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.

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.

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

The Consumer Action Handbook (Handbook) and its Spanish counterpart,the Guía del Consumidor (Guía), have been mainstays of USAGov since the 1990s. However, life as a consumer has changed drastically since these books began. To understand the changing consumer landscape, a cross-functional group from USAGov conducted a study of the scope of these publications. We wanted to answer several questions:

Content on the USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov websites provides information on many different government benefits, services, and programs. We group the content into various taxonomy buckets to make it easier for people to find what they are looking for. But after listening to user feedback, we realized that content about different programs wasn’t always written in the same style and format, which made it hard for people to find what they were looking for across topics.

In order to understand if certain pages and sections of our website effectively help customers complete their tasks, we run page-level and pop-up surveys that allow people to leave feedback and tell us what was helpful or what wasn’t.

A core component of the USAGov content team’s job is to make sure the public can find what it’s looking for on our site. One of the main ways we do that is by researching to zero in on the keywords people are using when they search for a topic. Then we incorporate those keywords into our page titles and content summaries.

After our content team moved to a more agile method of working, we also started to look at the metrics we use to measure the success of our work. To help us with that, our analytics team developed a new metric we’re experimenting with called the content efficiency metric.