News and Updates

Innovative work, news, and ideas from people and teams in government

Write for us
Tablet ownership continues to rise, 44% of Americans now owning one, according to Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) December 2013 estimates. Other interesting findings include: Exactly half of American adults now own either a tablet or an e-reader. 7 in 10 online consumers expect
Mar 11, 2014

We Love it When a Plan Comes Together…

Federal agencies are currently hard at work developing revised Open Government Plans—blueprints that are published every two years, highlighting agency progress towards making their work more transparent, participatory, and collaborative, and outlining new open government commitments going forward. This iterative, biennial process grew out of the December 2009 Open Government
Mar 10, 2014

Open Payments Apps Help Healthcare Professionals Track Reporting On The Go

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is bringing lots of change to the traditional healthcare landscape as practitioners and healthcare companies gear up for an influx of patient demand. There are also changes to the way healthcare companies and doctors will track and report reimbursements. And not only is the healthcare changing but also are the
Mar 06, 2014

GitHub for Government Recap

As the definition of “developer” has grown and expanded, GitHub has become a place where anyone can do simple collaboration. It’s a free social network that tracks changes to any data, not just code, where stakeholders and developers can work on the same data simultaneously. Project Open Data, a cross-agency initiative developed by the White House,
Mar 05, 2014

DigitalGov Search: Cache Me If You Can

Slowness Hurts Web Pages Have you ever been frustrated when visiting a Web page that doesn’t load quickly? Have you ever left a slow Web page before it finished loading? You’re not alone. Several recent studies have quantified customers’ frustration with slow Web pages. Customers now expect results in the
Mar 03, 2014

Mobile Code Sharing Catalog Snippet: BioZen

Interested in building an app that incorporates biofeedback data from multiple wearable body sensors? Check out BioZen, available on the Mobile Code Sharing Catalog, one of the first mobile applications to provide users with live biofeedback
Feb 28, 2014

Mobile Tester: Usability Short Reads: Learning from others’ mistakes

Over the last 18 months, the intrepid Mobile Gov team has worked with you to prioritize a set of guidelines and recommendations for good mobile user experience; categories are ranked by priority and tagged by user experience concepts such as information architecture, content, functionality, design, trustworthiness, and user context. The primary purpose of this set is
Feb 28, 2014

DigitalGov Search is Now Responsive

We’ve redesigned our mobile search results page. It now uses a card-based design and is responsive. This design gives searchers a more consistent user experience and access to the results anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Take a sneak peek of the new responsive results page.
Feb 27, 2014

Finding Inspiration Through Design Constraints

If you could only communicate through a business-card sized screen, what would you say and how would you say it? In which ways could people respond to your message? These are some of the questions constraints lead us to ask, and the reason why constraints are so great
Feb 27, 2014

Department of Education goes responsive (again) with FSA’s new Financial Aid Toolkit

Money for college? It’s never too early — or too late, for that matter — to start schooling oneself in the possibilities of federal financial aid. Following in the footsteps of their StudentAid.gov website, the digital team at Ed.gov’s Federal Student Aid (FSA) closed out 2013 with the launch of FinancialAidToolkit.ed.gov, a “sister” site featuring
Feb 26, 2014

Open for Innovation in DigitalGov!

There’s tons of great work and innovations happening in federal agencies, and it is happening fast. From mobile, to social, to user experience, to APIs, to data and codesharing, agencies are embracing the 21st century citizen expectations and working to deliver anytime, anywhere, any device services and
Feb 26, 2014

Welcome to the Future of Census.gov

If you have ever visited census.gov, you know that sorting through the vast array of information about America’s people, places and economy can be daunting. Based on customer research and feedback we collected and analyzed over time, we heard loud and clear
Feb 24, 2014