Made in America

Overview

In January 2021, Executive Order 14005 directed the federal government to maximize its use of goods, services, and materials made in America — and to be open about how agencies make those buying decisions. Part of that mandate landed on GSA: build a public website where anyone can see which Buy American waivers have been proposed, and which have been granted.

Ad Hoc supported GSA and the Office of Management and Budget through a four-week design sprint in the summer of 2021. I was the only designer on a three-person team. I designed the site’s identity, built the content map with subject-matter experts across both agencies, and delivered the mockups and clickthrough prototype the site was built from.

It launched. It’s still live.

The problem

If you ran an American manufacturing business and wanted to sell to the federal government, there was one place to find out what the government had decided it couldn’t buy in America: the Federal Procurement Data System. FPDS is renowned for being difficult to maneuver. In practice, the information was public and unreachable at the same time.

My role

Sole designer on a three-person team. I owned design end to end: site identity and logo, facilitating the content map with subject-matter experts at GSA and OMB, defining page templates and content, writing copy specifications where content didn’t exist yet, mockups and a clickthrough prototype, and designing on USWDS 2.0.

Four weeks, from kickoff to delivered prototype.

The content map

We started by identifying which pages and templates the experience needed, then worked out exactly what content belonged on each one. For waivers, I built a template rather than a page, so it could accommodate the range of content a waiver might actually contain depending on its type.

The identity

I presented a set of logo options. The one chosen paired the colors, stars, and stripes that immediately read as the United States with a price tag — the procurement transaction itself, made visible.

The build

Because the content was already approved and we were designing on USWDS 2.0, the two-page website and the clickthrough prototype came together in less than a week, with no design revisions.