• Read more about Usability and UX Can Make Space Cool for Everyone

Back in 2013, when I first joined Mobomo, we migrated NASA.gov from a proprietary content management system (CMS) to Amazon Cloud and Drupal 7. It goes without saying, but there was a lot riding on getting it right. The NASA site had to handle high traffic and page views each day, without service interruptions, and the new content management system had to accommodate a high volume of content updates each day. In addition to having no room for compromise on performance and availability, the site also had to have a high level of security. 

Maybe the biggest challenge, though, was laying the groundwork to achieve NASA’s vision for a website with greater usability and enhanced user experiences. If NASA’s audience all fell into the same demographic, that goal probably wouldn’t have seemed so intimidating, but NASA’s audience includes space fans who range from scientists to elementary school kids. 

Our mission was to create a mobile-first site that stayed true to NASA’s brand and spoke to all of the diverse members of its audience. A few years later, we relaunched a user-centric site that directed visitors from a dynamic home page to microsites designed specifically for them.

Making Space Seem Not So Far Away

NASA.gov includes data on its missions, past and present. To make this massive amount of data more user-friendly, we worked with NASA to design a site that’s easily searchable, navigable, and enhanced through audio, video, social media feeds, and calendars. Users can find updates on events via features such as the countdown clock to the International Space Station’s 20th anniversary. NASA.gov users can also easily find what they need if they want to research space technology, stream NASA TV, or explore image galleries. 

The NASA.gov site directs its younger visitors to a STEM engagement microsite where students can find activities appropriate for their grade level. The site also includes the NASA Kids’ Club where students can have some fun while they’re learning about exploration. For example, they can try their hands at virtually driving a rover on Mars, play games, and download activities. 

Older students with space-related aspirations can learn about internship and career opportunities, and teachers can access lesson plans and STEM resources.

How to Make it Happen

To successfully achieve NASA’s goals and manage a project this complex, we had to choose the right approach. Some website projects are tailor-made for a simple development plan that moves from a concept to design, construction, testing, and implementation in a structured, linear way. The NASA.gov project, however, wasn’t one of them.

For this website and the vast majority of the sites we develop, our team follows DevOps methodology. With DevOps, you don’t silo development from operations. Our DevOps culture brings together all stakeholders to collaborate throughout the process to achieve:

Faster Deployment

If we had to build the entire site then take it live, it would have taken much longer for NASA and its users to have a new resource. We built the site in stages, validating at every stage. By developing in iterations, and involving the entire team, we also have the ability to address small issues rather than waiting until they create major ones. It also gives us more agility to address changes and keep everyone informed. This prevents errors that could put the brakes on the entire project.

Optimized Design

NASA.gov has several Webby Awards, and award-winning web design takes a team that works together and collaborates with the organization to define the audience (or audiences), optimize the site’s navigation and usability, and strike a balance between the site’s primary purpose and its appeal. 

Mobile-First

Because NASA.gov users may be accessing the site from a PC, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or other device, it was also pivotal to use mobile-first design. Mobile-first starts by designing for the smallest screens first, and then work your way up to larger screens. This approach forces you to build a strong foundation first, then enhance it as screen sizes increase. It basically allows you to ensure user experiences are optimized for any size device. 

Scalability

NASA.gov wasn’t only a goliath website when we migrated it to Amazon Cloud and Drupal. We knew it would continue to grow. Designing the site with microsites that organize content, help visitors find the content that is most relevant to their interests, and enhance usability and UX informed a plan for future growth. 

Efficient Development Processes

DevOps Methodology breaks down barriers between developers and other stakeholders, automates processes, makes coding and review processes more efficient, and enables continuous testing. Even though we work in iterations, our team maintains a big-picture view of projects, such as addressing integrations, during the development process. 

Planned Post-Production

DevOps also helps us cover all the bases to prepare for launch and to build in management tools for ongoing site maintenance. 

What Your Business Can Learn from NASA

You probably never thought about it, but your business or organization has a lot in common with NASA, at least when it comes to your website. Just like NASA, you need a website that gives you the ability to handle a growing digital audience, reliably and securely. You’re probably also looking for the best CMS for your website, one that’s cost-effective and gives you the features you need.

Your website should also be designed to be usable and to provide the user experiences your audience wants. And, with the number of mobile phone users in the world topping 5 billion, you want to make sure their UX is optimized with mobile-first design. 

NASA’s project is also an illustration of how building your website in stages, getting input from all stakeholders, and validating and testing each step of the way can lead to great results. You also need a plan for launching the site with minimal disruption and tools that will make ongoing management and maintenance easier. 

You probably want to know you are doing everything you can to make your content appealing, engaging, and interactive. You may think NASA has an advantage in that department since NASA’s content is inherently exciting to its audience.

