Blogs

Cook-offs, bike rides, parades and dance parties—these are not the traditional public hearing-style events for which government agencies are known. But these events helped to fuel the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Rebuild by Design Challenge (PDF, 484 KB, 1 page, January 2016), boosting the collective morale among a complex, multidisciplinary network of engaged

Agile methods help agencies deliver projects and products more efficiently and effectively. The benefits aren’t limited to deliverables: Going agile can break down the silos that exist between and within agencies. And collaboration doesn’t need to end at the federal level—agile projects done in the open provide a way for the public to contribute to

Following the recent OMB memo that all publicly available federal websites and Web services must implement HTTPS by December 31, 2016, Web content managers across government are considering the SEO (search engine optimization) implications of the transition, among other details.

Journey maps are a visual representation of a customer’s end to end journey with your product or service. They are a powerful tool for exploring key interactions and experiences with your organization, programs, and/or services. Journey maps describe a customer’s entire journey, even the parts that occur before and after contact with your organization. They

Ahhh … Summer is here at last! It’s time for relaxing vacation! Whether you want to scale the peaks of Mount Everest, scuba dive in the Great Barrier Reef, ride a camel in the deserts of Mongolia, or shop in Paris—it is time for a travel app.

Driving visitors to a destination means reaching your users where they are at. In 2005, as part of the greater USA.gov marketing strategy, GobiernoUSA.gov launched an email program. These communications initially took the form of short blurbs that directed people to important site content and promoted other government information hosted by various federal agencies. From

Personas are a tool that organizations can use to learn more about their users. They are used to learn as much as you can about end users in order to better the product or service you provide.

The verdict is in. Placeholder text is harmful in search boxes. Searchers are on your site to complete a task. Having placeholder text inside a search box distracts from the task and it reduces the usability and accessibility of the search box. Placeholders look simple, but are in fact very tricky to use. When people

Building off the great discussion started around Customer Experience, we’re looking at the difference between User Acceptance Testing and Usability Testing.

“User Experience” and “Customer Experience.” They sound pretty similar, right? Well, here at the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, we look at it like this: User Experience (UX) deals with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate,

Making Web content and video accessible to people with disabilities is the law. Ensuring a video is accessible requires planning. Taking steps from day one will save you time and money. To verify that a video is accessible you’d need to incorporate three elements: Captioning Audio descriptions An Accessible video player Why Accessibility Matters Many government

When you watch a video on your computer, the window that displays your video is called a “video player.” It usually has start, pause, and other buttons. You might not be aware that you’re using a player at all—you just watch your video. A fully-accessible video player (e.g. Section 508-compliant)

An audio description is an additional audio track that describes and gives context for essential visual information, making videos and multimedia accessible to people who have low vision (very poor vision), or who are blind.

What are Captions? In a video, captions collect all audio information and describe them using text. They include not only spoken content but also non-speech information such as sound effects, music, laughter, and speaker identification and location (for example, audio spoken off-screen). Captions appear transposed over the visual elements in

If you plan for accessibility when creating and posting media, you can create a rich, interactive community where users can get important government information from your agency’s official website or blog and dialogue with government.

The Social Security Administration recently announced their new optimized mobile website which is compatible with Android, Blackberry, iPhone, and Windows devices. The mobile website offers a user-friendly, tabular, icon-driven navigation, which makes it very easy to find information anytime, anywhere.

In October 2012, comScore, a Web analytics research company, released an independently produced report that analyzes 75 federal agency websites on a range of quantitative and qualitative factors.

No information is more critical to your work than the numbers that reveal what’s happening, how you’re performing, and opportunities to do better. GovTech provides ten tips for getting the most from your data visualizations.