How Can the National Design Studio Standardize Federal Websites?
The focus on a standardized UX is built on four primary goals:
- A “One Government” approach that moves the U.S. Web Design System beyond a toolkit and into a strict brand standard; the goal is to ensure that no matter what site a citizen visits, the typography, navigation patterns and feel are identical
- AI-driven deployment that will be used to tackle the massive scale of managing 27,000-plus federal domains and accelerate data migration
- Prioritizing high-impact service providers starting with high-traffic agencies for the greatest impact
- Creating an in-house agency that provides a consistent level of design authority
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia was named the studio’s first National Design Officer, and he is heading the effort to redesign federal web portals to meet modern standards of accessibility and aesthetics. In a recent interview with the design podcast “First of a Kind,” he talked about how he’s looked at Apple’s UX when thinking about the aims of the NDS. “What if our government sites had great design, amazing usability and were running on the same modern software as any great consumer app?”
Gebbia points out how important UX is to establishing trust, and why that matters for government agencies.
“There’s that feeling when you use a website and things really don’t line up, and then you fill out the form, hit submit and it says your phone number is a required field. But you put your phone number in there, why is it not working? Things like that take away from the trust you have in something. You think, if they didn’t get this right, what else is off here?” he said.
How Does User Behavior Shape Federal Website Redesigns?
The inaugural challenge for the NDS team started a few months before the studio was founded, as two engineers working with the Department of Government Efficiency, who later became part of the NDS, were tasked with modernizing the Office of Personnel Management site for employees starting the retirement process.
For decades, federal employee retirement records were stored in a climate-controlled limestone mine in Pennsylvania. This protected these critical records but often made them difficult to access. Processing one of the 100,000 federal retirements each year meant retrieving often hard-to-find physical and digital files and could take up to six months.
“We started to really understand how the whole process worked end to end, and we sat down with career people in government to talk about the issue,” Gebbia said. “They’ve seen this problem for decades, and they were very happy to try something new.”
The studio worked with them and saw where they could make improvements in the process. By rewriting the retirement application software stack, processing times for basic retirements fell from months to weeks.
Taking a digital approach to how people interact with their public agencies can help guide design, Gebbia said. “At some point in history, Americans accessed their government by walking into buildings, and I imagine that the lobbies were impeccably designed with great lighting, nice art, clean floors, good signage. Now, the front doors are websites. Why wouldn’t we treat .gov domains with the same care and attention as those lobbies from years ago?”
