Working with the Public to Improve Digital Forms: A GSA Case Study

September 28, 2023

The American public spends approximately 11.5 billion hours per year filling out federal government forms, and form complexity can result in lack of submission or completion and errors that can have far-reaching consequences. 

On Thursday, September 28th, Stephanie Tepper and Blair Read from the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) joined the CCSQ HCD Community of Practice to discuss the digital forms evaluation project and share how five GSA offices and the public worked together to improve federal forms.

During the Community of Practice, Stephanie and Blair discussed how to:

• Build and use evidence in the federal government,
• Utilize data analytics and user feedback, and
• Evaluate the impact of form changes.

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Session Presenters

Stephanie Tepper – Associate Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences

.Stephanie Tepper is an Associate Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in 2023 in Social Psychology from Cornell University. Her research focuses on how people in the U.S. think about economic inequality and how economic disadvantage influences well-being. Stephanie also studies how to develop behavioral science interventions to promote economic opportunity. Prior to earning her doctorate, she worked as an applied researcher at the Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University, where she developed and tested interventions with nonprofit and government partners to improve the financial well-being of people in low- to moderate-income households. Stephanie holds a B.A. in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

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Blair Read

– Associate Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences

.Blair Read received her Ph.D. in Political Science at MIT, where her research focused on

the politics of private service delivery with an application to education policy in the Global South.

Through her applied policy research, Blair uses randomized control trials, quasi-

experimental design, and descriptive inference with large-scale administrative data to study how to

improve citizens’ experiences with the government, and poverty alleviation. Other applied

research interests include political behavior in the Global South, and survey design and measurement. Prior to the Office of Evaluation Sciences, Blair was a data scientist with Code for America, and a field research associate with MIT GOV/LAB, where she implemented lab-in-the-field experiments in Tanzania and Uganda. 

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