Blog

February 12, 2016

Happy Valentine's Day from the U.S. Web Design Standards team

By Melody Kramer , Carolyn Dew , Erica Deahl , Maya Benari

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.

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February 9, 2016

Bringing iterative development to our Talent Team

By Jamie Albrecht , Bill Rooney

Over the past year, the Talent Team has worked hard to improve the 18F job application process. We’ve worked hard, but also differently. We shifted our view of talent acquisition from a support function to a product that we deliver, and one that demands the lean and agile philosophies that are the 18F way of life.

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February 9, 2016

Tips for capturing the best data from user interviews

By Ryan Sibley

User interviews are, at a minimum, an opportunity for you to ask your intended audience about their expectations, what their needs are and to get direct feedback on the work you’ve done so far or on what you plan to do. But an interview is only as good as the data you get out of it.

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February 1, 2016

New U.S. Digital Registry authenticates official public service accounts

By Justin Herman

We’d like to introduce to you a new API-generating repository for official third-party sites, social media platforms, and mobile apps in the United States federal government that can help you do that and remove bureaucratic and technological barriers between users and digital public services.

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January 25, 2016

How user story estimation helps my team deliver value

By Michael Torres

At 18F, we believe that employing agile practices is the most effective way to build digital services. User story estimation is one of the most useful agile tools, and in this post, I’ll talk about how and why my team has been using it.

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