From APIs to Authentication: Oddball Helps Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Improve Websites

May 26, 2022

A woman works on a software development project.

(Image credit: Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

Whether it is building APIs to power consumer-facing applications for federal government websites, developing modern tooling that includes scripted, automated deployment processes, or creating authentication services for unified login across multiple domains, Oddball helps clients like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) provide exceptional customer service. Oddball is a software developer that specializes in digital transformation for federal websites. Oddball helps clients modernize their digital platforms to deliver outstanding user experiences for diverse humans. This in turn helps agencies like CMS achieve key objectives, like the six pillars of its strategic plan.

Oddball believes digital innovation only happens when we recognize every person who visits a website as a unique human with distinctive needs, desires, and challenges. Oddball key personnel (including engineers, product, and project managers) actively use federal government websites. They might log in to cms.gov to access information about healthcare or health insurance or visit VA.gov to engage with veteran benefits. This direct experience provides the empathy that leads to human-centered design, resulting in a superior and scalable website development solution for CMS and other agencies.

As CMS seeks to improve its services to the more than one hundred million people it serves, Oddball stands ready to help. Modernization of digital spaces is crucial to CMS objectives now and into the future, as increasingly, CMS customers and beneficiaries seek services online. These customers span a wide range of demographics, representing unique individuals who have distinctive needs when using CMS websites. As a leading government website development provider, Oddball is uniquely qualified to help CMS address these needs. Through experienced engineers, product and project managers, and technical personnel, Oddball has developed the processes to manage CMS requirements to deliver successful projects. Oddball provides comprehensive web and system development support, including infrastructure and security plans for CMS products and projects. This includes systems, tools, components, and applications that meet CMS user needs following government best practices and compliance requirements such as Section 508. To ensure ongoing compliance, Oddball provides site review and continuous improvement.

Design, User Experience (UX), and Usability Support for Federal Government websites

Creating an optimum user experience for CMS customers requires creative web design techniques that effectively engage consumers from all walks of life. Oddball accomplishes this by using a design process that follows a quantified path, which begins with product definition. Once the Oddball team has collaborated to define the product, the next step is to directly engage with users to determine how they use a specific website, product, or project and what problems and pain points they encounter as they do this. Oddball considers website accessibility per Section 508, to ensure access for people with disabilities, including motor, auditory, cognitive, seizure/neurological, and visual impairments. Oddball evaluates content to determine if it is “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.” Next, Oddball uses curiosity, questioning, observing, and prototyping to engage with users to see and understand what they experience as they access and navigate a website or digital product. During these steps, Oddball looks at all the components the user will experience on the website from the overall look and feel of the website, to buttons and navigation, to page layout, and more. Through this process, the Oddball team gathers the crucial information it needs to create detailed and compelling user stories for engineers that help them develop superior digital tools and applications. This iterative, experiential process honors the users’ desires and needs, solves problems, and results in truly innovative solutions. Oddball teams also conduct accessibility testing before launch, and when making significant changes to digital products and services. In this way, Oddball help clients like CMS meet the continued needs of its customers in the digital space.

To augment its human-centered design process, Oddball employs key strategies and ongoing reviews to ensure the project meets the requirements of relevant laws, policies, and regulations for federal agencies. This includes the specific guidelines and compliance requirements of Section 508 and digital.gov. Each project goes through a rigorous check-off and remediation process to ensure compliance in the key areas of governance, privacy, search, security, trust, and internal process.

 

 


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