Feds seek user input on mobile experience

The General Services Administration’s Digital Services Innovation Center is crowdsourcing mobile innovators to help make mobile government work better for the public.

The effort began with the collaboration of 15 agencies at a November mobile user experience workshop, where agencies partnered with government mobile practitioners to collect and develop mobile user experience guidelines agencies would ultimately use when updating mobile products.

To improve guidelines and recommendations further, the Digital Services Innovation Center has launched a mobile user experience crowdsourcing tool.

It is essentially a survey that asks participants to determine the importance of particular recommendations that will lead to “citizen-centric mobile,” said Gwynne Kostin, director of the Digital Services Innovation Center.

For example, participants will be asked whether it is critical, very important or important to keep button labeling short and clear, use jargon-free language or put the user’s principal task front and center.

Participants also have the option to chime in with their own wording if they wish.

“We are taking more than 40 elements to a wider audience – inside and outside of government – to hone and polish these recommendations to better serve the American people,” Kostin said.

The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete, and the project will be closed on March 25.

Kostin said results will be published on the MobileGov Wiki and will assist in creating programming and tools to support the adoption and continued development of these guidelines.