Blog

Design systems in government: How to ease handoffs

October 11, 2019

The end of a contract and subsequent transition represents a risk: not only will the system potentially sit idle or be forgotten, but the culture change you’ve been trying to effect may stop as well.

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Design systems in government: When to start

October 03, 2019

These two systems provide a helpful contrast for what it looks like when you begin a project with a design system and when you add it later. Let’s dig in.

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Launching a government MVP in less than a month

October 01, 2019

On behalf of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, we recently launched a site for insurance issuers. We went from zero lines of code to a production MVP serving pilot users in under a month.

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Design systems in government: Improving documentation for better collaboration

September 26, 2019

In this post, we’re going to provide some guidance on building or maintaining the documentation for design systems, but many of these concepts could easily apply to other types of projects.

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Using feature flags and dynamic blocks in Terraform 0.12.x

September 24, 2019

With the advent of the new HCL 2 language in Terraform, I’ve been using the newly available methods to make the internal Terraform modules that my team has written more functional and less inter-dependent.

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Design systems in government: Communication is critical

September 18, 2019

Design system communication is a two-way street. Establishing a strong communication strategy to get information from teams using the design system and provide the core team with information is critical for its success.

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Design systems in government: Less can be more

September 12, 2019

Let’s examine two directions you can take when creating a government design system: incorporate everything into the design system, or make the design system as small and flexible as possible.

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The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 5: Scaling design systems

September 10, 2019

The details of how the Office of Management and Budget will interpret this mandate into regulation are still to be determined, and it’s important that those regulations provide a smart, flexible way for agencies to adopt the USWDS.

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The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 4: Prioritize modernization with user research

September 04, 2019

The 21st Century IDEA Act mandates that every agency prioritize public services that need modernization. The best way for agencies to prioritize their services is to thoroughly research how users interact with those services.

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Ad Hoc wins contracts to continue support of Veteran digital services

August 28, 2019

Recently, Ad Hoc and our prime contractor partners at Oddball and GovernmentCIO won two contracts from the Department of Veterans Affairs to support the VA’s Veteran-Facing Services Applications and Platform programs.

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The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 3: Customized, mobile-friendly experiences

August 26, 2019

Today, we’ll finish up the first section of the IDEA Act with the final two requirements for public websites and digital services.

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What makes an API simple?

August 23, 2019

Whenever you're trying to make something simple, it's important to think of the people who are using your tool.

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