But so is yours. Create a website that showcases it. Not sure where to begin? Click here and we’ll point you in the right direction.

• Read more about Mobomo Partnerships Win Silver in W3 Awards

The 13th Annual W³ Awards were just announced and two Mobomo projects were selected by The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts as Silver winners! We are honored that The USO was selected in the mobile app category and www.NASA.gov was selected as a government winner in the web category. These awards celebrate digital excellence by honoring outstanding Websites, Web Marketing, Video, Mobile Sites/Apps & Social content created by some of the best interactive agencies, designers, and creators worldwide. These awards are also the first major competition that is accessible to companies of all sizes, from Fortune 500 companies to small startups.

The USO

Mobomo was able to recognize the USO and the mobile application that we partnered with them to create. This application fosters greater discoverability of locations where USO provides services and programs offered by the USO through its distributed locations and online. Prior to the discovery phase, USO was seeking to design, develop, and deploy a cross-platform mobile application that introduced an additional channel for the United States military service members and their families to better engage with USO centers and programs. Currently, there are 200+ USO locations that all create their own content. We were able to pull the CMS data and integrate it into the app so that the service member receives the content from the service center that they are physically at or that is most adjacent to them.

NASA

In addition, Mobomo also entered www.NASA.gov under the government category. In 2013, our team migrated www.NASA.gov —a site with over 250,000+ pages, 1.4 million assets, and 3 TBs of data—from a proprietary data center and content management system (CMS) to Amazon Cloud and Drupal 7 without downtime or service interruption. This was a colossal task: Mobomo completed the entire effort in just 13 weeks. The results were so colossal, in fact, that www.NASA.gov has won a multiple, highly coveted Webby Awards. Mobomo has continued to work with NASA in order to create a dynamic, user-centric, mobile-first site that simplifies the experience for every visitor. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for www.NASA.gov!

• Read more about Mobomo Presents Drupal Con Summit on NASA Eclipse Partnership

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• Read more about AFCEA Announces Best In Government InnovateIT Finalists

InnovateIT Awards Announced

“The 2017 AFCEA Bethesda InnovateIT Awards recognizes the best in Government-wide InITiatives celebrating individuals or groups whose contributions in information technology have significance beyond their organizations. These contributions represent achievements that advance business and citizen interaction, leading to improved effectiveness, cost-savings and leadership that meet national priorities and serve as a model of excellence government-wide.”

Mobomo has been working alongside many federal agencies over the years, helping to integrate the latest technologies to ensure the federal government has the most secure systems while being cost effective, saving millions each year. We are pleased to acknowledge two of our long term partners have been named as finalists and award winners for this years 2017 InnovateIT Awards. Tim Woods, Web Re-Engineering Project Lead from USGS, won the Technology Trailblazer Award and Ian Sturken, Web and Cloud Services Manager, Enterprise Application Architecture Co-Lead from NASA, was the award winner for the Mission Excellence Enabler Award.

Tim Woods, the Web Re-Engineering Project Lead, along with his team (WRET), is the visionary with a unique capability to combine deep technical understanding with executive stakeholder and business needs. He was able to work with executive leadership to define the vision and business needs of the new system, unite stakeholders and end users across multiple USGS regions and offices, and lead a user-centric design and agile software development team to deliver on a very aggressive project timeline.

The challenge faced by the US Geological Survey’s (USGS’s) Web Re-engineering Team (WRET) was to make the vast amount of scientific data and research easily accessible and searchable for the general public through an agency-wide website. This information included natural hazards, natural resources, ecosystems and the environment. The information impacts important business decisions, from infrastructure (e.g. impact of water erosion on bridges) to agriculture (e.g. predicting droughts or floods in specific locations) to hazard response and mitigation (e.g. improving ability to predict tornados, earthquakes and other natural hazards).

Previously, this information was stored in siloed databases, servers, spreadsheets and other resources, and there was no true understanding or inventory of what was available and no way for anyone outside of the agency to find or use this information. By making this information more readily available and centralized it allows citizens, industry, and other government agencies to make informed decisions about the world around them and to develop innovative solutions for preparing for potential threats and changes that impact human lives. We needed to launch the site within 6 months.

USGS WRET worked with a team of experts across the agency to develop the content, technical and mission-driven strategies for meeting this challenge. The website and CMS were built using agile methodologies, open-source software (Drupal) and hosted in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment. USGS worked with an AWS-certified vendor that also provided Certified ScrumMasters (CSMs) for project and program management. The team launched USGS.gov in under five months, and the team continues to deploy new features in regular intervals based on USGS requirements using Scrum. An information architecture was designed to organize science information from hundreds of sources within one website and navigation system. A robust taxonomy structure allows content managers to use a “Create Once Publish Everywhere” (COPE) philosophy facilitating content distribution throughout the site.

