Our Blog

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:

During times of national emergency, USAGov serves as the official channel of disaster communications for the federal government. To help people across the country prepare for and recover from disasters, we use different tactics across our channels.

These tips can help your organization deliver timely information to your audience during a disaster.

At vote.gov, our mission is to make it easy for all eligible voters to understand how to register and vote. That’s why we’ve partnered with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to create a tool that helps people more easily fill out the National Mail Voter Registration Form. 

We’re celebrating the release of our new benefits experience onUSA.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 theUSAGov program.

Since its launch in 2016, vote.gov has been known as a trusted source for accurate, official voting information from the U.S. government. We recently gave the site a new look with improved accessibility features and expanded information based on questions we heard from voters. And vote.gov is now available in 19 languages — covering 96% of the American public — with more on the way.

One of the USAGov program’s core focus areas is improving the benefits experience for our users. With customer experience in mind, we’re excited to share a significant change coming this fall. Benefits.gov, which has been hosted by the Department of Labor since 2002, will be sunsetting at the end of September, and we're creating a new benefits experience on USA.gov and USAGov en Español.

At USA.gov and USAGov en Español, we’re always striving to make our content more useful to the public. Meta descriptions are one way we help people quickly find the government information they’re looking for.

It’s been a year since we launched reimagined versions of USA.gov and USAGov en Español based on human-centered design (HCD) principles. Last year, we shared posts highlighting how we used those principles to shift our approaches to content development, user experience, and analytics.

Each month USAGov’s content designers spend many hours ensuring that the content on USA.gov and USAGov en Español is up-to-date, accurate, and meeting user needs. We do holistic reviews of each topic section based on a rolling calendar with the goal of updating all content at least every 6 months. 

As we shared in our 20th anniversary post, people have come to USAGov en Español since 2003 for official, trusted government information and services in Spanish. The site was created as a counterpart to USA.gov (then known as FirstGov.gov) and in response to Executive Order 13166to improve access to services for people with limited English proficiency (LEP).