About 400,000 service members move every year, and let’s just say the technology to support them in this time of stress has been less than adequate. For example, the Defense Personnel [sic] Property System (DPS), run by the U.S. Transportation Command, was reliable only 16 percent of the time, was not mobile friendly and would crash, making it difficult to schedule moves.

Starting last year and continuing into this summer, the U.S. Digital Service is beginning to relieve some of the stress that comes with moving.

I’ve worked on aspects of the Defense Personal Property System (DPS) since joining USDS last year. While most of the article focuses on the work my teammates continue pursuing, the article does make mention of our big relaunch of Move.mil.

Another piece to the project was simplifying the website Move.mil, which [designer and project manager Lauryn] Fantano described as a Wikipedia tool of how to move in the military. USDS worked with the command to remove government speak and answer the questions that families most care about when it comes to moving. USDS relaunched Move.mil in December.

It’s nice to see folks taking note of the important work we’re doing. If you’d like to help improve government services through better technology, head on over to usds.gov/join.

💪🏼 🖥 🇺🇸

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) is a library of design and code guidelines to help agencies create trustworthy, accessible, and consistent digital services. The Design System is being used on over one hundred government sites, with an audience of 120 million users. In this 12th post in our series, we sat down with Jason Garber, front-end web developer at the U.S. Digital Service (USDS)‘s Defense Digital Service, to talk about his work creating a Ruby gem for the new Move.mil that integrates the Design System into a Ruby on Rails application.

I was recently interviewed by the team behind the U.S. Web Design System about the uswds-rails Ruby gem I put together. Yay, open source!