Analytics

The Content Corner: Determining Your User’s Needs

I recently wrapped up a series of user interviews as part of a review of our judiciary-wide intranet in order to provide better digital services to our customers (and yes, our internal users are our customers, not just the general public).

Tyrus Manuel

Jul 20, 2015

Dwarf Planet, Giant Numbers: NASA’s Mission to Pluto Goes Global

Even on a slow day, NASA is a pretty cool place to work, but the cool factor gets cranked way up when the whole world joins in the adventure. That’s what happened this week when the New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto after decade-long, three-billion-mile journey through the solar system.

Jim Wilson

Jul 16, 2015

What’s in a Name? “Communities” in the Public and Private Sectors

Many of you are part of a government community. We lead a few of them here, and new ones are forming all the time. In fact, as I was writing this article, I stumbled upon a community for government Drupal users. A co-worker recently asked me for research on communities because she is trying to

Karen Trebon

Jul 15, 2015

Analytics Prove People Care About Space (and Pluto!)

Despite the fact that Pluto has been downgraded to a “dwarf planet”, the analytics of federal government websites prove there are still a lot of people who want to get an up-close look. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, a project over nine years in the making, flew by Pluto this morning at approximately 7:49 a.m. The

Tim Lowden

Jul 14, 2015

2015 Customer Service Trends: a Mid-Year Update

Earlier this year, we published 15 Government Customer Service Trends for 2015. We’re halfway through the year now—how are these trends holding up? 1. Centralized Customer Offices A few agencies have created centralized customer offices, while others question the need for a single organization that focuses on the customer. As the public’s overall satisfaction with

Martha Dorris

Jul 08, 2015

DigitalGov Podcast: DAP Delivers Data for 4,000 Websites

You cannot improve your digital outreach without data. Since 2012, the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) has provided agencies the critical information and metrics that they need to make their public-facing websites better.

Ashley Wichman

Jun 29, 2015

As with any communications effort, the social media bottom line comes down to impact. Can you prove that the time, money and effort put into social media helped achieve your agency’s goals? In a world obsessed with big data, it’s tempting to track every detail simply because you can. With more data comes more confusion

Katie Gresham

Jun 29, 2015

The API Briefing: the Challenge of Government’s Dark Data

By now, you are familiar with “big data” or datasets that are so large that they cannot be analyzed by conventional analytical methods. You may have heard of “long data” which is data that has a temporal context. I work with long data when I analyze hiring patterns over time in workforce data. There is

Bill Brantley

Jun 17, 2015

The Content Corner: Creating Engaging Content with Data

Over the last several years, continuing advances in computer processing power and storage have brought about the growth of what some call big data. Mobile and wearable devices now also generate large amounts of data via our

Tyrus Manuel

Jun 15, 2015

DigitalGov Citizen Services Summit: Reflections from Our Livestream Host, and Full Recording Now Available!

The second annual DigitalGov Citizen Services Summit was held at GSA headquarters in Washington, DC on May 21, 2015.

Bernetta Reese

Jun 12, 2015

#SocialGov Round Up 2015

The SocialGov Community is coming up on three years of hard work and pushing the boundaries on using social tools across the federal government. I’d like to start this round up by taking a look at the event we hosted last year, State of the #SocialGov 2014: 2 Years of Smashing Silos + Elevating Citizen

Alycia Piazza

Jun 08, 2015

Taking the Pulse of the Federal Government’s Web Presence

The U.S. federal government is launching a new project to monitor how it’s doing at best practices on the Web.

Jun 03, 2015

USA.gov in Beta: Tell Us What You Think

Thirteen years in digital is an eon, and on the eve of its 13th birthday, we at USA.gov found ourselves reckoning with a mid-life crisis. In the thirteen years since Firstgov.gov was launched (and ten years for FirstGov en Español), the sheer volume and sophistication

Sarah Crane

May 04, 2015

Mobile-Friendly Park Websites on NPS.gov

Park websites on NPS.gov from A (Acadia) to Z (Zion) are now mobile-friendly. Visitors using phones and tablets to visit national park websites now have a user-friendly experience to enhance their virtual visits. Previously, visitors using mobile devices saw a smaller version of the website scaled to

Todd Edgar

Apr 30, 2015

Social media tools can amplify your agency’s message, but they are also a meeting space for two-way conversations. They can be a key tool to resolve user issues and deliver excellent customer service. This is true for agencies in every corner of the government space. In honor of our monthly contact center theme, we reached

Ashley Wichman

Apr 24, 2015

Using a Hypothesis-Driven Approach in Analyzing (and Making Sense) of Your Website Traffic Data

At the Digital Analytics Program (DAP), some of the most frequently asked questions we get are “how can I get access to the DAP data?” and “what do I do with all this data?” We all know that data is knowledge, and knowledge is power, but once we have access to it and realize that

Marina Fox

Apr 16, 2015

Updated: Live Blogging the Analytics Dashboard on #TaxDay

2 a.m. EDT, April 16 Looks like the traffic peak for #TaxDay was around 3:00 pm when 194,301 people were on government sites. We’re now less than one-quarter of that traffic, and the more regular patterns of top sites are reasserting themselves. We’re talking about YOU, NASA astronomy picture of the day and that wonderful

Ashley Wichman

Apr 14, 2015

DigitalGov has seen posts from members of the community who land on opposite sides regarding social sharing buttons. There are those who find social sharing buttons useful (When Sharing Buttons

Sara Smith

Apr 14, 2015

Multiple Languages, Single Platforms: the World Digital Library

Multilingual does not always mean multiple accounts or websites. Increasingly, multilingual content is delivered in an integrated way, with two (or more!) languages delivered on the same website, app, or social media platform. The World Digital Library (WDL) is one example of how multiple languages can be incorporated on single platforms. The WDL is a

Ashley Wichman

Apr 09, 2015

Part of my job as an analyst on the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) team is to help agency users try to make sense of digital analytics data by using web analytics tools. I

Tim Lowden

Apr 07, 2015

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