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Articles by Carolyn Dew
Week of August 3, 2025
Futility Of Chasing Wealth Sunday, August 3 Ecclesiastes 1:2, 13-14; 2:18-23 The phrase “vanity of vanities” in today’s passage conveys the idea that life is meaningless and futile in worldly pursuits. Apart from God, our life, thoughts, and worldly possessions are meaningless and empty. Solomon had it all at his fingertips. Yet he found that chasing worldly goods amounts to nothing. The things of this world add nothing to the meaning of life.
How design consistency helps users navigate federal websites
We launched the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, and over the next month, we plan to explore various topics related to design standards. In this post, we detail how our user research informed the decision decisions we made. While conducting research for the Federal Front Door study, we learned people rely heavily on search engines for the information they seek.
How to integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into existing projects
One of the most common questions we receive is: Should I integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into my existing project? The answer is: it depends. A lot of design research supports the notion that many people who use government websites or services may benefit from consistency across interactions, user experiences, and behavior across those websites.
How user archetypes informed the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards
This past fall, we announced the alpha release of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards, a set of “open source UI components and a visual style guide to create consistency and beautiful user experiences across U.S. federal government websites.” When we started work on the standards, we knew we needed to start with a strong understanding of our users. We had two groups in mind — one was our end users, the folks who would eventually be using the government sites built with the Draft Standards.
Making the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards better through your feedback
Since our launch of the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards last September, hundreds of people have provided feedback on the project through GitHub issues and via email. We’ve received dozens of feature requests as well as over 400 contributions from the open source community. Over the past five months, we’ve incorporated suggestions from the feedback we’ve received, resolved a number of outstanding issues, and made various updates to our content and structure.
18F: Digital service delivery | Trust as a two-way street between the government and the people it serves
This is part seven of a series detailing the findings of a team of researchers from 18F and the General Services Administration who studied broad trends in people’s perceptions of and interactions with the government. You can find the introduction to the series on our website and a complete pdf of the research findings on a new microsite that details the themes the research team is investigating. In yesterday’s post, we talked about choice overload affecting decision-making..
Informing the future of the Federal Front Door
In our last post, we introduced the Federal Front Door project and briefly described a six-week discovery phase, in which we set out to better understand how the general public feels about and interacts with the federal government, so that we can design and build products that improve people’s experience across government agencies. We think of the federal front door as the places the public first interacts with their government.
IA Summit 2016 Speakers
Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn't Want to be Free and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group.
Happy Valentine's Day from the U.S. Web Design Standards team
How do we love the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards? Let us count the ways. This Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing some love from the Standards, which include a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites. These tools — and these Valentine’s Day cards — follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and use the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design.
Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards
This project was a collaboration between 18F and the U.S. Digital Service (USDS). The team was led by Mollie Ruskin (USDS) and Julia Elman (18F) and made up of designers and developers in both groups, including Maya Benari (18F), Carolyn Dew (18F), Victor Garcia (USDS), Angel Kittiyachavalit (USDS), Colin MacArthur (18F), and Marco Segreto (18F). Joanne is a young Army Veteran who is looking to make use of her GI Bill Benefits and apply for federal student loans to attend college.
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