GSA Asks What You Want in a Federal Web Site

For a study in contrasts, check out these two federal web sites:

1. NASA here.

2. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau here.

NASA has about 20 years of Web experience on the CFPB, plus it’s NASA for crying out loud. Embattled and adrift though the agency might be in reality, it’s still the clearing house for discoveries such as a planet orbiting two suns. A sunrise just like the one in Star Wars! The web site of the Smithsonian Institution, with a prestigious .edu domain, runs even deeper than NASA’s.

The CFPB is so new and so politically contentious it doesn’t have a permanent leader yet. Its web site, visually, could pass for that of a local bank. It seems to anticipate the elderly or poor, the less digitally savvy Americans with low bandwidth, who would benefit from the big buttons, simple language and easy navigation. It’s almost like Web-lite.

Such is the range of web sites the federal government operates by the thousands. As discussed in FedInsider #87, the administration has ordered a kind of Web housecleaning.

Now enter the latest online debate. On Monday the General Services Administration, on behalf of the White House, launched the loftily-named National Dialogue on Improving Federal Web Sites. Results so far show, everybody is an expert. And, as federal managers like to say on conference panels, nearly everyone is in violent agreement. Barely a handful of people vote “I disagree” on any of the ideas put forth. The ideas cover content (use plain language on federal web sites), policy (create standard project management plan for all web development) and geekery (stop using Cold Fusion).

The dialogue results so far seem to indicate that mostly federal web practitioners themselves are contributing ideas. It’s hard to imagine that a broad range of the American public thinks about federal Web sites quite that intently in the first place.

You find a few tough comments, such as “community member” who said federal web taste stopped changing in 2002, and recommended going slow with Facebook and Twitter. “You have far too much basic work to do before you should even consider a social presence,” this commenter said.

When you think about it, collective wisdom is so diverse as to produce very little in terms of obvious trends or “Aha!” insights applicable across the board. It’s like asking the American public what it wants in a car. Or a store. There’s no such thing as average.

Federal agencies serve citizens, but the reality is many of them serve primarily specialized audiences – seniors on Social Security, veterans, the aviation community. No federal site should be exclusionary. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be customized to serve the community that provides the bulk of traffic to a given site.

Much of the debate going on at the dialog concerns whether people go to a site to complete a transaction or to get information. No single answer exists, which is why a single dialogue will yield less useful information than an agency-specific dialog.

Still, the GSA dialog makes for useful reading, especially if you click on one of the ideas. Use of plain language ranked as the most popular idea the first evening the site was up, but on many of the ideas the same few people are doing most of the commenting.

The dialog will run through September. GSA will harvest some good ideas. But it’s unlikely to glean wisdom sufficient to enable the federal government to “re-invent how it delivers information and services online.”