18F Content Guide

18F content designers and strategists join cross-functional teams to collaboratively improve user experiences across government. This guide is here to help us get the job done. It’s neither a step-by-step tutorial nor a set of rules. Instead, it’s a starting point for 18F-led content design: doing it, discussing it, and ensuring it’s done to a consistent level of quality.

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Under development

This guide is currently under development. It is a living guide that will continue to be added to and updated over time. You can review our goals, preview the site on Federalist, contribute or get a general overview below.

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Table of contents

1. About
2. Our approach
   1. Values and principles
   2. Defining design
   3. Stay lean
   4. Meet partners where they are
3. Research
   1. Clarify the basics
   2. Plan
   3. Do
   4. Make research actionable
   5. Legal
   6. Privacy
   7. Bias
   8. Ethics
4. Design
   1. Build a prototype
   2. Use a design system
5. Resources

Development

The UX Guide uses USWDS-Jekyll.

To test it locally:

1. Clone this repo
2. In the local clone of this repo, run jekyll serve

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Contributors

This guide was collaboratively authored by members of 18F’s UX team past and present. While the initial content was pulled together over a few months, the guide builds on institutional knowledge from across 18F over the years. Here are the members of the UX guide working group:

• Qituwra Anderson
• Melissa Braxton
• Jeremy Canfield
• Jennifer Damis
• Matt Dobson
• Vishal Iyer
• John Donmoyer
• Nikki Lee
• Julia Lindpaintner
• Corey Mahoney
• Andrew Maier
• Anne Petersen
• Ben Peterson
• Jacklynn Pham
• Laura Poncé
• Aditi Rao
• Mark Trammell