To free up scientists to focus on science and minimize website-related tasks, the following tools were built: 1) an automated migration tool allows a new microsite to be set up rapidly by completing a simple form in the CMS and b) a custom ElasticSearch, LogStash, Kibana (ELK) module ingests data from multiple internal and external sources and can be configured within the Drupal CMS. The USGS team delivers in person and online training and maintains a training website with additional materials, updates and staff access.  

This project aligned with the agency mission and with what USGS was trying to accomplish as a whole. It provides a forward thinking approach that not only makes science provided by USGS easily accessible and searchable to the public, but also uses advanced technical solutions for keeping content updated and, in some cases, providing near real-time data for natural hazard events.

The cloud-based, Drupal framework solution has allowed multiple internal USGS departments to reduce costs on maintaining websites and data repositories that are now managed through the centralized content management system and AWS cloud infrastructure on the USGS.gov website. As additional science centers move into the new framework, those cost savings will increase.

Additionally, science centers are able to focus both funding and resources on their important research and initiatives and to more rapidly make this information accessible to the public from a central, easily searchable website. This information enables innovative solutions to problems that impact lives and livelihoods and empowers citizens to better understand the Earth and its processes from global, regional and very local perspectives.

For a complete list of award winners visit AFCEA.

• Read more about NASA Wins Webby Award for NASA.Gov

NASA Wins Webby Award

NASA.gov, the agency's primary website, received its ninth 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. The site won Webby Awards in 2003, 2012 and 2014, and visitors to NASA.gov have voted it the winner of the People's Voice award eight times since 2002.

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 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 NASA Launches Orion On First Step to Mars

At 7:05am EST today, the world watched as NASA released its unmanned spacecraft, Orion, into the ether. With Captain Kirk (in doll form) at the helm, the massive capsule soared from Cape Canaveral with countless hopes attached. This new spaceship was built with one goal in mind: deep space exploration.

Orion’s 4.5 hour flight test was a critical step toward eventual near-Earth asteroid excursions, trips around the moon, and--most significantly--manned missions to Mars. That's right: with the success of Orion's launch would come “the beginning of the Mars era,” as NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, remarked before blastoff.

And succeed it did! Completing two orbits and going farther than all rockets designed to carry astronauts have in the past four decades, Orion passed with flying colors, and landed in the Pacific Ocean at 11:29 this morning. Our biggest congratulations to NASA on an incredibly successful flight test! Mobomo is proud to be part of the team supporting NASA.gov.

• Read more about In A Galaxy Far, Far Away...NASA Gets Their Webby!

Previously, we mentioned that NASA won a Webby, and we were delighted to accompany them to New York City to receive it. With a packed schedule of events, the Webbys pulled out all the stops with a star-studded, wildly entertaining night to remember. Award recipients and attendees were treated to a cocktail hour, followed by a fun, fast-paced ceremony at the famed Cipriani Wall Street.

During a delicious, four-course meal, guests were regaled with a stream of acceptance speeches by all of the winners. All speeches had to be 5 words or less, which left little room for rambling, but lots of room for wit. A crowd favorite? A speech that wisely stated: “As my favorite song says—”

NASA astronaut, Mike Massimino, wasn’t the only powerhouse in the room: guests rubbed elbows with Orange Is The New Black’s Taylor Schilling; Jason Collins, the NBA’s first openly gay player; the Jamaican Olympic Bobsled team; De La Soul; the co-founder of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee; and one of Mobomo’s all-time favorites, George Takei (who presented NASA’s award!). And for those who want to know exactly what the Fox says, we can tell you, but we’ll have to charge: he sat right next to us during the ceremony, and as you’d expect, had a lot to say.

After an exciting night, the Webbys closed with one more after-party, where guests celebrated their Internet wins. Congratulations, again NASA! We may be biased, but you were the most stellar winner in the room.

• Read more about NASA Wins A Webby!

We’re over the moon for NASA, who has just won a 2014 Webby Award!

Presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the 20-years running Webbys are a highly respected and coveted Internet industry award. Touted as the “Oscars of the Internet”, Webbys are given for “Excellence on the Internet, including Websites, Interactive Advertising, Online Film & Video and Mobile content”. Past winners have included Al Gore, Meg Whitman, David Bowie, Prince, Thomas Friedman, and countless others—both individual and organizational.

NASA is this year’s People’s Voice Award winner for Government: no small feat, as the Webbys notably bring in more than 1.5 million worldwide voters. What’s more? NASA beat out four other contestants with a whopping 59% of the votes! We are humbled to have worked alongside NASA and InfoZen to build this award-winning website.

Congratulations on your achievement, NASA! You’re out of this world.