Research Collaboration and HCD Guide Series (Digital.gov)
Digital.gov’s two guide series covering user research methods and human-centered design: the Research Collaboration guide (methods for capturing user needs, testing, and team collaboration) and the HCD Discovery Concepts guide (observational research techniques and affinity synthesis).
Note: The original 18F Methods site (methods.18f.gov) is no longer accessible (DNS does not resolve as of 2026-07-01). The digital.gov guides represent the equivalent current GSA resource covering UX research methodology.
License: Public domain — U.S. federal government work (17 U.S.C. § 105).
Key points
Journey mapping (Journey Mapping): visualizes major interactions, decisions, and emotional states across a user’s full experience; organized by user-narrative phases (not system architecture); documents actions, information/tools, decisions, emotions, pain points, and potential harms at each step. Contrasted with service blueprints (operational perspective vs. user-experience perspective). Output: a phase-based table.
Contextual observation variants (see Customer Research Methods): three named variants beyond generic ethnographic observation — shadowing (researcher follows participant through their activities in natural context); guided tour (participant shows researcher their physical space, revealing what they embody rather than what they can describe); intercept interviews (conducted on-site during active service use, capturing mid-task behavior rather than retrospective recall).
Affinity mapping (clustering): grouping words/phrases with commonalities into proximate groups on paper.