Project MyUSA

Since we announced the project and introduced ourselves in August, we’ve been hard at work down in the Bat Cave (yes, we named our work space in the sub-basement here in DC). Last week we shared the results of our first usability test - thanks for all your great feedback! We’ve made a number of changes to the UI.

This week has been a busy one, as the pieces fall into place for our Project MyGov. We’ve been working on ways to deliver on reimagining how citizens interact with government – through an experience designed around their needs rather than a confusing and fragmented bureaucracy. Rather than have one large deliverable at the end of our 6 month fellowship, we’ve broken it down into 5 components (so far) and will continue to ask for your input on as we go along.

We’ve identified a number of ways the current experience can be improved:

• Create a single account, and do away with multiple accounts across various different government websites.
• Obliterate the need to fill out forms over and over. Do away with filling out forms by hand or having to print out and mail them in.
• Build a more consistent experience across agency and government websites, and expose personalized content relevant to their individual needs.
• Consolidate duplicate information that currently resides on different websites.
• Establish the ability for people to have an ongoing relationship with their government.
• Build APIs and hosted services that agency web teams can use to quickly integrate with MyGov.

If you think of the above as the “what” we’re going after, here’s the “how” - a set of tools and services to support these goals:

1. MyGov account

• Provides users with a single service that can be used by agencies to sign in to any government website.

2. MyGov apps

• Enables agencies to create a wizard for people to complete a task, transaction, or process.

3. MyGov forms service

• Provides agencies with a service to host a form, collect data, and enable people to quickly pre-fill information from their MyGov account.

4. MyGov discovery bar

• Provides a consistent browsing experience via a persistent navigation bar that snaps to bottom of site, which includes easy access to MyGov profile and other relevant info.
• Embeddable widget that provides contextual information for users while browsing any government website.

More to come in the next few weeks of what this all will look and feel like.