Why do governments keep getting technology wrong?

July 26, 11:33 PMDC Technology ExaminerTanya Gupta

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DC government website

Every time I go to a government website, I am thankful for the principles behind capitalism.  Profits earned represent the reward for the value of the object created or service offered, as judged by the public who freely offer their wealth in exchange. The profit motive is why bad websites disappear (no one offers money in exchange for them) and the good ones rise to the top.  With government websites, unless there is an exceptionally motivated person at the top, there are all different degrees of bad.  Lack of funds is not the reason these websites are bad.  They are bad because most government officials running these websites either don't care, or don't have a strong enough feedback loop from citizen to government to tell them where they are going wrong.  Take "send an email to your local government official."  I sent one recently letting them know about a traffic light that was not working.  The result?  No acknowledgement and no response.  Any web designer will tell you that even worse than not having a "send comment" box, is a "send comment" box that no one is in charge of. 

What governments don't do while designing these websites, is imagine themselves in the position of the poor citizen.  If you want to pay your taxes, do you really need to know which department is in charge of the function?  If you want to adopt, should you have to find out which department handles that?  No, of course not.  But if you take a look at any of these goverment websites, you will see that they don't think that way.  That is not to say that there are no good government websites.  Of course there are.  The chances are that they are just not run by the government.   I am talking about http://www.google.com/unclesam.  It is much easier to find information about the government, or locate a government website here than it is at usa.gov.  For one, the government websites have too much crammed into them, which makes it hard to find what you are looking for.  On top of that, their seach function is poor.  One of the worst websites that I have ever seen is the US Citizen and Immigration website.  Just take a look at it:

If you are in need of services you are probably not going to look at this, and say, "Of course! There's the nice I-9 form I was looking for!"   Some people may indeed know what an I-9 is, and then come to this website, but for others, USCIS has got to find out what the user needs and not expect the user to know about all their products and services.

Next on my list is, you guessed it, the IRS.  Their website is filled with names of forms and acronyms.  Why?  Simple, they expect you and me to already know the exact form we need and then visit their website.  If you don't too bad. 

Their search?  Even worse.  Try this search: Let's say you are a non-US citizen, and you think, maybe if you typed in "foreigner," you would get at least some relevant hits?  Wrong agan!  This is what you get:

None of the searches are the least bit relevant to you.

The third worst, and the media has covered this extensively, is recovery.gov:

This website wastes a lot of space on all the important people who are involved and what they are doing, but does not focus on providing citizens with the information they need in a simple straightforward manner.  If I, as a citizen, want to know how the government is spending my tax dollars, then I will not find any easy answers here.  I would probably be better off writing to my Congressman for an explanation.

Now, let's focus on the services that are connected to these online offerings.  Try calling DC DMV in the hope of reaching an operator.  Only after you have finished listening to all that they have to say on DC and DMV, will they tell you what you need to reach an operator!  Obviously the designers of these services have never had to use their services themselves or they would have figured simple things like this by now. 

Let's stay on DC, close to home.  You would think that the website they would concentrate on, in terms of keeping it simple and clean, would be "kids," one of the options you get when you search for DC Government.  Wrong again.  I got this message:

Now I can go and get the Flash plug in, but do they expect young kids to figure it out, install the software, and then come back to this page?  The older kids may indeed figure it out, but I have a suspicion that they may have not have patience with the website after that.  And older kids won't click on anything labelled kids in the first place.

Still on DC, of course they have an agency search page, because as citizens, it is our duty to know exactly what agency does what, and if we don't know, we need to learn about this.  So, OK, if I want to adopt a kitten, and I am not sure which agency I should contact for that, assuming there is one.  I type in kitten:

Nothing found!  "Dog" gives me information on "dog waste."  I will get the number for Animal Shelter, only if I type in "Animal."

The government is taking a lot of money in the form of taxes from its citizens, and spending sizable amounts on websites and online services. The least it owes to its citizens is to make an honest effort to get it right!