Making Mobile Gov: User Experience Recommendations

How We Did It

Last November, as part of revisiting the state of Mobile Gov, government mobile innovators identified a need for guidelines to help create amazing and engaging mobile user experiences. We convened a group to workshop around elements of mobile user experience with the goal to develop user experience practices for government.

We then asked you to set priorities and help hone a set of useful, actionable user experience guidelines and recommendations that agencies could adopt. More than 100 people from 35 federal agencies, states, the private sector and academia helped rank these practices in our crowdsourcing effort.

We took the feedback, did some analysis and posted these guidelines and recommendations developed by Mobile Gov practitioners.

What We Found

We ended up with a foundation of 42 recommendations for agencies.

Information architecture (IA) practices–that is the logical structures that help people find information and complete tasks–were identified as the most critical recommendation. Bottom line, with less real estate on mobile screens, Mobile Gov developers need to focus on making the information and/or task easier to find.

See the Mobile User Experience Toolkit for help you can use to create good mobile IA.

The conversation on mobile user experience is not finished with just IA. It’s just heating up. As you can see, mobilegov innovators also recommended practices in functionality, content, trustworthiness and design.

What’s Next****

First, take a look at the recommendations. They are meant to evolve as this fast moving technology evolves. Let us know what’s missing. Tell us how we can be clearer. Share your UX tips in the comment section of the recommendations page.

Then, check out the discussion with the folks from NIH, Department of Labor and the State Department who led this effort in the webinar below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPQ8Yob3Z9U&w=600]