Blog posts by Carolyn Dew:

We launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, and over the next month, we plan to explore various topics related to design standards. In this post, we detail how our user research informed the decision decisions we made.

One of the most common questions we receive is: Should I integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into my existing project? The answer is: it depends.

To celebrate Sunshine Week, we’re highlighting some groundbreaking open government work by the Department of the Treasury, one of 18F’s partner agencies.

Since our launch of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, hundreds of people have provided feedback on the project through GitHub issues and via email. We’ve received dozens of feature requests as well as over 400 contributions from the open source community.

We're publishing a full report to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. Today we end the series with a look at what we’ll focus on in the next stage of research.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we'll share what people think about before deciding to share personal information with the government.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we'll detail when people decide to trust the federal government and how they view the federal government vs. private companies.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we'll talk about how choice overload affects decision-making.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we detail the need for transparency in government so that the public can “see” the process they’re undergoing when they’re interacting with federal agencies and programs.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we detail how people interact with the government using proxies.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we detail how people learn to navigate government services and what barriers exist to accessing services.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we detail the strategies people use when interacting with the government.

Over the next two weeks, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research to better understand the public's overall experience interacting with the federal government and their attitudes about sharing information with government agencies. In today’s installment, we detail our initial research questions and what we learned.

Today, we’re publishing a full report with findings from our research on the Federal Front Door, as well as a microsite that will contain future research findings related to these topics. In the coming days, we’ll also be publishing the complete report on the 18F blog.

This Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing some love from the Standards, which include a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites. These tools — and these Valentine’s Day cards — follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and use the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design.

The U.S. Web Design Standards is the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.