Our Blog

What do the people want? A simple question with no simple answer.

At USAGov, we’re taking a close look at Kids.gov -- a long-standing site focused on providing information and resources to parents, teachers, and kids. Our cross-functional team has joined forces to “reenvision” the site’s content and presentation to be sure that we’re doing our best to meet the needs of our current audience.

At USAGov we always put our customers first. In the wake of our rebranding efforts, our desire to create a positive user experience across the organization has pushed us to turn a scrutinous eye toward Kids.gov -- a site focused on providing information and resources to parents, teachers, and kids. In a cross-organizational effort, individuals from the marketing, user experience, and performance measurement teams have joined forces to “reenvision” the site’s content and presentation to better suit the public’s needs.

Partnership and collaboration are at the cornerstone of innovation within the federal government. In support of this belief, USAGov’s Sarah Crane recently spoke at an EPA sponsored conference in Crystal City. Her presentation entitled, “The Future of Digital Government: The Next Big Things” focused on the following key topics:

Better. Stronger. Easier. More-efficient. Like many other civil servants with a passion for improving the government, Mary Ann Monroe has lofty goals for GSA and the federal government as a whole. Despite the illustrious nature of these ambitions, however, under Mary Ann’s tenure, OCSIT has seen a marked improvement and progression towards these objectives. In her newly appointed role as chief-of-staff she will further assist USAGov in its pursuit of even higher aspirations.

About a year and a half ago, the Federal Citizen Information Center - today called USAGov, embarked on a very ambitious task: integrating our content operations.  We blurred lines that defined silos and adopted a bilingual content approach to offer a more consistent experience, regardless of language preference or point of access to our information. See more about our rebirth.

Even in the digital age, we must remember that not everyone has access to the Internet. But they should still have access to government information. As part of USAGov’s effort to do just that, we produce the Consumer Action Handbook (CAH) and the Guía del Consumidor in Spanish. This publication empowers people to make informed purchases, avoid fraud, and exercise their consumer rights. More than a textbook, the CAH is actionable. We do the legwork, aggregating the resources from across government and the private sector.  

Last week, we shared what people think about before deciding to share personal information with the government. Today we end our series with a look at what we’ll focus on in the next stage of research. If you’d like to read the complete series, start here.

Yesterday, we shared our Snapchat account with the public. After weeks of testing the tool to iron out kinks and determine how we’d make content accessible, we were excited to go public when the official government-friendly terms of service were signed.

One of the biggest things we take into account whenever we consider launching on a new social platform is how we can make the information we share through that tool as accessible as possible.