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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.

In March, the team of writers and editors at USAGov adopted some agile principles in an attempt to streamline our content development process.

The USAGov team wants to share our 2017 predictions with you! We asked staff members about their goals for USAGov and all of government digital services and we got plenty of great  ideas. Here are six of our favorites:

View the accessible version of the 2016 Top 5 Most Popular Search Topics in USA.gov infographic.

As part of USAGov’s efforts to provide our audience with the reliable and quality information that they need, this summer, the Health, Education & Benefits (HE&B) topic desk completed its first content audit.

Every first week of every month, USAGov's marketing team sends an office-wide email newsletter to give an update on past and current marketing efforts and campaigns. It’s how we try to help keep the rest of the office in the know. The monthly newsletter can spur a content idea, a future marketing endeavor, and act as a reminder of what's coming up that month that contributors need to be aware of. It also gives a heads up to our Analytics Team about what promotions could be the causes of increased website visits, email, and social media traffic.