The challenge

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is working to improve the confusing experience many Veterans have when navigating multiple VA sites built on a mix of legacy technologies.

Having launched a reinvigorated VA.gov in 2018 as an important step to a unified Veteran-first digital platform, the agency still needed to build out a common content management system (CMS), establish consistent descriptions for services, and organize the information in an accessible way for Veterans in need of health care.

Client goal

The large-scale pilot effort focused on using one of the regional VA Medical Centers as a model for all future VA.gov content. This would empower the VA to:

• Provide better healthcare management and scheduling online
• Explain benefits clearly and provide intuitive paths to apply for them
• Help minority and women Veterans find services specific to their needs
• Provide online connection with care coordinators
• Establish a model for content publishing and governance VA-wide

We integrated the new CMS with the existing site architecture and helped create standards for content and design that make it easier for VA staff to do their jobs—while directly improving quality of life for millions of Veterans seeking health care and benefits.

Our approach

Working alongside our partners Agile Six and Nava in collaboration with the U.S. Digital Service at VA and other organizations, our team was one of many moving parts in a complex project. We provided technical leadership and modeled transparent communication practices that helped the various teams work effectively together.

The technical strategy shifted to a “decoupled” approach partway through the project, requiring us to integrate the new CMS backend with the VA’s existing frontend system so that Veterans and caregivers could access content across multiple platforms. Agile practices helped us navigate this and other evolving priorities in a large ecosystem undergoing significant changes.

Smooth the technical transition

We managed the move to the new CMS without “pausing” the old site so the VA could re-use their existing front-end technology instead of starting from scratch. This meant we had to juggle content being served from two sources (GitHub and Drupal) during the transition, while training VA staff to use the new CMS effectively. We also set up a CI/CD pipeline for automated testing to ensure healthy functioning systems.

Find out what people need

To make sure health services and benefits are easy to find and understand, we tested navigation and content with real people, including unique groups like women, minority, and LGBTQ Veterans. We also interviewed VA staff responsible for maintaining the website, to understand their pain points and develop authoring and approval processes that make their jobs easier.

Empower a Veteran-first approach

The VA has been working to pave the way for a Veteran-focused digital experience, and this project was a landmark moment in propagating that approach throughout the organization. Human centered design and plain language are no longer the sole purview of digital experts — we developed systems that allow VA staff across the country to participate in the modernization of service delivery.

The challenge

To ensure products used by the government are accessible, vendors must submit accessibility conformance reports (ACR) to demonstrate their products meet Section 508 requirements. The most commonly used ACR follows the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), a templated Word Document or PDF that software vendors fill in manually, and often is not an accurate representation of product accessibility.

The ACR process is inconsistently structured, not searchable, static, and with no version control. For this reason, providing more accessible services can be complex and disempowering for vendors and procurement officers. The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages and supports the basic functioning of federal agencies, was interested in finding ways to modernize the ACR process. After requesting a Market Research Request for Information (RFI), we responded with the concept for OpenACR, a tool that simplifies the process of finding, sharing, and maintaining accurate and actionable data about product accessibility. After GSA reviewed potential solutions, CivicActions was awarded the contract for our innovative approach.

Our Approach

Our team, led by Senior Strategist and accessibility expert Mike Gifford, realized that the process of managing ACRs hadn’t kept up with the nature of modern software development. Leveraging the YAML machine-readable language, the team created a highly structured report format that can be easily exported to an accessible and readable HTML document.

OpenACR, Open Source

Our team was excited to do the development process in the open. OpenACR is open source, so other organizations and members of the open source community are free to generate input and build on OpenACR’s source code. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) worldwide have contributed to the development of this new tool, and all are welcome to visit the open issue queue to add feedback.

Foundational Accessibility

OpenACR sets a new standard for foundational accessibility. By building a machine-readable ACR, OpenACR allows for developing a central directory of accessibility standards for software used by the government. This is a significant milestone in standardizing accessibility practices and simplifies the process of communicating product accessibility for vendors and government IT buyers.

The challenge

When we first engaged with the Department of Education, they needed help consolidating and updating their collection of websites for the Literacy and Information Communication System (LINCS), which supports adult education practitioners in their goal of helping adult learners transition to post-secondary education and 21st-century jobs.

