DSN Spotlights celebrate our members’ stories, lift up actionable takeaways for other practitioners, and put the examples we host in the Digital Government Hub in context. Submit a proposal by May 31, 2025 to be featured in our series as part of our open call for submissions.
This presentation explores the balance between security and user experience in digital benefit account creation and authentication, highlighting insights from a forthcoming playbook focused on SNAP and Medicaid portals.
The CUTGroup book explains how civic user testing (paying residents to test civic apps) can allow for more community engagement in civic tech. This book covers how to do UX testing, community engagement, and digital skills in one civic tech system.
This paper examines three key questions in participatory HCI: who initiates, directs, and benefits from user participation; in what forms it occurs; and how control is shared with users, while addressing conceptual, ethical, and pragmatic challenges, and suggesting future research directions.
The U.S. Digital Response collaborated with a state workforce agency to develop a multilingual, user-friendly system for retroactive Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) applications, enhancing claimant comprehension and reducing administrative strain.
Initially created for and shared with staff at the Administration for Children and Families, this webinar provides an introduction to Universal Design, covering plain language, accessibility, user research, and Agile development.
Important considerations for understanding user needs to inform responsive design in rapidly changing contexts are discussed, including how context, threat perception, decision-making, and crisis affects disaster management and UX research.
USDS partnered with CMCS and state Medicaid agencies to improve eligibility and enrollment systems after the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency ended, focusing on health coverage renewals.
In the Fall of 2022, the USDOL Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization (OUIM) consulted with the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) to provide hands-on support with IT modernization and customer experience strategy. Primary discussions focused on making informed product, service, and business decisions based on qualitative and quantitative data— how might IDES leverage existing data streams to identify the most pressing technology issues in their unemployment insurance system, and how might IDES act upon this information in a timely and impactful manner?
In 2022, Nava formed its first-ever PAC as part of their initiative to help Montana’s Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program design a new recertification portal. Leveraging what Nava learned from this experience, this toolkit outlines the necessary steps to form a PAC, including planning a structure for the council, recruiting participants, and other logistics.
The existing system for evaluating state safety net programs does not adequately capture the human experience of accessing services. This new National Safety Net Scorecard is a more meaningful set of metrics that can effectively asses the true state of the current program delivery landscape and measure progress over time, creating a more human-centered safety net.
Teams crafting policy inside and outside government can use the assessment to center their policy-making activities around those most impacted by their proposed programs and policy ideas.
