Delivering Digital First: Turning 21st Century IDEA into Action

By Mike Gifford and Emily Ryan

What 21st Century IDEA Means to CivicActions

Our team has embraced many of the key elements of The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA), which became a US law 5 years ago (December 2018). This was a bipartisan act to encourage government agencies to build a framework and requirements for a digital-first public experience, with an emphasis on accessibility, building mobile-friendly user experiences, digitizing services and forms, and improving the overall customer experience.

The legislation was designed with specific recommendations for a variety of senior executive agency roles including Chief Information Officers. At a high level, the guidance was designed to push agencies and the overall administration to modernize the federal government. Included in the IDEA act is a handful of strategic goals calling on agencies to:

• Modernize their websites (which includes being mobile-friendly)
• Digitize services and forms
• Transition to standardized and centralized shared services
• Improve overall customer experience (CX)

Additionally, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memo M-23–22, Delivering a Digital-First Public Experience, came out this past fall (September 2023), which expanded on the 21st Century IDEA act. The OMB memo clarified what the 21st Century IDEA act meant by the concept of modernization. The OMB memo affords greater insight into what OMB and the federal government expects agencies to deliver to the public.

This OMB Memo gives specific mechanisms by which agencies should be improving their CX. Specifically, agency sites should:

• Provide a feedback mechanism for users to report satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each web page or piece of web content
• Test online content with the intended target audience before and after publishing
• Examine websites and digital services to ensure content is written and implemented so that Limited English Proficiency (LEP) users can meaningfully access those services

CivicActions has extensive experience working within these strategic goals found in the IDEA act and the OMB memo, and we have brought this expertise to agencies such as the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Education (ED). The work that we do is accessible, responsive, mobile performant, and frequently exceeds the requirements of Section 508, thereby ensuring the solutions create the best customer experience while adhering to the needs of the public.

Modernizing websites

We understand that a modern digital experience fully incorporates smartphones. Our team works with our clients to build a good mobile first experience. We know from the US Census data that millions of Americans do not have a desktop computer. Data from Analytics.USA.gov shows that more than half of the traffic to the sites monitored is coming from either iOS or Android users.

To ensure we’re building the best mobile-first experience, CivicActions works extensively with Drupal and the US Web Design System (USWDS). We maintain the Drupal USWDS Theme, and also implement it for our clients. This allows us to confidently build modern digital experiences for multiple devices, screen sizes and assistive technology, through a proven mobile-first strategy. By leveraging the USWDS federal design system and open source platforms such as Drupal, we improve the customer experience (CX) of our clients’ sites.

In addition, we bring content strategy, user research, and visual design into our processes to ensure they meet the needs of the public and the agencies we serve. Our practitioners are well-versed in using human-centered design (HCD) approaches and we balance this with addressing the needs of each agency and their goals. Finally, our focus on accessibility allows us to build sites that are both inclusive and future compatible, providing an experience that works across all of the public.

Digitizing services and forms

There is an ongoing challenge to digitize government services. Agencies are struggling to move beyond legacy PDF forms. At CMS and VA, we have done extensive work on building customized web forms. These forms follow best practices, and provide a user-friendly interface for citizens to provide information to the government. Such approaches also help to ensure information gathering is done in an accessible and usable manner, creating time-saving data collection methods for agencies and reducing mistakes and processing time.

Transitioning to standardized and centralized shared services (including open source)

CivicActions has extensive experience in open source communities, like the USWDS. We are connected into the USWDS community, and our teams contribute to improving the USWDS framework by actively engaging with the community through collaboration in GitHub and Slack as well as through annual conferences, trainings, newsletters, podcasts, webinars and other opportunities. Where we can, we bring our deep Drupal experience and solutions to our client’s challenges back into the USWDS. This is a critical part of seeing that we continue to provide robust digital services in the future.

This work with Drupal supports the goal of future transitions to centralized shared services. Building open source solutions with Drupal create structured content which lends itself to standalone and/or federated systems. Content can be published once, and blended into the pages of multiple sites, thus reducing the cost of maintaining repetitive content. Governments around the world are seeing the benefits of centralizing on mature open source technology like Drupal.

Working with Drupal also provides us an advantage both in accessibility and mobile support. Drupal has been built to exceed the needs of Section 508 for both the public facing and author facing interfaces. With 25% of the population having a disability, we know that authors also need accessible interfaces. Because of our work in the Drupal community, we are able to engage with global experts on a range of topics.

Improve overall customer experience (CX)

As mentioned above, we have an experienced team with an understanding of user research, content design and service design work.

CivicActions understands the need for user research and testing. Our human-centered and data-driven design team works to align with the USWDS and the specific design systems and style guides of our government clients. CivicActions’ content design team is also working to establish plain language text that is easy to understand and more accessible to the average user.

We know people come to government websites in order to find information and we work with our clients to build an experience that allows users to quickly find what they need. The OMB’s policy guidance (M-23–22) embraces the idea that search is an important piece of a digital first public experience. It is important that government pages are optimized for search engines, but also that they have a meaningful internal search capacity. Our team has experience customizing the search experience in Drupal for our clients. There is a lot of customization available within Drupal, but we have also leveraged Search.gov services.

We are working with our clients to find ways to embed dynamic experience for our users in their sites. We understand that government often requires users to complete complex tasks and we continue to utilize best practices that align to the IDEA act and the OMB’s memo in order to simplify their workloads.

Accessibility and Digital-First Public Experiences

Finally, for the first time, per the OMB memo, agencies are directly encouraged to do the following:

• “Apply the most current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to websites and web applications, where possible.”
• “Include automated scanning, manual testing of websites, and usability testing with people with disabilities, as well as testing with users of adaptive technologies.”
• “Incorporate the needs of individuals with disabilities into the design and development of websites and digital services, and should include individuals with disabilities in usability testing of new tools or features.”

The guidance from the OMB re-enforces the need for government agencies to focus more on accessibility. The Spring 2023 Section 508 Program Maturity Report, demonstrated accessibility is not being consistently well managed across government agencies. Citizens with disabilities should be able to expect that they can engage with government agencies. This has been understood as a right for citizens for over 30 years, yet it is still a challenge. The OMB Memo provides very specific guidance on how agencies should be addressing accessibility.

Accessibility is at the heart of CivicActions mission; our team is taking a leadership role in Drupal’s accessibility, and is engaged in several other open source projects that focus on accessibility as well. Our staff includes people with disabilities, and through our Champions Program and Accessibility Onboarding, we ensure that this value is understood by every team member.

Where We Are Going

Our team is continuing to innovate in digital government. Our work with the open source communities, like the USWDS & Drupal, allow us to regularly engage with other teams, projects, and agencies. By engaging with others, we learn and contribute to the development of best practices. We can then bring these approaches back to our clients, improving the experience for all. Reach out if you are interested in learning more about our approach — we’d love the opportunity to talk about what we can do together.