• Read more about NASA Wins People’s Voice Webby for Government & Civil Innovation

NASA.gov, the agency’s primary website, has been awarded the 2019 People’s Voice Award in the Government & Civil Innovation category!

NASA.gov, led by Brian Dunbar, NASA’s Internet Services Manager, continues to incorporate cutting-edge technology solutions to communicate the excitement of exploration to the global online public. NASA’s commitment to innovation has been the foundation for NASA.gov’s continued success and solidifies its position as one of the most visited website in the federal government.

NASA’s Office of Communications has managed NASA.gov, the agency’s primary home on the web since 1994, setting a high standard for government online communications. This is the 5^th time NASA.gov has won the Government & Civil Innovation Webby award in the last 6 years, winning each time it has been nominated!

The site receives an average of more than 300,000 visits a day, and surges with major announcements, such as the discovery of the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, which brought in 6.7 million visits in a week.

Mobomo has been thrilled to be part of an award winning team at NASA – we are excited to see what’s in store for the future.

• Read more about Our Work With NOAA Fisheries

In late 2016, Mobomo partnered with NOAA Fisheries to assist in restructuring and redesigning their digital presence. Merging all their core web properties into one Drupal site. Allowing users to go to one destination to find and discover information they need. Focusing on improving content efficiency, design consistency, and unifying NOAA Fisheries voice. Within one year we launched the framework for their next generation site.

About NOAA Fisheries

NOAA Fisheries is a federal agency that conserves and manages U.S. waters to promote prevention of overfishing, declining species and degraded habitats. NOAA Fisheries manages five coastal regions broken down by department, fisheries management, science centers, and labs. Each office ran their own independent site creating inconsistency and overlap in content and design as each digital property sat isolated.

How We Unified their Content

NOAA Fisheries as a whole covers many areas of information dealing with marine life. Each of the 10 core properties containing up to 10,000 pages and 5,000 pdf files. Together, we worked with 50+ stakeholders to discovery the consistency in their content and workflow. Creating ways to automation their content and move it over to a more tag driven system.

Putting the Site to the Test

NOAA Fisheries were moving to a topic based information architecture and wanted Mobomo to user test and suggest improvements. In our evationtion, we ran two types of user tests targeting four key audiences. This process took over two months to complete running 6 rounds of tests. Each test we Iterating each time based on the user insight we received improving their success rate by 13%.

First Test) How Users Group & Labels Items

We started out our evaluation by testing how users group items compared to the current sitemap. We tested over 100 people across all audiences in one week discovered that majority were not using the technical vocabulary that NOAA was using in their navigation concept. As a result, we select key categories and ran another test to see if users can still group all the items in our new groups, which provided technical terms was the issue.

Second Test) How Users Interacted with the Structure

After our rounds of sitemap revisions using the tool slickplan, we wanted to validate our sitemap again with our audiences. We used Treejack, a digital navigation tool that allow use to not only test the top level nav, but secondary and third levels of navigation. We conduct four rounds of testing focusing on only 10 individuals per audience. Each round we iterated focusing on where users clicked, improving task success as well as user directness. Our final sitemap scored 91% success rate, up from 13% from the first iteration.

Simplifying The Complexity

NOAA Fisheries site is more than a conveyor of marine life information and research, but offers a large variety types of information. From summaries of upcoming rules, archive of past rules, permits, funding opportunities, to various types of helpful resources. Each section had its own challenges for us to learn and develop automated solutions around. The goal was to automatic and simplify the content for users to locate as well as editors to post and manage.

Pushing For Dynamic Content

An unique aspect about NOAA Fisheries content is that their subject matter could cross over various topics and subtopics. Prior, content editors would duplicate information or manually link out overlapping information. This was one element NOAA Fisheries wanted to remove and streamline. As a result, we build topic templates that had auto populate feeds based on each custom tab in the template. Providing editor's the ability tag their content to have it display in specific tabs across the site. Now, Users can go into a topic and easily skim the lasted background information based sub-area of interest. Moreover, search and filter it down even more.

