USA.gov Blog

Earlier this year, we shared a blog post about our methods for surveying our bilingual email subscribers. We wanted to learn more about our users, their needs and preferences, to serve them better.

The USAGov team plays a challenging, but important role in times of national disaster in helping people across the country prepare for and recover from disasters. To do this, we use different tactics across our channels to ensure we are delivering accurate, helpful information to those who needed it most.

For nearly 50 years, USAGov has been working to serve every person and every government agency. Our history has been full of change, and never static as we improve people’s lives by connecting them with the government services and information they need.

One of the 2018 goals for our email outreach efforts was to learn more about our audience. Though in the past we had performed different exercises to do so -- email-level data analysis, content testing, and persona development to name a few -- we decided nothing beats being able to ask questions directly to our subscribers.

One of our core principles behind the USAGov chatbot is consistent, iterative improvements. We recently released our newest batch of small changes and wanted to share them with you.

USAGov and USAGov en Español offer a wide range of government information and services organized by topics to make it easy for people to find what they’re looking for. But navigating through different sections within our sites could be challenging and overwhelming for our visitors, especially first-time users.

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.

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 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.

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.