[Back from hiatus – celebrating with a double-length post…hopefully not TLDR]
With journalistically appropriate hyperbole, Chrystia Freeland ponders the problem the modern world is having with government. She starts off with the political baiting that is typical of Reuters, but settles eventually into a more compelling thesis – what if what is wrong with government is that it isn’t modern? While everything else becomes ever more user-friendly, from airport check-ins to streaming music to buying insurance, government stagnates. Freeland meanders a bit in order to work in a quote about the private sector historically innovating from platforms developed by government and ultimately doesn’t make much of a point at all. But I can work with that…
It seems fair to say that the American government’s interactions with the electorate are antiquated, so I immediately got to wondering what part of government did modern interaction best. Political parties immediately sprung to mind, such as Ron Paul and Obama’s famous use of social media. Politicians are, out of necessity, quickly picking up on how to effectively reach Americans. So too has the military. Remember those “awesome” 90’s CGI effects in early Marines ads in theatres? That campaign has become a multimedia onslaught that includes recruitment movies starring Rihanna, social media campaigns, and websites that at least belong in web 2.0 (or 3.0 or whatever web we’re on today). The IRS has even upgraded in its own bureaucratic way – not the prettiest site in the world, but it works pretty well. Forms are easy to find, law is easy to research, and there’s large, friendly links that click-through to the popular 1040-EZ and free tax preparation options.
Conversely, the CBO is a wealth of information that is dry at best and clunky to use – the disparity in expected user effort relative to the IRS is noticeable. The patent office? Not terrible, but reminiscent of the late 90s as soon as you leave the splash page. The EPA website is drab, especially compared to allied political action groups. Somewhat better, the FDA. Heck, I think most of these even use the same production suite to design their pages. Even the SSA sucks, and it should try hardest since it necessarily caters to the over-65 crowd.
Well, cynical as ever, I started to look for a common thread here. What splits the difference? Almost immediately it dawned on me – it’s whether the government is providing something (information or services) or taking something (your money or votes). Wondering if this was unfair I took a look at a couple more sites, or tried to anyway. Medicare’s websites are only a step up from the SSA. But the USPS is crazy professional nice. Then again, the USPS does only provide its service in exchange for fees, so it has an interest in being as user-friendly as possible (it’s a business). So there goes that. Trying one more, I went to NASA, which has a pretty cool website, even just looking at usability and ignoring all the awesome content. But I think NASA gets a special pass because it’s populated exclusively by various species of space-nerd, so its website had better be awesome. To contrast, NOAA, which could be almost as cool as NASA in terms of content, has a truly miserable website that is outdone by cable-favorite the Weather Channel. So it looks like that’s it, then. Desire to acquire money or influence leads to good websites. Funny, that’s an awful lot like how the free market works. Next time, I’ll look at whether we can fix that problem by creating incentives for government to make its processes and services more user-friendly. I’m not hopeful, though.
TooLongBlog 