Simplifying Fishing Rules & Regulations

When it comes with the rules and regulation, there are a lot of nuances when trying to catch a fish. NOAA Fisheries does a great job interpreting the technical information posted on the Federal Registry for fisherman. We wanted to continue that message throughout all aspects of rules that NOAA Fisheries covers. As a result, we created key directory that allow fishermen to toggle between what matter most to them. Enabling them to view weekly fishing update, upcoming rule changes, or just view all the rules for the type of spices.

Expanding Species Profiles

The biggest draw to NOAA Fisheries site was their protected species profiles pages. Moreover, in our user testing we found that majority of users look for key information under species profile. This lead the push for expansion of species profiles. Currently, NOAA Fisheries only had profiles for protected species only and one of the five regions had for fish. We work together to create a new framework of common key information for these new revamp profiles. The goal is provided simple overview information for the general public, scientific area for the scientists, rules & regulation information for the fisherman and government employees. Furthermore, we provided them of simple species directory and category view, which never existed prior.

Designing For Success

Rapid Prototyping & Iteration

Communication and expectations are key to the success of any project. In order to maintain this throughout our project, we used Invision to create our flat designs into clickable prototypes. This allow the client to better visualize what their site will look and act like. Each week, we focused on key sections and deliver interactive designs, which would review and quickly iterate. However, as the project grew, we switch to Webflow, interactive web builder, to better showcase responsive design and better interaction. As a result, we had build an interactive reference for both the development team and stakeholders to use throughout the entire project.

Building a Design System

Consistency is the most important aspect of a site, especially larger projects like NOAA Fisheries. Inconsistencies in designs and layouts can create more complex, more code, longer load times, and increase maintenance and expansion. However, the solution is more than just online brand guidelines, but a documentation and implementation of all reusable components, templates, and styles. The style guide was first created in Sketch of all the modules/symbols, colors, and styles. We moved it to Webflow with more of site structure, which we are in the process of converting our templates to be component driven as well building a live style guide.

Road Mapping to Success

Prioritization is key in building and launching a successful project. Together we work with NOAA Fisheries to help narrow down their needs and wants to help stay pace with their timeline. Websites should never be considered done, but a work in progress that is always improving and innovating. In the upcoming years, we will be working with NOAA Fisheries in migrating their content. During that time, we will be working on new features and improvements making it more automatic and efficient for users and editors. Ensuring we are creating a creating user experience for both their visitors and the content editors.

• Read more about Growing WordPress In The Federal Government

It is safe to say that at the moment, WordPress does not have the largest presence in the federal government. By large, Drupal is the preferred CMS in the federal government.

Recently, we spoke at WordCamp DC where we were able to outline some reasons as to why and how we can help WordPress grow throughout the federal government.

First, lets identify some of the problems keeping WordPress less popular. There are three main reasons that Drupal appears to be the popular CMS over WordPress.

WordPress developers frequently hear a lot of these arguments and concerns about WordPress.

Drupal is more flexible and complex because:“Drupal contains taxonomies, content types, blocks, views, and user/role management”

We hear this a lot, but it’s misleading to say because WordPress also offers the following:

Drupal handles large volumes of content much better than WordPress

Often times, this seems like a moot argument. Whenever we hear people arguing about X framework versus Y framework it usually boils down to scalability.  But are you ever going to reach those upper limits you are arguing for? And if so, why can’t WordPress handle “large volumes of content”? We developers have seen plenty of sites with thousands of pages and posts.

Drupal can support thousands of pages and thousands of users

So can WordPress! WordPress.com is a single instance of the WordPress  Multisite codebase and serves millions of websites and users.Edublogs.org hosts millions of sites on one WordPress Multisite installation with over 3 million users. 

Drupal is more secure than WordPress - WordPress is plagued with vulnerabilities

It’s true that over the years, there have a been a number of high profile vulnerabilities, but these vulnerabilities are almost always a result of using a poorly built plugin, or out of date plugin.  WordPress itself is very quick to fix any discovered vulnerabilities. So installing free, low quality plugins or just the first plugin you see is not WordPress’s fault.

That’s a managerial decision, and that that needs to change. Same goes for not staying on top of your plugin updates. If you choose not to update your plugins, or you choose to keep a plugin that hasn’t been updated in years, then you take the risk of running something with security vulnerabilities.

Personally I think this is a perspective people have about websites in general.  That once you build it the first time, you can just walk away from it and not think about it again and we wish that were the case.  But like your cars, you need to maintain it to keep it running smoothly.

