USER EXPERIENCE AND ACCESSIBILITY
USER EXPERIENCE AND ACCESSIBILITY
For a fixed price, we get an evidence-based picture of exactly where our service fails the people we serve, and a roadmap our IT shop can actually execute and our budget office can defend.
Avalon studies how the people your agency serves actually experience a specific government service, and turns that evidence into a prioritized, costed roadmap your program can fund, build, and measure.
THE PROBLEM & THE APPROACH
The Challenge
Our Approach
Eligible people abandon applications, miss benefits, or fail to comply because the process defeats them, and backlogs and wait times become the mission failure itself.
Avalon maps the end-to-end journey a customer actually travels across channels, quantifying exactly where the experience breaks down and what it costs.
21st Century IDEA, the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, and OMB Circular A-11 Section 280 all require agencies to modernize digital services, measure customer experience, and show service-delivery improvement in their budget justification, obligations most agencies cannot evidence.
The engagement delivers journey maps, a cost-to-serve analysis, a measurement framework aligned to OMB's standardized post-transaction measures, and an 18–36 month roadmap sequenced to the agency's own budget cycle.
Phone, paper, and in-person channels cost an order of magnitude more per transaction than digital self-service, and 'failure demand', contacts caused by a broken process, inflates contact center spend invisibly.
A channel cost-to-serve and failure-demand model quantifies exactly which process defects are generating the most expensive contacts, so remediation dollars go where the cost actually is.
Modernization dollars routinely get spent replicating a bad process on new technology, because nobody mapped the experience before requirements were written.
The roadmap is pressure-tested against the agency's actual IT portfolio and constraints, including the ATO boundary and legacy integrations, so it survives contact with the build.
CORE CAPABILITIES
Understanding how the service is actually experienced today, through stakeholder interviews and structured research with real customers.
Turning research into an evidence base: where the experience breaks, and what it costs the agency when it does.
A KPI dictionary and a costed, sequenced plan the agency's budget office can actually defend.
OUR PROCESS
Confirm the services or journeys in scope, success criteria, data access list, and PRA pathway. (1–2 weeks)
Stakeholder interviews, document and data collection, analytics pulls, and frontline observation. (3–5 weeks)
Customer interviews and lightweight usability observation, plus survey analysis. (3–6 weeks, overlaps Discovery)
Journey maps, service blueprints, pain-point ranking, and the cost-to-serve model. (2–4 weeks)
Measurement framework, opportunity backlog, roadmap, and governance recommendations, built in working sessions with the sponsor. (3–4 weeks)
Leadership briefing, deliverable transfer, and follow-on scoping discussion. (1–2 weeks)
WHY AVALON
5
Federal Frameworks Addressed
Security-and-Compliance-Grounded Strategy
Design-led firms hand agencies strategy decks that die the moment they meet a legacy integration or an ATO constraint. Avalon's cybersecurity and infrastructure practice means every recommendation is pre-checked against the systems that have to build it.
Recommendations are pre-checked against RMF/ATO realities and identity/access constraints most design-first firms never see.
Avalon starts in weeks with the same senior people named in the proposal, no leveraged pyramid behind a partner who only appears at the readout.
The channel cost-to-serve and failure-demand modeling borrows discipline from Avalon's FinOps practice, it speaks the language of efficiency-driven budget offices.
A small, milestone-gated strategy sprint lets an agency evaluate Avalon at capped exposure, rather than committing to a large embedded team.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
Straight answers about scope, research methods, and what this strategy will, and won't, deliver.
Talk to Our Team →5
Federal Frameworks Addressed
Because most federal experience failures are system and process failures, and a strategy that ignores the ATO boundary and the legacy stack is a deck, not a plan. Our researchers run the human-centered method properly, and our engineers pressure-test every recommendation for buildability before it reaches the roadmap.
Not under FAR 15.305 (a) neutral rating applies, and Avalon leads with the gap rather than waiting to be asked. That's why the entry engagement is small, fixed-price, senior-staffed, and milestone-gated, the government's exposure is capped at each milestone, and you're evaluating named individuals whose federal work you can check, not a brand.
Data collection isn't strategy. If the dashboards existed and the experience still hasn't moved, the missing piece is the connection between what the data says and what gets funded and built, that's precisely the deliverable.
It constrains design; it doesn't prohibit research. We work inside your Section 280 generic clearance or GSA's government-wide fast-track clearance, and where neither applies we design under-10-participant qualitative research that requires no clearance.
This isn't positioned as a study, it's a cost play. The cost-to-serve model typically finds that a small set of process defects is generating a large share of contact center load, and the engagement is priced under the simplified acquisition threshold to be fundable from operating money.
We address the organizational conflict of interest question head-on rather than waiting for it: the strategy specifies needs and outcomes, not proprietary specs, and we include an OCI statement, and a mitigation plan where required, in every proposal that raises the possibility.
Talk to Avalon about scoping a CX strategy engagement for your priority service or journey.