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Building equitable systems

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Designing the unseen: Enabling institutions to build public trust

Five Nava designers explain how design can contribute to behind-the-scenes service improvement in government.

How our work with Montana WIC demonstrated the value of a national API standard

A national API standard can help fuel modernization to improve the WIC experience for staff, participants, and applicants.

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As a recession looms, government agencies are readying unemployment insurance systems

State governments modernizing their unemployment insurance systems would benefit from an agile and human-centered design approach.

The first fifty years of civic design

Tracing civic design's history can help the field become more resilient.

Meeting people where they are with community engagement

When it comes to public service technology, human-centered design and agile development can support a state’s broader community engagement efforts.

An illustration of a middle-aged Black man in a wheelchair sitting at a desk. He is typing on a laptop and holding a phone between his ear and shoulder.

Testing accessibility at every step of designing and building technology

Improving accessibility to public services with an online application for a state's Medicaid for the aged, blind, and disabled (ABD) supplement.

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How to prepare for the unexpected with strong, scalable website architecture

Biden’s student loan forgiveness announcement caused outages on StudentAid.gov. Scalable architecture can help prevent these issues in the future.

Human-centered design

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Three models for cloud adoption in government

We’ve found that categorizing cloud adoption projects into three models helps us maximize the value cloud can provide our government partners.

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Building public benefit claims trackers across states

What we learned helping design and build public benefits claims trackers for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as the state of California.

Why human-centered testing is crucial to building government software

At Nava, we’ve leaned into modern and open-source frontend testing options to ensure seamless experiences for the constituents we serve.

Aligning technology and policy

An illustration of a middle-aged Black man in a wheelchair sitting at a desk. He is typing on a laptop and holding a phone between his ear and shoulder.

Bringing diverse perspectives to help modernize ADA.gov

The Department of Justice contracted Nava and 18F to redesign ADA.gov, aiming to make ADA rights easier to find, understand, and share.

Why policymakers and technologists should engage throughout the policy cycle

Bridging the gap between the policymakers who define programs and the development teams who implement them builds better government services for all.

Healing policy papercuts

Aligning small conflicts in application requirements makes public benefits easier to access.