WordPress was originally built as a blogging platform

Yes that’s true, but WordPress, just like everything else has grown and changed.  WordPress hasn’t been a “blogging” platform for years.  Our WordPress engineer Kyle Jennings uses WordPress as an application framework to build user centric web apps.

WordPress goes the extra mile

A lot of these arguments above seem to be related to WordPress’s approach to addressing the same issues that Drupal has addressed,but at the end of the day these discrepancies don’t actually exist. And because WordPress also offers user friendliness and intuitive design, that have in our opinion blown Drupal out of the water, we think the real discrepancies lay with Drupal.

Extra Incentives Supporting WordPress

In 2015, the U.S. Digital Services teamed up with 18f to create an official front-end framework for government websites called U.S. Web Design Standards (USWDS). It is basically Twitter’s Bootstrap but built for the federal government and focuses on accessibility compliances, making it easy and affordable for agencies to build or rebuild their websites.

Our WordPress developer, Kyle Jennings built a WordPress theme named Benjamin with these standards. Benjamin makes extensive use of the awesome WordPress Customizer to provide a ton of flexible and thoughtful settings as well as a live preview of your changes. Here is a quick overview of settings:

So by using Benjamin and Franklin, agencies can quickly and easily spin up their own websites, that are branded with federally ordained style guidelines as well as easily customize their sites to meet their needs at any given time.

In case you missed the top reasons why the federal government is moving to Drupal be sure to read and let us know which content management system you prefer!

• Read more about Mobomo Partners with Drupal

Mobomo believes in partnering. Over the years we have partnered with Amazon, IBM, Tracx, and a number of other companies and organizations. We are pleased to announce our recent partnership with the Drupal Association (https://assoc.drupal.org), Drupal has been a major contributor in the community for many years. 

Drupal is an open-source content management system framework used to make many of the websites and applications that you use every day. Drupal has great standard features like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets Drupal apart from other solutions is its flexibility and extensibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Drupal allows you to build the versatile, structured content that is needed for engaging and dynamic web experiences.

We are very pleased to be a part of the Drupal community, since we have developed Drupal solutions for major Federal Government websites in the past this partnership only makes sense. We are excited about our partnerships and look forward to building bigger and better things as a supporting partner of Drupal.org. Be sure to visit our Drupal page.

• Read more about User-Centric Design for Federal Websites

For Federal Offices of Communication, the act—and art—of balancing websites that both cater to the public and promote the organizational structure and mission of the organization is always top of mind. Accordingly, those partnering with Federal offices must prioritize meeting both needs when designing and building agency sites. On numerous projects, our team has successfully managed to increase usability and deliver user-centric designs while simultaneously building sites that allow our Federal clients to bolster their brand. A sample of results for some clients:

-a swift 4% increase in first-time visitor overall satisfaction
-76% of all mobile users strongly agreeing that the new site made content easier to find
-88% of frequently visiting teens being satisfied with the new site

Below are some of the tools we’ve implemented to achieve success:

Navigation and Information Architecture

Treejack is a great usability testing tool that development teams can wield to test the information architecture and navigation of the site prior to even beginning a design. It is best used to test the findability of topics in a website using different navigational hierarchies. For one of our projects, both internal and external stakeholders were given 46 tasks to perform using a variety of different navigation hierarchies to find the most optimal site organization for both constituent groups.

Usability Testing

For usability testing, our team leverages both Loop11 and Usertesting.com. Using a live, interactive environment, both of these tools allow development teams to gain deep understanding of user behavior by observing users as they complete a series of tasks and questions on the site and/or mobile app in question. Interactions are captured and then analyzed in comprehensive reports. As an added bonus, Usertesting.com provides video footage of the interaction for review:

http://bit.ly/1rRvEAm

In summary, Federal websites and applications are often designed with too much emphasis on organizational hierarchy and goals, and too little focus on meeting end-users’ needs and expectations. User-Centric Design (UCD) tools can help government agencies buck this trend, however, allowing them to create websites and applications that engage users and maximize their interaction. Ultimately, this results in a sure win-win: Federal agencies’ constituents can experience an efficient, satisfying, and user-friendly design, and—with constituents’ increased engagement—organizations can ensure that their missions and information are communicated effectively. Act balanced.

