News and Updates

The Content Corner: Optimize Your Content

For the past several weeks, I have been writing about fairly cerebral and more technical aspects of content generation and language in general. This week, I felt it was time to get back to a more basic content concept: content optimization. Frequently when content optimization is discussed it is heavily focused on search engine optimization

Tyrus Manuel

Aug 31, 2015

DigitalGov Summit Recap: Building Privacy & Identity Management in the Open

How can government protect citizens while delivering the services they demand in the modern age? This was a theme of the panel discussion on privacy and identity management at the 2015 DigitalGov Citizen Services Summit.

Andrea Sigritz

Aug 28, 2015

Rebuild Healthy Homes from HUD

We all know it is virtually impossible to prevent natural phenomena such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis etc., and we cannot easily avoid these inevitable geological and climatic incidences, as they are typically unpredictable and occur swiftly.

Nirmala Ramprasad

Aug 27, 2015

HUD’s Switchboard Puts Customer Experience and Customer Service Together

Customer experience is about making sure needs are met. It’s certainly not a new concept for business; every bookstore has a customer service section. Government agencies are slightly different though. Often people are driven to public services by need or regulation, not choice. Government traditionally didn’t need to court positive attention. The increasing prominence of

Zachary Lerner

Aug 27, 2015

Analytics Pitfall: Avoid this Common Implementation Mistake

In large agencies, lots of Web teams touch digital analytics in one way or another, and we have had the pleasure of working with teams both within and outside our agency. For us, hearing from a diverse set of perspectives has been a great learning experience. However, over the course of many meetings, we have

HHS Digital Analytics Team

Aug 26, 2015

DigitalGov Summit Recap: The Need for Change Agents, plus the Internet of Everything, from A to Z

The Internet of Things is already here. How will we prepare for the Internet of Everything?

Ashley Wichman

Aug 26, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: Web Standards Advocate Advises Adaptive Web Design for Government Sites

This August, Aaron Gustafson, Web Standards Advocate at Microsoft, industry thought leader and speaker, and an author who wrote a leading book on adaptive web design, spoke to the government tech community at the U.S. General Services Administration

Will Sullivan

Aug 25, 2015

The Central Intelligence Agency launched their Twitter account with the second most retweeted inaugural post in the platform’s history.

Justin Herman

Aug 25, 2015

The Content Corner: Modular Design and Structured Content

Several months ago I discussed the concept of a world without Web pages and the importance of structured content and thinking about content, not pages. This week, I’m taking that discussion further by discussing the importance of modularity in Web design and how that complements our efforts to create more structured and reusable data. Break

Tyrus Manuel

Aug 24, 2015

National Customer Service Week: Coming Soon!

Help us celebrate the Everyday Heroes in our agencies during Customer Service Week, October 5-9, 2015. In 1992, Congress passed Public Law No: 102-481, which proclaimed the first full week in October as National Customer Service Week. The Principles and Practices Subgroup of the Customer Service Cross Agency Priority (CAP) Goal has started work on

Alison Sturgeon

Aug 24, 2015

Agile Strategy Implementation

The Challenge Much like GSA experienced three years ago, the Management Information Systems Office (MISO) organization at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had a vision, a crazy deadline, and the need to change and change fast. MISO is responsible for developing, maintaining, and managing a variety of enterprise business systems across the CDC.

Suzi Connor

Aug 21, 2015

Three New Mobile Apps Honor Fallen Veterans Overseas

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) released three new mobile apps this summer to honor fallen veterans in overseas cemeteries in Belgium, France, and Italy.

Aug 20, 2015

Facts on the Federal-Compatible Terms of Service Agreement for Yelp

We’ve been excited to see the outpouring of interest this week in response to Yelp’s decision to amend their terms of service for official government use, a clear message that citizens want more ways to ensure their voices are heard by the public programs that serve them. Yelp is just one of dozens of platforms

Justin Herman

Aug 20, 2015

FSA: Using a Data-Driven Marketing Campaign to Inform Your Audience

For millions of Americans, federal student loans have made it possible to get a college education. For many, moving forward after college can become an overwhelming challenge. In 2014, the Department of Education had 41 million borrowers and a loan

Kendrick Daniel

Aug 19, 2015

Trends on Tuesday: The Rise in “Mobile Addicts”

Yahoo’s mobile analytics division, Flurry, released an interesting report, in July, comparing mobile usage among three distinct types of users around the world based on how frequently they launch mobile applications each day: Regular Users, Super Users and Mobile Addicts. According to Flurry, of

Will Sullivan

Aug 18, 2015

Services Mean Success for Federal Challenges

Challenge.gov offers a number of services to help agencies create successful competitions. One challenge that recently wrapped up made use of the full range of these services to come up with some creative, useful apps that have nationwide implications. Presidential

Judy Romano

Aug 18, 2015

The Content Corner: Using Natural Language Processing to Improve Rulemaking

For the past several weeks, I have been inflicting you with my recent dive down the rabbit hole of natural language generation and the larger discipline of natural language algorithms. Most of the focus has been on the power of natural language generation and how it can help you rapidly produce content on a wide

Tyrus Manuel

Aug 17, 2015

Secure Central Hosting for the Digital Analytics Program

The U.S. government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP) collects Web traffic and analytics data from across the federal government.

Eric Mill

Aug 14, 2015

What Is Mobile Device Compatibility Testing?

In most instances, your hardware and software are developed independently but are expected to function properly together. For example, when a Web application is developed in HTML, it is expected to function properly on an Apple computer using Safari as well as a Windows computer using Internet Explorer. This sounds simple, but there are thousands

David Fern

Aug 14, 2015

Federal Student Aid Customer Experience Journey: A Recap

Customer Experience (CX) deserves a voice at an agency’s senior levels. Putting CX

Zachary Lerner

Aug 14, 2015