At LaGuardia about to fly home from a day-long session on university websites from the Neilsen Norman Group in NYC. I have to say, there is no happier line in any airport anywhere than the one of folks getting ready to head to Portland, Maine. The conference was excellent. There is just no substitute for […]
UPDATE: Apparently the governor has been asking himself this very same question: “I’m considering running for Mike Michaud’s seat if you want to know the truth because it can’t be any worse in Washington than it is here,” LePage said. “Everything’s on the table. Retirement, Social Security, running for Congress, maybe going back to Marden’s […]
So good to be back in Maine. Rose loves it too. Here she is pointing to the dog — who perhaps loves it most of all.
The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov […]
Fascinating interview with telecommunications expert Susan Crawford on Bill Moyers’s show. The gist: public access to ubiquitous high-speed internet is being strangled by a lack of competition and oversight. A petition to support the appointment by the president of Susan Crawford as chair of the FCC is circulating now. After watching this video, you better […]
What makes a particular design successful can be hard to define. Elegance and intuition can take a variety of forms, and all kinds of different interfaces can get the job done well. Plus, what works for one person may be totally inaccessible to another, which is why the process of iterative design and testing is […]
Our last crowdsourced endeavor was a real success — with dozens of people contributing over 80 examples of points of interaction between citizens and government — so why not push our luck and try another? With the election behind us, it’s time to focus on how government functions, and how that functioning can be improved […]
The more I’ve thought about Citizen Experience — with its goal of reconsidering and improving the experience citizens have when they interact with government — the more I find myself coming back to the same thought: we really need a list of all those points of interaction. This would include everywhere that public institutions and […]
For the last year or so, my efforts at work have been focused primarily on trying to improve the user experience for visitors to GAO.gov. We’ve undertaken a usability testing process and incorporated new, sound analytics into our decisionmaking. On every web project, we are in the room to ask what each new proposed element […]
This is the only known video footage of Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909 one year before Twain’s death. In it, he walks around his house, puffs a cigar, and has tea with his daughters. Living the dream, basically.