• Read more about Apple Watch: A Look Inside

At the time of this writing (pre-WWDC 2015), there are a number of limitations on what Apple Watch code can do. The primary limitation is that watch apps cannot exist by themselves. It is necessary for the watch app to be a part of a corresponding phone app. Apple has said they will not accept watch apps where the phone app does not do anything itself. Also, watch-only apps (such as watch faces) are not allowed for this same reason—although it’s rumored that this may change after WWDC 2015.

Another Apple Watch limitation is that Core Graphics animations are not supported, but animated GIFs are. Complex layouts (such as overlapping elements) are not allowed. However, elements can be positioned as if they overlap—provided only one element is visible at a time. Using actions such as taps and timers, the visibility of these "overlapping" elements can be changed. This can be implemented to provide a more dynamic interface. Another major limitation (also whispered to change after WWDC 2015) is that watch apps cannot access any of the hardware on the watch including the motion sensor and heart sensor.

Most watch app processing (controller logic) is done on the phone instead of the watch, and some delays are inherent in the Bluetooth communication that transpires between the watch and the phone as the view (on the watch) talks back to the controller (on the phone). This view/controller split is not obvious in the code, but the watch/phone split is obvious in the code, as the watch cannot access anything from the phone, even though the controller logic is running on the phone side—except via a specific watch-to-phone request.

One notable feature is the watch app’s ability to explicitly call the phone app with a dictionary and obtain a dictionary response. This functionality allows the developer to then set up a number of client-server style requests, where the watch is the client, and the phone is the server. For example, the watch can request information from—or record information to—the phone. The phone (which has storage and may have Internet connectivity) can then fulfill the request and provide data in response to the watch. This can drive the phone app's UI to provide near-real-time synchronization of the watch app display, as well as the phone app display.

Custom notifications (both local notifications and push notifications) are supported on the watch. These custom notifications can have a somewhat customized layout as well as having the ability to define a set of custom actions. After performing one of these actions, the watch app is started. Apple mentions not to use notifications as a way to just launch the watch app from the phone app. Apple maintains that the notifications should provide useful information.

One developer test limitation relates to custom watch notifications (for local notifications).  Since watch notifications are only displayed if the phone is asleep, there is no direct way to test custom watch notifications.  Because of this, XCode does provide a mechanism to test push notifications in the simulator (using a JSON file), but there is no similar mechanism to test local notifications. Still, one can certainly test local notifications with the physical device.

• Read more about NASA Uses "Headless" Drupal To Reach New Website Heights

In April 2015, NASA unveiled a brand new look and user experience for NASA.gov. This release revealed a site modernized to 1) work across all devices and screen sizes (responsive web design), 2) eliminate visual clutter, and 3) highlight the continuous flow of news updates, images, and videos.

With its latest site version, NASA—already an established leader in the digital space—has reached even higher heights by being one of the first federal sites to use a “headless” Drupal approach. Though this model was used when the site was initially migrated to Drupal in 2013, this most recent deployment rounded out the endeavor by using the Services module to provide a REST interface, and ember.js for the client-side, front-end framework.

Implementing a “headless” Drupal approach prepares NASA for the future of content management systems (CMS) by:

1. Leveraging the strength and flexibility of Drupal’s back-end to easily architect content models and ingest content from other sources. As examples:

• Our team created the concept of an “ubernode”, a content type which homogenizes fields across historically varied content types (e.g., features, images, press releases, etc.). Implementing an “ubernode” enables easy integration of content in web services feeds, allowing developers to seamlessly pull multiple content types into a single, “latest news” feed. This approach also provides a foundation for the agency to truly embrace the “Create Once, Publish Everywhere” philosophy of content development and syndication to multiple channels, including mobile applications, GovDelivery, iTunes, and other third party applications.

• Additionally, the team harnessed Drupal’s power to integrate with other content stores and applications, successfully ingesting content from blogs.nasa.gov, svs.gsfc.nasa.gov, earthobservatory.nasa.gov, www.spc.noaa.gov, etc., and aggregating the sourced content for publication.

2. Optimizing the front-end by building with a client-side, front-end framework, as opposed to a theme. For this task, our team chose ember.js, distinguished by both its maturity as a framework and its emphasis of convention over configuration. Ember embraces model-view-controller (MVC), and also excels at performance by batching updates to the document object model (DOM) and bindings.

