USA.gov Blog

We’ve wanted to try out artificial intelligence (AI) for a few years. We get tons of questions from the public, and wanted to see if automation could help us answer them quicker. We also knew that scams are one of the top tasks for our website and contact center audiences. In late 2018, we blended our exploration of AI and expertise in scams to launch our chatbot.

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires federal agencies to create products and information that give employees and members of the public with disabilities access that’s “comparable to the access available to others.” But 45 years in, many teams and organizations across government still struggle to meet this mandate.

After 15 years, GobiernoUSA.gov, the trusted source of government information in Spanish, begins a new era. As part of our fifteen year celebration, we are announcing our new name: USAGov en Español.

The outreach team has been partnering with federal agencies for years to share government information with the public. Recently, we launched our partnership toolkit to demonstrate exactly what our team does, show which agencies we’ve teamed up with in the past, and initiate conversations with potential new partners.

We scheduled an online workshop to discuss how to improve and reorganize our Military and Veterans section. We all were teleworking the day the event was planned, so it became a 100 percent virtual session – which ended up being remarkably successful! We wanted to share some of what we learned to be best practices.

The Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) at GSA is a two-year Pathways program for recent graduates to transition from college to a career in government. Each participant rotates through up to seven different offices within the agency, working closely with team members and learning about the work before being permanently placed. The program offers networking opportunities, in-depth trainings on technical and leadership skills, and previews a variety of career tracks.

Here are some key things I've learned while leading the outreach team — from sprint lengths and editorial calendars, to meeting overload and how to learn to lead more effectively.

When the content team wrapped up researching and drafting the Disability Services section, our UX team did two usability tests to determine how the new information should be organized in order to make it as easy to find as possible.

Creating a single piece of content is one thing, but creating a whole new section for our website is quite another endeavor — especially when it needs to address a gap in government information. It takes time and resources to produce the content, test the sections, and build the infrastructure. This blog post is the first in a series about that process.

In the last quarter, the KPI trended upward. Here are some things the KPI helped us analyze in the last several months.