The first edition of this storytelling series explores the critical role of cognitive accessibility in digital government services through the personal experiences of a scholar and a mother navigating a complex bureaucracy.
Design systems are a foundational component of good government digital service delivery. This publication explores why design systems matter and includes a tracker of centralized design systems across U.S. states.
This blog post shares five key service design lessons from U.K. experts Lou Downe and Sarah Drummond, offering practical guidance for building more connected, user-centered government services in British Columbia.
An introduction to digital accessibility, emphasizing the importance of designing digital content to be usable by individuals with various disabilities, and guidelines and assistive technologies that support inclusive digital interactions.
This Urban Institute report examines how public investments in children's health, education, and welfare yield significant short- and long-term benefits for both individuals and society.
Better Rules utilizes multidisciplinary teams that include people skilled in policy, legal, business rules, programming, and service design working together in an iterative fashion to develop rules. Several outputs are produced using this approach, each offering an opportunity that can be fed back into that iterative process and re-used to solve other issues.
Though the rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is ubiquitous when it comes to welfare programs, low-income households receive little relief from benefits programs. Most efforts to make public benefits systems more “efficient” actually just waste time and money in practice. They instead serve to stigmatize low-income families and chip away at the little assistance that remains available to them.
This report evaluates state government websites for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), providing links to each state's site and assessing the information and services they offer.
This post argues that for the types of large-scale, organized fraud attacks that many state benefits systems saw during the pandemic, solutions grounded in cybersecurity methods may be far more effective than creating or adopting automated systems.
