18F/18f.gsa.gov

---
title: "Learning how to build a better “front door” for the federal government"
date: 2015-12-08 14:00
authors:
- colinmacarthur
- carolyn
- michelle-chronister
tags:
- user research
- federal front door
- transformation services
excerpt: "Over the last several months, staff from General Service
Administration’s USAGov and 18F teams have been talking to Americans
around the country about the good, the bad, and the ugly of interacting
with their federal government. The goal of the research is to gain a
better understanding of how we can build a better “front door” to the federal government by building new digital services and enhancing existing ones."
description: "Over the last several months, staff from General Service
Administration’s USAGov and 18F teams have been talking to Americans
around the country about the good, the bad, and the ugly of interacting
with their federal government. The goal of the research is to gain a
better understanding of how we can build a better “front door” to the federal government by building new digital services and enhancing existing ones."
image:
---

*This was originally published on [USA.gov's blog](https://blog.usa.gov/learning-how-to-build-a-better-front-door-for-the-federal-government).*

Over the last several months, staff from General Service
Administration’s USAGov and 18F teams have been talking to Americans
around the country about the good, the bad, and the ugly of interacting
with their federal government. The goal of the research is to gain a
better understanding of how we can build a better "front door" to the
federal government by building new digital services and enhancing
existing ones.

Over the next few months, we'll share what we're doing and learning with
a series of blog posts.

What is this project and why are you doing it?
-----------------------------------------------

When we started this project we knew that, for many people, interacting
with the government is a mixed bag of emotions, some good and some bad.
Right now, a lot of the information and services available from
government sites are organized according to the agency that provides
them, but that doesn’t always meet the needs of the people accessing
that information or those services. Since the methods people use to
interact with the government are so diverse, we didn’t really know when
and how people connected with the government, or how they experienced
those interactions. We also weren’t sure how people’s attitudes towards
the government affected those interactions.

So we started this project with a six-week discovery phase of interviews
in five major, diverse cities across the U.S. to answer those questions.
This will help us shape the next phase of the project, in which we’ll
design experiments based on what we learned to further explore how we
can improve services and information across the government.

So, what is the "federal front door"?
-------------------------------------

We think of the federal front door as the places the public first
interacts with their government. There are many front doors — agency
websites (like [benefits.gov](http://www.benefits.gov/)),
physical places (like Social Security offices), contact centers (like
1-844-USA-GOV1) — where people start interacting with the government.

With so many "front doors" to the federal government already, what does this project hope to do?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This project won't necessarily build new front doors; it's about
learning ways to improve our existing ones. We won't be rolling out lots
of new websites for interacting with the government, but instead we’ll
be figuring out ways we can simplify, streamline, and improve people’s
interactions with the current ones (especially ones that interact with
multiple agencies).

What's next?
-------------

As we wind down our research, you can expect to hear more about how we
conducted it and what we found. You can expect us to build little
experiments to test our ideas, test them out with users, and
continuously iterate. And we'll be sharing the process through blog
posts, and other media. In a future post, we’ll talk about how we went
about doing research without a particular product or website in mind.
Stay tuned.