LINCS offers support to individual practitioners as well as U.S. community, state, and Federal programs that promote literacy, making it a unique resource for both individual educators and government-funded programs alike.

LINCS gives educators and learners access to resource libraries, discussion groups, and self-guided courses — but these were located on various websites that were outdated and confusing to navigate. LINCS needed to be restructured with modern, secure technical architecture. LINCS users also needed reliable, friendly support to resolve technical and login issues and get back to helping adult learners.

Client goal

To provide a valuable and secure learning platform for thousands of education practitioners, the Department of Education needed to:

• Update and consolidate numerous LINCS websites and resources
• Provide prompt helpdesk support for the large user community
• Improve site navigation with user-centered design
• Maintain a secure and reliable platform

Our approach

Our engagement with LINCS began as we transitioned the service’s website hosting to secure Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers, then used a modern Drupal content management system to consolidate the overabundance of outdated websites that LINCS had inherited from other departments. We used the U.S. Web Design System to make the updated websites easy to navigate and mobile friendly.

Our partnership with LINCS is ongoing — we now provide continuous improvements to their platforms using Information Technology Agile Development methods. We work closely with program managers to help them get the most business value from their IT applications. This includes the maintenance and enhancement of LINCS websites, web-based tools, databases, search engines, streaming media, content management, and learning management systems.

Provide a seamless experience

The main LINCS website serves as a central hub and brand for the Division of Adult Education and Literacy’s (DAEL) national leadership investments. To create a unified look-and-feel among the disparate supplementary LINCS websites, we did a visual redesign based on user research — creating a seamless experience for practitioners to access the resources they need.

Of late, our redesign has extended to information architecture, rendering global navigation more intuitive and informative, and revamping the way that site resources are organized and searched for.

Use helpdesk feedback for iterative improvement

Our support team provides fast, friendly resolution of technical and login issues for LINCS users, so they can get back to work quickly. Since our improvement of LINCS products is user-focused, we tie the helpdesk into the agile development process through daily communication between support staff and development teams. This ensures that system improvements are prioritized based on real user needs.

Increase efficiencies for cost savings

We implement automation and efficiency for the LINCS systems wherever possible. This helps prevent the buildup of technical debt and gives the Department of Education the most value for its investment in LINCS. We improve operations through DevOps practices including system administration, continuous integration, code standardization, lifecycle development, and quality control.

A recent highlight of this approach is our campaign toward Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, which automates the management and monitoring of our site architecture. IaC dramatically enhances the security, stability, and scalability of all LINCS sites, and increases both the efficiency and consistency of our development workflows. Following the IaC production deployment, we’ll be able to further consolidate our server and storage architecture, substantially reducing both their complexity and their cost. And following this, the next major phase of this initiative is the use of our automated tools and processes to process and monitor our Compliance documentation, boosting efficiency and scalability in this arena as well.

The challenge

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) provide healthcare benefits to millions of people every year. But the websites and digital tools that help people find and enroll in these programs were built on a myriad of aging technologies and were confusing to navigate. CMS needed to streamline and update its online platforms to improve the customer experience while establishing more efficient backend workflows for agency staff.

This is an enormous and complex task, involving the modernization of Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, CMS open data portals, and many other public facing apps that serve multiple user groups — including beneficiaries, caregivers, health providers, data professionals, and government stakeholders.

WECMS helps more than 100 million Americans every year apply, find, and enroll in healthcare programs. The information and tools provided are essential components in supporting CMS' goals of creating a truly consumer-focused, streamlined, efficient, and omni-channel experience for beneficiaries and their caregivers. The overall intent for this contract is to ensure continuity of operations for the Americans it serves and the WECMS program, which maintains, designs and implements open source software digital services for CMS’ flagship websites, tools, components and applications on Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, CMS.gov, and 7 Open Data catalogs. In addition to engineering and design continuous improvements on these established websites, this contract provides security compliance, devops, system infrastructure, content strategy, information architecture, training, documentation, content editor support, public call center dev support, Section 508 improvements, mobile application development, and tooling and systems expertise.

Client goal

When this multi-year transformation is complete, CMS will be able to deliver on its mission more effectively. CivicActions is providing agile development, DevOps, and human-centered design (HCD) services to help the agency:

• Improve the content editing experience for staff
• Modernize legacy systems and tools
• Replace proprietary technologies with open source
• Support active, informed healthcare consumption

Our approach

Collaboration is the key to success in a project of this scale and complexity. With multiple partner vendors (including our primary partner Fearless) and disparate stakeholders across many organizational layers, we work hard to keep lines of communication open and be up-front about potential problems.

