Method Cards

Why method cards?

To add rigor and structure to agile development.
To build a shared vocabulary for each method among 18F staff and our partner agencies.
To give less experienced or new researchers a gateway into well-documented and proven research methods, supported by other 18F team members.

We’ve grouped these methods into four phases

Discover: Learn as much as you can about the project and people involved.
Decide: Use what you’ve learned to start focusing your research on specific areas and groups of people.
Make: Move toward a final product that’s ready to be released and tested.
Validate: Test your research, design, and product.

We’ve called out specifics about doing this work in government.

For the most part, the processes are the same as anywhere. However, to stay on the happy side of the law, take a look at Recruiting, Incentives, Informed consent, Privacy, and the Paperwork Reduction Act. No matter which methods we work with, these are the fundamentals of our design research.

This site is built using the 18F Guides Template

This is a skeleton repo containing the CFPB/DOCter-based Jekyll template for 18F Guides.

Generating the site/hosting locally

You will need Ruby ( > version 2.1.5 ). You may consider using a Ruby version manager such as rbenv or rvm to help ensure that Ruby version upgrades don't mean all your gems will need to be rebuilt.

On OS X, you can use Homebrew to install Ruby in /usr/local/bin, which may require you to update your $PATH environment variable:

$ brew update
$ brew install ruby

To create a new guide and serve it locally, where MY-NEW-GUIDE is the name of your new repository:

$ git clone git@github.com:18F/guides-template.git MY-NEW-GUIDE
$ cd MY-NEW-GUIDE
$ ./go init
$ ./go serve

This will check that your Ruby version is supported, install the Bundler gem if it is not yet installed, install all the gems needed by the template, and launch a running instance on http://localhost:4000/guides-template/. (Make sure to include the trailing slash! The built-in Jekyll webserver doesn't redirect to it.) That page contains further instructions on how to adapt the template to a new guide repository.

After going through these steps, run ./go to see a list of available commands. The serve command is the most common for routine development.

You'll need to create a new Github repository for your new guide. To do this, go to github.com/18f and click the "New Repository" button. Enter the title and description for your new guide and then click "Create Repository".

After the repository is created, you'll see the repo URL at the top. Copy this url by hitting the handy "Copy to Clipboard" button next to the text box.

Go back to the directory where you cloned the guides-template repository. We're going to change this repo to point to the one you just created (which is empty) and push the template to it.

git remote set-url origin https://github.com/18F/MY-NEW-GUIDE.git
git push origin 18f-pages

Now you can edit the template freely, and push up changes as you need.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.

shashashasha / methods