- Does your product or service have access to people with design, development, and research skills?
- What are the key metrics your service uses to measure success?
- How are your success metrics tied to positive customer or user outcomes?
- How have these metrics performed over the life of the service?
- Do you have system monitoring tools and processes in place to identify and respond to issues?
- Which tools are in place to measure user behavior, and how do you use them?
- Do you measure customer satisfaction and take steps to improve satisfaction?
- Do you assess your customer experience maturity and develop action plans to identify focus areas for improvement?
- How are you collecting user feedback for bugs and other product issues?
- Do all members of the project team participate in user interviews and research activities?
- Do you cultivate direct community participation in your project with activities like hackathons?
- How often are you reviewing and addressing feedback and analytics?
- Do you contribute feedback to services your project uses?

Listen Considerations USWDS

- Actively collect issues. 
- Collect direct feedback. l).
- Analyze analytics data. 
- Analyze search results.
- Analyze social media data.
- Publish metrics. 
- Coordinate large projects with service design. 
- Involve the team in research. I
- Use direct observation. 
- Keep testing. Test and re-test with real users.
- Share back. Contribute feedback and share solutions back to the internal and open source projects you use.

Listen Practical Actions USWDS

"Evaluate and improve your product by listening to your audience and learning from what you hear. Continuous feedback drives continuous improvement. Measure customer experience — how well what we’ve built is working for our audience — at every stage of a project, and as projects grow and mature."

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

"These design principles are intended to help teams across government align on important common goals and better use the design system — to be an evaluative lens for design and implementation decisions."

USWDS Design Principles

U.S. Web Design System

"Real user needs should inform product decisions. Whether our audience includes members of the public or government employees, decision-makers must include real people in our design process from the beginning. Then, we need to test the assumptions we make and the products and services we build with real people, to keep us focused on what is most useful and important."

Start with real user needs (USWDS)

Trust has to be earned every time. Federal websites and digital services can’t assume it. Trust is about understanding and meeting or exceeding expectations, a process that can be established quickly and maintained over continued interactions, but is easily damaged. Be reliable, consistent, and honest. Reduce the impact of failure with solid design and engineering. Be a good steward of your audience’s data, resources, and time.

Earn Trust USWDS

"Accessibility affects everybody, build it into every decision. Legal requirements are a critical, necessary starting point, but this is only the beginning. Accessibility is about real people who use our services — it’s usability for people who interact with products differently. Everyone who works on government websites has a role to play in making federal resources accessible and inclusive. Design generously and celebrate accessibility requirements as a set of design constraints that help us create a better product for all users."

Embrace accessibility USWDS

"Minimize disruption and provide a consistent experience: throughout services, over time, and across agencies, platforms, and devices. Consistency is not necessarily conformity. Agencies, sites, and services may have different audiences, missions, and goals — and the way we implement our solutions may differ — but we promote continuity by starting from shared solutions and values. Strive to build user-centered solutions that address the whole experience, not just a user’s specific task, but the context of their journey."

Learn Before

Related

Learn After