To Build Trust, Aim for Easy
Trust is earned through consistency and commitment. Build sites that build trust by considering user needs, respecting people’s time, and avoiding customer experience pitfalls.
Usability
Resources on Usability
Usability Testing with Steve Krug —Get started making usability fixes to your website or product.
Department of Homeland Security: Usability Testing Kit —A resource with four approaches to help federal employees perform usability testing.
18F Methods —A collection of tools that describe how teams can put human-centered design into practice.
Usability Starter Kit —Here are some tools and templates to help you create better user experiences.
Fueleconomy.gov – Extended Case Study —Like any valid business decision, User Experience work should produce results and demonstrable impact. To see a list of screenshots from …
Government Usability Case Studies —This list of government usability case studies shows how government sites, mobile apps and other products become more effective, more …
Join a Community of Practice
Web Analytics and Optimization —Brings together government analytics practitioners to make better decisions using web analytics and other optimization strategies.
News and Events on Usability
59 posts
Accessibility Testing for onrr.gov
How do you make sure a website is accessible? This blog post outlines the four steps the Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR - pronounced like "honor") at the U.S. Department of the Interior took to verify accessibility. — via DOI Revenue Data
User Research
Managing Stakeholder Feedback: Lessons from Experience
During the 2022 Plain Language Summit, Stephanie Morrison from the Department of Health and Human Services provided five tips for managing reviewers when asking for feedback.
DHS Usability Testing Kit
Usability testing is a way to learn how easy or difficult it is for people to use something by observing them actually using it. The resources provided in this kit can help you systematize the process, produce reliable findings, and generally expand your ability to test service materials (i.e., paper and digital forms, mobile applications, web pages, etc.) thoroughly with real users — before you launch them out into the world.
USWDS
Webinar Recap: U.S. Web Design System October 2021 Monthly Call
In this recap of the October 2021 U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) Monthly Call, the USWDS team shares how their community can help teams solve problems together, and what tools and channels we can use to ask questions, get answers, and provide useful feedback.
USWDS
Webinar Recap: U.S. Web Design System September 2021 Monthly Call
For our September call, we focused on the future of the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS): Where does the design system go from USWDS 2.0? What did we learn from our 1.0 and 2.0 releases? Read key points and takeaways from this month’s presentation.
User Experience
Building a Bureau-Wide Usability Collaboration Group: Lessons Learned from the U.S. Geological Survey
Learn about the U.S. Geological Survey’s Usability Collaboration Area in this short interview with the group’s organizer.
Research
Involving End Users at All Stages To Create Actionable Science Products for Complex, Real-World Issues
How co-production methods increase the usefulness of scientific results, products, and tools
User Experience
A User-Centered Approach: Simplicity and Complexity in a Homepage Graphic
A User-Centered Approach: Simplicity and Complexity in a Homepage Graphic—UX interns go through the redesign and testing process of a homepage graphic to communicate the scope the site.
A/B Testing
How To Navigate Challenges to Successfully A/B Test Your Emails
The article will go over some best practices of implementing A/B testing on your emails.
Metrics
Zero Pageviews Is Your Goal: Finding Problem Pages with Website Analytics
Improve customer experience by turning your website analytics upside down to track the numbers for pages you DON’T want visitors to see.
