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.

The challenge

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) relies on its website to provide regulatory guidance to millions of visitors across various industries. But the old site was hard for users to navigate and frustrating for employees to manage.

In this rapid engagement, CivicActions worked hand-in-hand with the FCC to build a modern, mobile-friendly Drupal website that was more accessible and easier to update.

Client goal

The FCC’s cumbersome, outdated site was not doing its users or internal content managers justice. On top of antiquated technology, the Commission's waterfall processes made it harder for content managers to keep the site updated and relevant for its diverse audiences. The policies and the product needed a refresh.

• Transition from waterfall to Agile methodology
• Migrate legacy content from various systems to a modern Drupal Content Management System (CMS)
• Ease public access to regulatory information through a mobile-friendly web experience
• Save FCC administrators time and money with more efficient content management
• Provide reliability and stability by implementing Quality Assurance (QA) testing

Our approach

We had to work fast and our deployment options were limited by security considerations, so we rolled up our sleeves and turned up the collaboration. By implementing a modern Drupal CMS and Agile practices, we helped the FCC modernize its approach to content while avoiding disruptions for users and maintaining a secure environment.

Seamless content migration and management

FCC has a very active user community, so we had to move quickly and avoid disruptions. We performed a massive content migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and consolidated content from various legacy systems into one CMS. To make the content creation and editing more pleasant and efficient, we added a robust text editor and new access controls. This allowed FCC’s many content creators to manage their own content without compromising the integrity of the site’s design.

The modernized FCC.gov is clean, simple, and easy to use for visitors and agency staff.

Accessible content

The FCC is responsible for the accessibility of 21st Century communications, so there was no room for accessibility errors on its website. We scanned the site for compliance issues and quickly resolved them. The current website serves as a model for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and complies with Section 508 requirements.

The mobile-optimized user experience lets people do business with FCC from anywhere.

Automatic testing for quality code

Knowing that government websites can be subject to degradation over time as new code is added, we also wanted to help FCC achieve sustainability for their site. We used Behat—a behavior-driven development testing framework that can double as user acceptance test criteria—to make sure all new code worked properly. We configured Behat tests to run automatically whenever new code was merged, ensuring a quality codebase for years to come.

Improved practices for better staff experience

The content editors at FCC were drowning in waterfall processes that didn’t let them respond quickly to evolving needs at the agency. To ease content management and improve the employee experience, we worked with key stakeholders to implement Agile practices. Together we curated priorities, made sure the end result met real user needs, and helped the FCC transition to ways of working better suited to the digital age.