The Public Experience (PX) Portfolio was busy this past year developing better ways to serve agency partners and connect people with their government.
We asked our teams to share the work they were most proud of in 2024:
“This past year, the PX Contact Center supported the Department of State during critical crises throughout the world, including Lebanon and Syria. The team swiftly established and optimized communication lines to provide timely support to those impacted. Whether coordinating updates to IVR messages for callers or standing up 24/7 hotlines and seamless workflows under urgent conditions, the contact center played a pivotal role in delivering efficient, empathetic service.” - PX Contact Center
“2024 was a big year for helping people find the government benefits they need. Following an extensive audit by our team of the former DOL website Benefits.gov, we created a streamlined experience on our USAGov sites to connect the public with the benefits they need. Through user experience research and usability testing, we enhanced our benefit finder tool, making it easier for users to filter by topic or answer a few questions to find important benefits they may be eligible for. Decommissioning Benefits.gov and transitioning into our websites saved taxpayers at least $4.4 million in agency contributions for the operation of Benefits.gov.” - Benefit Finder and Benefits.gov Transition Team
“We kept people connected with critical information before, during, and after Hurricanes Helene and Milton. We sent and amplified hundreds of messages to our over 2 million subscribers and followers on social media along with key safety and life-saving messaging from dozens of agency partners. The messaging, along with more than 540,000 visits to the USAGov hurricane-related pages in September and October, showed we engaged people with the information they needed precisely when they needed it.” - Outreach and Content
“Search.gov launched a new faceted search feature in beta and continued to provide a service to government agencies, saving money on their own search needs." - Search.gov
“We empowered people to recognize a scam and to know how to report it. Using visitor data and user tests, we rebuilt our where to report a scam wizard, adding step-by-step information to help people confidently stand up for themselves and get the government support they need to battle scammers. The tool aggregates information from across the government in one interactive space for people to take action--principles that are at the core of what USAGov does.” - USAGov
“We made some changes to the back end of USA.gov that made a big difference for users. For example, we added the USPS API to validate a user's address in the contact your elected officials tool. The USPS API lets us tell the user if the address they entered isn't valid and allows them to update it to get the accurate, personalized information they need instead of going into an error loop. This saves them time and frustration, and gives us an opportunity to experiment even more with APIs in 2025.” - Engineering
“This year we increased our focus on serving people from the disability community. We recruited people who use assistive technology to navigate government information online to take part in interview studies. The research confirmed that screen reader navigation requires clear website labeling, that videos and content that moves or refreshes hinder accessibility, and that using ARIA regions in coding helps people with assistive technologies understand the different parts of a website. This research and resulting website changes boosted our accessibility score to 96.1%. That exceeds the government accessibility benchmark by more than 8 points.” - User Experience and Accessibility
Keep following to see how we’re building on 2024’s accomplishments to serve agencies and people around the country in 2025!