Balancing stakeholder priorities, user needs, technical complexity, and CMS deadlines, we created a roadmap that minimizes risk and maximizes opportunities for success. Then we went to work on “quick wins” — tasks we could complete right away that would make the biggest difference for users.

Address the holistic customer experience

We knew that each CMS application is part of a huge public-facing ecosystem of digital tools, with many touchpoints. To address the entire experience that a person would have in navigating the systems, we drew on the agency’s own knowledge of their beneficiary community, working with them to refine and document how each person interacts with CMS online. The resulting holistic view helped us identify how we could improve that experience iteratively.

Adopt a data-driven strategy

To make sure we built the right solutions, we immersed ourselves in the CMS mission from the operational, technical, and UX perspectives. We dug into existing user research, reviewed analytics reports, conducted stakeholder interviews — then created user personas and journey maps to refine the project scope and goals. All this data is managed in a shared repository of user insights and project knowledge, which we refer to as we prioritize the work to be done.

Replace proprietary software with open source

We are “reverse engineering” multiple custom-built Microsoft.NET applications (such as the Medicare Eligibility and Premium Calculator and the congressionally-funded Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Lookup Tool with modern, open source solutions. As we recreate all these applications in Drupal, we’re making guides and code documentation that outline the entire system — allowing CMS to maintain control of its own technologies and avoid vendor lock-in. We are also migrating CMS open data platforms from Socrata (proprietary) to an open source solution using DKAN 2.

The challenge

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 to “promote the progress of science” and “advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare." With a 2021 budget of $8.5 billion, NSF accounts for over 25 percent of the total research funds awarded at U.S. colleges and universities.

CivicActions was tasked with rebuilding the entire public-facing NSF website, including implementation of all new visuals and improvement of the information architecture. By collaborating closely with stakeholders across NSF and adopting a rapid-iteration MVP approach, we regularly released prioritized features while simultaneously building the back-end infrastructure to power the ongoing full-scale migration.

Client goal

To better serve employees and the scientific community — including researchers in mathematics, computer science, social sciences, and beyond — NSF needed to replace the existing NSF.gov with a modern, flexible, cloud-hosted online experience. Primary goals were to:

• Modernize and improve the user experience for nsf.gov
• Improve funding search for colleges, researchers, and scientists
• Empower NSF staff with a new Content Management System (CMS)
• Leverage user research and testing throughout the project

Our approach

To support timelines for a public launch, we took an “MVP approach” by launching a beta site with a small, prioritized set of functionalities. As new pages and features are built, the site continues to develop over time, in the open. This approach requires rapid prototyping and iteration, frequent testing, and continuous engagement with stakeholders.

Start by understanding the needs

After some initial design discovery, NSF engaged CivicActions in September of 2018 to begin a site-wide redesign and migration. The legacy NSF.gov site — built mostly in static HTML — was hard to manage and laborious to update. We knew a scalable, flexible CMS solution was needed, so we got right to work on development and design — starting the site infrastructure, building the initial set of components, and kicking off design research.

Identifying “top tasks” of various user groups helps us solve the right problems for people.

Deliver fast and improve continually

By the spring of 2019, we’d launched beta.nsf.gov and established an iterative, MVP-based approach that allowed our design and development team to release and test content with static data while continuing to build out the site infrastructure. Later that year, we released an updated Careers portal on https://beta.nsf.gov/careers, and began research on the Funding portal and the Funding Search feature.

Improve organizational processes

Working closely with NSF stakeholders, we continued to steadily test and release features, launching the Science Matters blog and an updated top level menu in February 2020. By the fall, we integrated the Pims Rest API to streamline NSF’s online program management, and deployed the Drupal Layout Builder tool that allows content editors to drag and drop content as they build and publish pages.

Partnership for public good

In 2021, after extensive research, testing and iteration, the updated Funding Search Portal will be launched in June — creating a simpler, quicker way to fund the research that powers the U.S. scientific community. Additionally that year, CivicActions was awarded a $44 million contract extension to continue supporting this important work. As we look to the future with a growing team and ambitious goals, we are grateful for our ongoing partnership with NSF.