innovating tomorrow's government
posted on 09.05.2012 posted by Christina Osborne

Responsive Design: Designing for an Unpredictable Future

Consider how you access the Internet in a single day. You have a mobile device that allows you to read the news, check your email and get your daily social media fix on your commute from work.

Design vs. Design

We all know the concept of design. Most of the time we see the end result of design in either a comp, wireframe or simply a website.

UXCampDC – A Chance to Learn More about User Experience Online and Offline

Recently, 140 user experience professionals in the DC area gathered at UXCampDC for the purpose of sharing knowledge and discussing trends within the user experience community. Aquilent was a Platinum Sponsor of this event, and several of us attended this “unconference” where anyone, from novice to professional, could participate, discuss, or present.  This was my first time at a “bar camp” or unconference, and frankly…

Up, Up, and Away with AWS GovCloud

Everyone wants to move into the cloud these days. The whole notion of “Cloud First,” the national CIO’s initiative asking all departments to prioritize uploading data to cloud servers, has given this idea even bigger wings.  For the government, it poses a particular challenge however because of the very tight security regulations that exist within that environment – FISMA in particular which “requires the development…

Testing and QA - What’s the Difference and Why Does It Matter

When people hear “QA” (Quality Assurance), they usually think test.  The terms are used synonymously much of the time. In the past, I’ve been asked to “QA” software and systems, when what was really being asked was to test them. In reality, you don’t “quality assurance” a Web site or system – you test it. Testing is a task. It involves testers and it begins and…

The Truth About Open Source

Open source has gotten a bad rap. It reminds me of the McDonald’s strawberry lemonade commercial. In a deep, “good guy” voice the lemon complains that his kind have unfairly become synonymous with “dud, reject, flop, failure, bust, fiasco.” It seems that a lot of organizations have a similarly not so high opinion of open source, justified or not. But like the lemon, which redeems…

Plain Language: Writing for the Web

Here’s a cold, hard truth about websites in general: Viewers generally read less than a third of what’s on any given web page. Does this mean that viewers find what they’re looking for after reading only a portion of the page? Do they just move on after a while because they realize that what they seek is not available on that site?

Developing In Javascript

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in Javascript, due to the growing popularity of web applications that use asynchronous-style programming (Ajax) and cross-browser libraries (such as jQuery.) Examples of such applications are Google Maps, Twitter, Gmail, Live.com and Google Suggest.