In another stride toward maximizing “Headless” Drupal’s massive potential, we configured the site so that JSON feed records are published to an Amazon S3 bucket as an origin for a content delivery network (CDN), ultimately allowing for a high-security, high-performance, and highly available site.

Below is an example of how the technology stack which we implemented works:

Using ember.js, the NASA.gov home page requests a list of nodes of the latest content to display. Drupal provides this list as a JSON feed of nodes:

Ember then retrieves specific content for each node. Again, Drupal provides this content as a JSON response stored on Amazon S3:

Finally, Ember distributes these results into the individual items for the home page:

The result? A NASA.gov architected for the future. It is worth noting that upgrading to Drupal 8 can be done without reconfiguring the ember front-end. Further, migrating to another front-end framework (such as Angular or Backbone) does not require modification of the Drupal CMS.

• Read more about Mobomo Announces Management Changes

We are excited to announce expansion and growth of Mobomo's executive team:

Ken Fang, formerly CEO, will now serve as President of the company. Since joining in 2010, Ken has led Mobomo from a small startup to a company with over $5M in annual revenue, a more than tripled staff, consecutively high rankings by Inc. 5000, over 120 product launches, and an increasingly glowing client roster. In Ken's new role, he will be focused on high-level company strategy, corporate partnerships, and sales.

Brian Lacey will be assuming Ken's responsibilities as CEO. Brian joined Mobomo in 2011 as a Project Manager, and because of his passion for UX design, was quickly promoted to Creative Director. Within a short period of time, Brian was soon appointed COO, and under his tenure, Mobomo successfully built out well-defined design, development, and quality assurance capabilities. He also spearheaded the founding of the Buenos Aires office and helped acquire Exceptual Technologies, among other operational expansions.

Jesse Vizcaino will be assuming Brian's responsibilities as COO. In 2012, Jesse launched his Mobomo career as a Project Manager and quickly rose to Director. In his various roles, he has been instrumental in guiding Mobomo’s strategic direction, streamlining operations, and signing flagship customers such as the District of Columbia Retirement Board and the National Library of Medicine.

Please join us in congratulating Ken, Brian, and Jesse: we’re excited to see the great things they’ll accomplish in their new roles, and wish them all the best.

• Read more about Federal Mobile Computing Summit 2014: Government in the Future

We were particularly proud to see one of our favorite clients, Peter Dewar, Chief Technology Officer at the District of Columbia Retirement Board (DCRB), participate in a thought-provoking panel on Wearables and the Internet of Things. The session's description as a “visionary panel” proved to be true, as all of the participants outlined the groundbreaking mobile capabilities they foresaw as feasible within the next five years.

Mr. Dewar described his vision for implementing Google Glass in the office, at conferences—even for pension fund participants, staff, and Board members. Taking the idea of “smart rooms” even further, he also described a futuristic conference room, which would be able to set up a meeting’s required media (think dial-ins, projectors, etc.) upon the meeting organizer’s entrance or (biometric) authentication.

We from Mobomo were on the edge of our seats thinking about the possibilities, and excited about building them—especially for our government clients. Congrats to Peter Dewar for a great panel session, and thanks to Tom Suder for hosting yet another fantastic summit. We’re looking forward to next year’s—and to the future of mobile (in the government!).

• Read more about Ken Fang presents at the HowTo.gov Mobile First Webinar

Federal agency mobile implementation is an important aspect of the Digital Government Strategy, so last week the Mobile Gov team and Digital Gov University partnered for a “Mobile First” Webinar. A “mobile first” approach is where new websites and applications are designed for mobile devices first, instead of designed for the traditional desktop.  Representatives from government and the private sector spoke about what it means to be “mobile first.” You can listen to the entire webinar, but here are some highlights:

Ken Fang from Mobomo Inc. talked about the importance of a mobile first approach, citing the increasing percent of traffic routing from mobile devices. Fang  proposed three steps to consider when choosing a device and platform to develop.

1. Consider your audience needs and remembering who and what you are making the app for.
2. Think about what kind of content will be sent out.
3. Think platform strategy —answering whether you develop for one device or choose a different route such as an API or responsive design.