Agencies urged to consider mobile-first strategy

Federal agencies should consider giving mobile solutions a prominent role in early planning rather than developing mobile applications as an afterthought, panelists said at a seminar on mobile government.

“Mobile has huge implications for content,” Haley Van Dyck, former director of citizen engagement at the Federal Communications Commission, said at the FedScoop MobileGov conference June 28. Mobile solutions can provide a more innovative way to solve a problem or to reach a specific population, she added.

For example, when the FCC held its Open Internet rule-making proceeding in 2010, the commission wanted to get comments from people without broadband Internet access or smart-phone access. Many of those consumers were accessible via their cell phones, so the FCC adopted a solution to facilitate consumers' comments on the rule-making by text message from their cell phones, she said.

GSA helps agencies go mobile

What to name baby? SSA has a new mobile app for that

The FCC also created an iPhone application as part of its planning for the National Broadband Strategy. In writing the strategy, the commission was looking for ways to collect data directly from consumers about the broadband connection speeds on their home networks.

The agency developed the Consumer BroadBand Test in both Web, iPhone and Android formats, and more than 2 million consumers have taken the test to date, Van Dyck said.

“It has been a wonderful way for us to diversify the data we are getting, and to diversify how we are getting it,” Van Dyck said.

There was some resistance in the commission to collecting data directly from consumers, because of the need to protect the consumers’ privacy and locations. That problem was fixed by aggregating data at the census tract level to hide individual addresses, she said.

The “mobile first” approach also was considered is in the recent redesign of the FCC.gov website and is being used on an ongoing basis in preparation of agency communication materials.

The FCC.gov website went through a comprehensive redesign on an open-source platform, relaunching in May. “We made sure that FCC.gov was easy for spinning off mobile applications,” Van Dyck said. “We spun off mobile applications within six days after launch.”

The commission's external communications, such as news releases, are being designed for mobile use, with shorter sentences and simplified formats, she added. The communications that are designed for mobile applications can easily be transferred to online and offline uses, she added.

“If you go mobile first, it is an easy, inexpensive and efficient way to get content out,” Van Dyck said. She recently accepted a position at the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For example, one of the targeted groups is African-Americans, who as a group have higher rates of HIV infection than the U.S. population as a whole. About 46 percent of African-Americans use mobile phones to access the Internet, which is higher than the average rate, she said.

The content on AIDS.gov also reflects puts the needs of mobile users first, because it was designed based on an analysis of mobile-based searches of the Internet related to AIDS information, Samplin-Salgado said.

At the Agriculture Department, Kim Taylor, director of Web services for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said she has been advancing a more prominent role for mobile solutions at the agency by incorporating language into the agency’s long-term strategic plan. The strategy is intended to help shape future budget planning, she said.