Our Blog

Earlier this year, we piloted our USAGov chatbot to help visitors find answers to their questions about scams and fraud. After the launch, we made tweaks to the interface based on customer feedback and usage data. 

Right now, the common denominator across all online platforms seems to be video. Whether it’s breaking news or information about a long existing government program, video content is a powerful way to present information.

Over the years, the structure and the volume of content on USA.gov has changed as the Internet has matured and user needs have evolved.

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.

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.

We scheduled an online workshop to discuss how to improve and reorganize our Military and Veterans section. We all were teleworking the day the event was planned, so it became a 100 percent virtual session – which ended up being remarkably successful! We wanted to share some of what we learned to be best practices.

The process of searching for and bidding on federal government contracts is complicated, and last year our research revealed that it was an area the public needed help navigating.

We just recently released an updated design of our home pages to make it easier for the public to get answers to their top government questions. The new structure, content, and look and feel are based on data from top searches and analytics, top questions to the call center, and user behavior learned during usability testing.

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: