hundreds of publicly available repositories, with dozens under active development. We’ve had numerous contributions from colleagues within government, and contributions from members of the public. But in the next few weeks, we are going to run an experiment: we want to contract for contributions. And we want

Dave Zvenyach

Oct 16, 2015

Why Your User Experience Must Include Design for Accessibility

Too often, usability and accessibility are confused with each other by our clients (stakeholders). They shouldn’t be, because while they are related, they are very different. So, how do you bring these two concepts together? They should really be working side-by-side throughout the ENTIRE process. This might seem like a no-brainer but it can be

Justin Dopke

Oct 16, 2015

Gov Analytics Breakdown #1 – Browsers: Chrome Takes the Cake

We wanted to take a look at overall browser usage now that DAP has a few years of data, and the changes tell an interesting story. Here’s a breakdown of the percent of total sessions of the top five browsers during the last three years.

Tim Lowden

Oct 15, 2015

Learn about the Fight Against Transnational Crime with INTERPOL Washington

INTERPOL Washington—What is it? It’s a movie. It’s the latest spy novel…No, it’s a mobile app from INTERPOL Washington, a component of the U.S. Department of Justice. INTERPOL Washington, the United States National Central Bureau, serves as the designated representative to the International Criminal Police Organization

Nirmala Ramprasad

Oct 15, 2015

Income Scams Are Subject of New FTC Fotonovela

The FTC’s second Spanish-language fotonovela is about scams that promise you can make money selling high-end products or brand-name merchandise. If the pitch sounds familiar, that’s because the story is based on facts from a recent [Federal Trade Commission] FTC lawsuit against a

Alvaro Puig

Oct 14, 2015

Challenge.gov Honors Federal Agencies, Staff for Raising the Bar on Public Sector Prize Competitions

The biggest advocates for the use of challenges in the public sector gathered at the General Services Administration (GSA) headquarters, October 8, to acknowledge the remarkable rise of a community that has grown steadily in number and influence over the past five years. More than 300 federal employees representing agencies spanning government attended in person

Eric Beidel

Oct 13, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Is Crowdsourcing the Future of Mobile Design and Development?

NASA recently announced the winners of a smartwatch app interface competition. A Canadian duo won the design competition, and NASA’s plan is to build the app with 2016 funding to have it available for astronauts to use when they are aboard the International Space Station. This is the first government smartwatch app development we’ve talked about

Jacob Parcell

Oct 13, 2015

How Agencies Can Support Employee Professional Development

Providing professional development for over 100,000 employees is no easy task. To build on the existing skills of their workforce, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has piloted AgOpportunity, a program that matches USDA employees with projects that need their skills and interest. The idea for AgOpportunity came from the Partnership for Public Service’s Excellence

Ashley Wichman

Oct 09, 2015

White House Kicks Off Challenge.gov Anniversary with Wealth of New Prize Competitions

In a call to action issued Oct. 7, the White House announced several new programs challenging citizens to help federal agencies solve problems in areas ranging from space exploration to education. Hosted in conjunction with Georgetown University, the Case Foundation and the Joyce Foundation, the event

Eric Beidel

Oct 08, 2015

National Cancer Institute’s Smokefree Tools

The National Cancer Institute has developed a triple threat to help users stop smoking for good with an app, responsively-designed website, and SMS program to help lead the way to a healthier life.

Jennifer Johnson

Oct 08, 2015

Is Your Agency Winning Its Mobile Moments?

Someone has a problem they are trying to solve. They pull out their mobile device and find a solution. They move onto something else. That’s a mobile moment. Organizations are living and dying by their mobile moments, and a few government agencies are winning theirs. We’ve written before how the Transportation Security Administration is winning

Jacob Parcell

Oct 07, 2015

The Data Briefing: White House Asks Data Scientists and App Developers to Help Suicide Prevention Efforts

This article describes some of the data sources that could be leveraged for building data analysis and apps to aid in the suicide prevention effort.

Bill Brantley

Oct 07, 2015

The People and Teams That Power High-Impact Incentive Prizes

Federal agencies have used prize competitions and challenges to drive competition and spark innovation for nearly a decade. In September 2010, as part of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation [PDF], the Administration launched Challenge.gov, an online platform that enables federal agencies to engage civic

Jenn Gustetic

Kelly Olson

Oct 06, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Rise of Apps, The Decline of TV

Move over, 60 inch widescreens—for the first time ever, U.S. consumers are spending more time in mobile apps than on TV. An article from Flurry Insights, the blog for Yahoo’s mobile analytics service, covered the recent viewing trends. Apps are now the top media channel in the United States: on average, people spend 198 minutes on

Ashley Wichman

Oct 06, 2015

The Content Corner: Content Management System Considerations

These days you couldn’t be faulted for thinking your content management system (CMS) choices are limited to two open source systems and maybe an enterprise-level offering that no one uses anymore. And while it’s true that for the public sector the popular open source options are extremely attractive from a cost standpoint, if nothing else,

Tyrus Manuel

Oct 05, 2015

At the Peace Corps, we continually try to find new ways to test, measure and optimize our marketing and communications initiatives. Recently, we embarked on a project to design a framework to test and optimize content on the social media platforms we use to engage our stakeholders. This process required us to reboot our expectations in terms of

Chris Rottler

Oct 02, 2015