Steve Ballmer had a vision: to elevate public discourse about government revenue, spending, and outcomes by making unbiased data easier to find and understand. We created a public, extensive source of individual government metrics, editorial experiences that line up loosely with the government’s legislative calendar, and data-based publications such as an annual report for the US government.
Users
Citizens, journalists, educators, and policymakers
Product Strategy
Create and scale a comprehensive destination for audiences to understand federal and state data
Process Highlights
3+ years of feature development
Weekly coordination between data and API team, design, and development teams
Data: began with federal data, now adding state data
Features: started with line chart visualizations, added choropleth and distribution view
Outcomes
2,000+ unique users per day
Data is used by professors in many states
Ongoing national coverage including CNN, Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel
About the Features
USAFacts is a comprehensive metrics warehouse. Users can search or navigate to several thousand federal metrics collected from a variety of verified government sources. In June of 2019, we added the ability for users to select and compare individual state data to national data.
USAFacts offers visitors different ways to contextualize and compare data. Want to see educational attainment levels (or some other metric) in the US over time? A simple line chart is the easiest way for you to do it, but you might also switch to table view. On metrics with state data, you also have the option to toggle to map view for a given year, or view the data as a distribution of all states. Finance tables offer a convenient way to compare government spending and revenue. Many metrics support the ability to adjust per capita and by inflation to give audiences even more context.
USAFacts is also a data museum. We customized a content management system so that analysts working for the initiative would be able to publish their custom data journalism articles. The CMS allows for custom visualization, metric embeds from within the site, PowerBI embeds for more tailored interactive pieces.