18F

News and Events on 18F

123 posts

Informing the Future of the Federal Front Door

In our last post, we introduced the Federal Front Door project and briefly described a six-week discovery phase, in which we set out to better understand how the general public feels about and interacts with the federal government, so that we can design and build products that improve people’s experience across government agencies. We think

Posts by Colin MacArthur Posts by Carolyn Dew Posts by Michelle Chronister Posts by John Yuda

Mar 01, 2016

Analytics.usa.gov: Now with Agency-Specific Dashboards

We’ve added agency-specific dashboards to analytics.usa.gov!

Posts by Tim Lowden Posts by Gray Brooks Posts by Gabriel Ramirez Posts by Eric Mill Posts by Julia Winn Posts by Colin Craig

Feb 18, 2016

Why People Contribute to Federal Tech Projects (And How You Can Provide a Good Experience)

Author’s note: Anyone can contribute to the development of the Open Opportunities platform via the project’s GitHub repository. The Open Opportunities program itself is only open to federal employees. Open, agile software development projects can improve government initiatives. As discussed in last week’s article on agile projects in government, the Open Opportunities platform has benefited

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jan 14, 2016

Tips for Adapting analytics.usa.gov from Tennessee, Boulder, and Philadelphia

When we launched analytics.usa.gov with the Digital Analytics Program, the U.S. Digital Service, and the White House last March, we purposefully made it very easy to adapt and wrote language on the website to let people know they could use the code without restriction: This open source project is in the public domain, which means

Posts by Melody Kramer

Jan 07, 2016

How Agile Development Can Benefit Federal Projects

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

Posts by Ashley Wichman

Jan 04, 2016

18F Reflects on Their Most Meaningful Projects in 2015

2015 was a big year for 18F. We almost doubled in size, worked with 28 different agency partners, and released products ranging from Design Method Cards to cloud.gov. Internally, we improved onboarding and our documentation by releasing guides on topics as diverse as content, accessibility, and creating good open source projects. To mark the end

Posts by Melody Kramer

Dec 29, 2015

Good Content Needs Plain Language

If good content is essential to good user experience, as Tyrus Manuel proposes in his November 23, 2015, DigitalGov post, then plain language is also part of good user experience. Plain language helps the public do what they need to do—find forms, apply for benefits, look up information and more—when they use federal websites and other

Posts by Cynthia Baur

Dec 23, 2015

The EPA’s New Environmental Digital Services Marketplace

Over the past year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has undertaken a broad initiative to transform the way it delivers digital services. We’ve been working hand-in-hand with the EPA to make this transformation a success by supporting such programs as eManifest. Working with 18F

Posts by Chris Cairns

Dec 07, 2015

Analytics.usa.gov: New Features and More Data

As of writing this post, 25,225 of the 124,878 total visitors on federal government websites participating in the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) are NOT located in the United States. And as a result of

Posts by Tim Lowden Posts by Gray Brooks Posts by Eric Mill Posts by Julia Winn Posts by Gabriel Ramirez

Dec 01, 2015

UX vs. CX: What’s the Dif? Part 2

In honor of World Usability Day, which happened on November 12, we’d like to demystify two extremely important and oft-confusing acronyms—CX and UX. Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX), while related, focus on different aspects of service delivery.

Posts by Rachel Flagg

Nov 20, 2015

New Playbook Details What It’s Like to Work with 18F Delivery

If you or your agency have thought about working with 18F but are unsure of how we work with our partners, we have a new set of guidelines to help you out. The 18F Delivery Partner Playbook is specifically targeted at federal offices interested in working with 18F to build digital services. The playbook is

Posts by Will Slack

Nov 20, 2015

GSA.gov Refreshed with Eye Toward Mobile Users

GSA unveiled a refreshed GSA.gov website yesterday with a more crisp design layout, improved usability, and features geared more toward mobile users. Increasingly, website traffic is coming from mobile users. With this in mind, GSA unveiled a newly refreshed GSA.gov website on Nov. 16. “Our ultimate goal for the refresh

Posts by Jeff Woodworth

Nov 17, 2015

Welcome to BetaFEC: Campaign Finance for Everyone

As the 2016 presidential election heats up, here at 18F we’ve been working with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to make campaign finance data more accessible to the public. Today, we launched betaFEC, the first piece in a complete redesign of the FEC’s online

Posts by Emileigh Barnes

Oct 30, 2015

New Website. New Farmers.

USDA has been looking for ways to improve content delivery to our customers and making their first interaction with USDA and government a positive one. In 2014, USDA launched New Farmers, a website dedicated to helping new and beginning farmers and ranchers find the resources

Posts by Peter Rhee

Oct 30, 2015

5 Factors to Building a Successful Government-wide Digital Analytics Program

Launched just three years ago, the Digital Analytics Program (DAP) continues to drive the 2012 Digital Government Strategy’s mission to improve the citizen experience by streamlining the collection and analysis of digital analytics data on a federal government-wide scale. The DAP officially launched on October 15, 2012 with a release of its first version of

Posts by Gwynne Kostin Posts by Marina Fox

Oct 20, 2015

Open Source Micro-Purchasing: An Experiment in Federal Acquisition

18F is an open-source team. We currently have hundreds of publicly available repositories, with dozens under active development. We’ve had numerous contributions from colleagues within government, and contributions from members of the public. But in the next few weeks, we are going to run an experiment: we want to contract for contributions. And we want

Posts by Dave Zvenyach

Oct 16, 2015

Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards

Joanne is a young Army Veteran who is looking to make use of her GI Bill Benefits and apply for federal student loans to attend college. In trying to access the federal programs which will allow her to afford college, Joanne must navigate the websites of multiple agencies. She finds dozens of government websites which

Posts by Mollie Ruskin Posts by Carolyn Dew Posts by Maya Benari Posts by Colin MacArthur

Sep 28, 2015

How a Two-Day Sprint Moved an Agency Twenty Years Forward

At 18F Consulting, we experiment with ways to empower agencies to build cost-efficient, excellent digital solutions. Recently we partnered with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to run a two day “Design/Dev Agile Sprint.” Background: Investigators in Wage and Hour Division The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division is responsible for

Posts by Jesse Taggert

Sep 21, 2015

Under the Hood: Building a New College Scorecard with Students

How the U.S. Digital Service worked with students, families, schools, developers, and teams across the federal government to rebuild the new College Scorecard tool.

Posts by Lisa Gelobter

Sep 18, 2015

Announcing the Agile BPA Awards: A Conversation About the Process

In January, 18F Consulting announced a new kind of process for vendors to compete for software acquisition contracts. The Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) process would be open to existing vendors on Schedule 70, and require vendors to submit a working prototype based on a public dataset—and then show their work in a publicly available

Posts by Dave Zvenyach Posts by Kathryn Edelman Posts by Chris Cairns Posts by Melody Kramer

Sep 01, 2015

• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7