18F Blog

Building products for the public requires a lot of listening and finding the right balance of value, cost, and user needs to build the best product. With that approach, we find most of the time that building a highly-optimized mobile-friendly website almost always trumps building native mobile apps.

As a consultant who does user research, I’ve found that the way consultants present “findings and recommendations” to clients isn’t always effective: findings immediately followed by recommendations, all at once in a single presentation. A better approach in sharing user research findings with a partner is “findings, consensus, and recommendations.”

Securely connecting Azure with an on-premises server environment provides the benefits of a modern, cloud infrastructure, while making it trivial for application developers to interface with an on-premises legacy environment.

In product development, we often use prototypes to understand user needs and reduce risk. Prototypes are a great way to test out ideas or approaches before you actually commit to building anything, but governments are not always set up to develop and use prototypes efficiently before building digital services.

Agile without DevOps is a bundle of potential energy with no outlet. We’ve found that it’s easier to get agency buy-in for DevOps if automated security audits are part of that work.