We’re celebrating the release of our new benefits experience on USA.gov and USAGov en Español. It features a redesigned benefit finder tool, offering a more streamlined way to find government benefits for health care, housing, food, unemployment, and more.
This major update came as a result of the closing of Benefits.gov, SSABest.Benefits.gov, and GovLoans.gov. It transitions the role of the government’s one-stop shop for federal benefits information to the USAGov program.
From Benefits.gov to USAGov
To deliver this new experience, we assembled a product team made up of functional leads, including product managers, user research and experience specialists, content strategists, and developers. The leads worked with their individual teams to:
- Conduct an exhaustive content audit of Benefits.gov
- Study data from both Benefits.gov and our own websites to prioritize topics and federal benefit programs people need most
- Combine newly-created materials based on Benefits.gov content with existing content from USA.gov and USAGov en Español
- Implement a comprehensive redirect plan to guide traffic and map over 1,500 Benefits.gov pages in English and Spanish to the corresponding information on USA.gov and USAGov en Español
- Develop a new look and expanded functionality for the benefit finder
Testing our work and making improvements
As we enhanced our benefits content, we conducted comparative usability testing. We asked participants to complete tasks on both Benefits.gov and our redesigned benefits pages. This direct user feedback helped us iteratively improve our wording, topic order, content structure, and more. We also added a category filter to the benefit finder to streamline information by specific types to help users find benefits more quickly.
As people are discovering the benefit finder and other federal benefits information on USAGov’s websites, our work continues. We’re studying user data and investigating ideas to help us further expand and personalize the way we connect people with the benefits they need.
