Government Websites

There are a lot of good people working really hard to make e-gov work. Surely, this movement will pick up steam (or at least funding) in the Obama administration, which has committed itself to making government more technically savvy.

But a recent survey (original results here, large file) shows that government websites lag far behind the private sector, especially e-commerce sites.

"Government Web sites have gotten better, but the private sector sites have gotten better at a much faster pace," said Darrell West of the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. think tank. "The gap is still substantial." ... "There's no common navigational scheme. Every site looks different, so you always have to spend a minute or two seeing how that particular site works," West said. "And most of them don't have good search engines, so it's really hard to find what you need."

This is no surprise. The government isn't selling anything, so it isn't really all that crucial to their survival that you find the product you are looking for or get the information you need.

I was responsible, in part, for the website at one of my government jobs. It was not pretty. Worse, I often couldn't find things that I knew existed somewhere on the site; I can only imagine how the general public fared. But the bottom line, as much as people all over the agency wanted a better website, it wasn't a priority. We certainly weren't going to go out of business if our customers couldn't find our product.

On a related note, amazingly, a few years ago grants.gov, the centralized government website for grant applications, launched with no compatibility for Macs. This doesn't happen in the private sector, where you customers have choices.