Federal CIO Council Turns Customer Experience Expectations On Itself

The federal IT community has been pushing hard on the idea of improving service delivery by focusing on the experience of the customer—whether the citizen, a stakeholder, another agency or their own employees. As agencies report on their progress meeting administration objectives around CX, the Federal Chief Information Officers Council is taking its own advice.

Last week, the council launched a redesigned website, CIO.gov, with a focus on usability and easy access to information the government technology employees need.

“Interviewing stakeholders, conducting user testing and looking at visitor data helped us determine what information users were looking for and how to approach design so that they could find it quickly and easily,” Federal CIO Suzette Kent wrote in a post introducing the new design. Kent also noted the user-centered design aligns with the administration’s IT modernization cross-agency priority goal, as well as the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, or IDEA Act, which passed Congress in December.

Kent said the new look and structure is designed to engage with more members of the federal IT community, including more direct access to the policy catalog—still in beta—and resources like playbooks, as well as the bi-weekly newsletter and events calendar.

Along with improvements to layout and access to resources, the site also took advantage of existing federal projects for things like hosting platform, security, analytics, accessibility and design standards.

Kent noted that using these shared resources also gives the new CIO.gov a familiar look and feel as that of other federal websites, such as FedRAMP.gov, Vote.gov and Performance.gov.