Skip to main content
This is not an official government website. Views expressed here represent the personal opinions of current and former federal employees.

Blog posts by [Mysterious Gazelle]*


  • Why your agency (likely) doesn’t need a mobile app

    on

    Building products for the public requires a lot of listening and finding the right balance of value, cost, and user needs to build the best product. With that approach, we find most of the time that building a highly-optimized mobile-friendly website almost always trumps building native mobile apps.

  • The new FEC.gov

    on

    Last week, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) unveiled their new website at FEC.gov. This new site is the result of a years-long collaboration with GSA’s 18F and features completely revamped tools for exploring campaign finance data.

  • The life-changing magic of writing release notes

    on

    A key part of agile development is constantly shipping new features. With so many changes happening to the product, it can be hard to keep track of how the product is growing and improving. Release notes help keep everyone on the team in the know about what’s shipping, give a clear list of features to check, and help always frame our work in terms of the value it delivers to users.

  • Building better by building together with the Federal Election Commission

    on

    How do you work iteratively and in the open in government? How do you transform an agency’s digital presence with agile and user-centered design? We’ve learned a lot about this as we’ve worked alongside our partners at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on beta.fec.gov, and we want to share some of those lessons here.

  • Creating an open FEC

    on

    A few weeks ago, FEC and 18F started to explore how campaign finance information can be better presented to the public. Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun learning all we can about the FEC, the process by which it collects and shares data, and how individuals outside of FEC use that data on a regular basis to gain insights into the workings of our democracy.

* Some author names have been anonymized.