CivicActions, along with our partner Fearless, facilitated Drupal 10 upgrades across the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) suite of websites, bringing improvements for editors, better security and accessibility, and community contributions to streamline upgrades for large- scale Drupal. The new Claro administration theme is cleaner, clearer, and more accessible.

The new rich text editor CKEditor 5 provides many UI enhancements and an improved user experience. The most significant change from previous versions of CKEditor is that editors must now use a predefined set of elements to configure the content, which leads to fewer instances of invalid markup patterns making their way into the published site. Since invalid or non-semantic markup is often the cause of accessibility issues, this is a major upgrade. In addition, the improved Layout Builder experience makes it easier for content editors to control more complex layouts, while still keeping consistent with CMS Design System standards.

The 8 sites included in the upgrade, which occurred ahead of schedule, were: CMS.gov; Medicare.gov; Openpaymentsdata.cms.gov; Data.medicaid.gov; Data.healthcare.gov; SDIS.medicaid.gov (internal CMS site); PFS.data.cms.gov (internal CMS site); QIC.cms.gov (internal CMS site); and Provider Data Catalog (data.cms.gov/provider-data).

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resource libraries, discussion groups, and self-guided courses — but these were located on various websites that were outdated and confusing to navigate.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.