Blogs

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has two apps that can help citizens learn about their housing rights, locate housing counselors and file housing discrimination complaints. The HUD Counselor Locator App allows smartphone and tablet users to locate housing counselors in their own area

One way to leverage Twitter, beyond the basics of sending messages and engaging in dialogue, is to organize a Town Hall discussion, or Twitter chat. New guidance on preparing a live chat is now available, and we need your agencies to contribute your own policies

Cloud Computing enables convenient, on-demand access to, and rapid deployment of, shared computing resources such as networks, servers, storage, applications, and services. Plan What is the Cloud? Is Cloud Computing for you? What types of services does Cloud Computing support? Types of Cloud environments Implement Learn steps to acquire, manage, and secure your agency

A Twitter town hall, or Twitter chat, is an event where agencies invite public engagement for a scheduled time period during which users can ask questions or find out more information about a topic via Twitter, much like a webinar. The questions are tagged

Mobile First is the idea that web sites should first be designed for mobile devices, including only those tasks/items that website visitors use most. Then as screen real estate increases, add in tasks/features as needed based on user priority. This means the site

(This is the second installment of an ongoing series charting the programs, events and people that make the emerging field of social media and data in government From where I sit, I think we just had a great week in #socialgov. From a sold-out international forum that demonstrated how we can use free tools to

In our very first customer experience (CX) blog post about GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies’ (OCSIT) Customer Experience Program, we published our principles and values. Our core principles say that all staff will: Take responsibility for providing an experience greater than customer expectations. Engage, listen and resolve. Design business from the outside

The Library of Congress recently released The U.S. Constitution: Analysis and Interpretation app, an iOS version of the “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation.” This is a comprehensive analytical legal treatise prepared by attorneys

A few days ago a coworker asked me to look at a paragraph. He said it was on the top customer service priorities in our division. So I scooted my chair over and looked at it. Then I looked at him and asked, “But what

Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project recently released their report on Cell Phone Activities for 2013. The report stated

As non-lawyers peering into the legal world, be advised this post is not official legal advice from the Office of General Counsel. These are our impressions and what we took away from the Legal Learning Series session Social Media – Privacy, Records and Litigation.

Content refers to the various types of material in different formats, such as text, images and video, that provide information to the user (it also fits into a mobile product’s information architecture).

Guest post by Cheryl Hackley who works in the Office of Public Affairs at the Federal Trade Commission. From my early days of using email, sites like MySpace, and later getting my first smartphone, it was a common practice for me to

As mentioned in previous blog posts, great efforts have been made in creating a Customer Experience program and a Customer Experience (CX) index in our Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OCSIT) at GSA.

The National Science Foundation’s National Science Board has developed Science and Engineering Indicators for iPad. The application provides full content of the Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) 2012 report –the latest edition available. From NSF, The biennial SEI report is a comprehensive source of high-quality, quantitative

(This is the first installment of an ongoing series charting the programs, events and people that make the emerging field of social media and data in government an exciting place to serve the public. Agencies are encouraged to submit their own stories for this travelogue of digital innovation.) From where I sit, I think we

How We Did It Last November, as part of revisiting the state of Mobile Gov, government mobile innovators identified a need for guidelines to help create amazing and engaging mobile user experiences. We convened a group to workshop around elements of mobile user experience with the

Mobile searching has become a fact of life. According to a recent study by Econsultancy, 67% of smartphone owners had used their device to search for information in the past 7 days. The infographic below describes what they are searching for–the majority of searches are for

On Feb. 15, 2013, a meteor weighing 10,000 metric tons exploded 14 miles above Chelyabinsk, Russia. Users flocked to NASA.gov for info, and we spiked to nearly 12 million page views that day, ~16 times the daily average. Our real-time analytics showed over 300,000 active visitors

I’m the kind of guy who loves tests. Not SATs, or BMI tests, but usability tests: connecting target customers with a government website and watching how they interact with it. Our DigitalGov User Experience Program (formerly known as First Fridays) has taught dozens of agencies how to conduct