Our Blog

During times of national emergency, USAGov serves as the official channel of disaster communications for the federal government. To help people across the country prepare for and recover from disasters, we use different tactics across our channels.

These tips can help your organization deliver timely information to your audience during a disaster.

We’re celebrating the release of our new benefits experience onUSA.gov and USAGov en Español. It features a redesigned benefit finder tool, offering a more streamlined way to find government benefits for health care, housing, food, unemployment, and more.

This major update came as a result of the closing of Benefits.gov, SSABest.Benefits.gov, and GovLoans.gov. It transitions the role of the government’s one-stop shop for federal benefits information to theUSAGov program.

As we continue to develop content for USAGov’s benefit finder, we work hard to tailor the experience for our Spanish-speaking users. Rather than a straight translation from English, we transcreate Spanish language content to catch the nuances of both language and culture. The process begins with our iterative multilingual user research.

One of the USAGov program’s core focus areas is improving the benefits experience for our users. With customer experience in mind, we’re excited to share a significant change coming this fall. Benefits.gov, which has been hosted by the Department of Labor since 2002, will be sunsetting at the end of September, and we're creating a new benefits experience on USA.gov and USAGov en Español.

It can be challenging for federal programs to recruit people to participate in user research. They need to follow the privacy and security regulations and paperwork reduction laws designed to protect the public, but that adds time and complexity to the process. And it can lead to teams doing less user research with the people their websites serve.

To create a solution to this challenge, USAGov and the 10x program, both part of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), partnered to develop a user research recruitment page at usa.gov/user-research.

The Public Experience Portfolio's User Experience (UX) team consistently conducts research to evaluate various aspects of the program. We generally try to recruit a broad audience but also use a prequalification process to ensure diversity. Despite these efforts, we found we weren’t reaching the disability community as thoroughly as we would like. We decided to conduct a dedicated study with individuals who use assistive technology to access USA.gov.

At USA.gov and USAGov en Español, we’re always striving to make our content more useful to the public. Meta descriptions are one way we help people quickly find the government information they’re looking for.

It’s been a year since we launched reimagined versions of USA.gov and USAGov en Español based on human-centered design (HCD) principles. Last year, we shared posts highlighting how we used those principles to shift our approaches to content development, user experience, and analytics.

At the Public Experience (PX) Contact Center, we recognize the important role of quality in shaping customer interactions. When people call and chat with us, they expect clear, reliable information about government benefits and services. Learn how we work with our contractor to deliver exceptional service to the people who get in touch with the USAGov program and pick up some tips for your program’s contact center.

Each month USAGov’s content designers spend many hours ensuring that the content on USA.gov and USAGov en Español is up-to-date, accurate, and meeting user needs. We do holistic reviews of each topic section based on a rolling calendar with the goal of updating all content at least every 6 months.