Simon Moores argues that the government should spend
more time making its websites accessible and
attractive.
So here’s the picture. Charlotte, aged eight, returns
home from a hard day at school. When she’s finished her homework
and eaten her dinner, she and her mother settle down to a family
evening testing government websites for usability and political
correctness.
If you think I’m joking, then read on. According to the
e-Envoy’s "Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design",
government web managers needing users to make their websites
citizen-friendly should consider recruiting public sector staff or
their families as a "cheap alternative" to usability
consultancies.
Government has two concerns. Not enough people are using
government websites and, if like me, last weekend you were trying
to work out how to pay your National Insurance and PAYE over the
web, you’ll know it’s not exactly the most user-friendly and
intuitive experience available on the internet today.
The good news is that the new framework stresses the "crucial"
role of user feedback and the need for testing at various stages,
by groups of end-users who are representative of the website's
target audiences.
It gives the "optimal" size of a testing group for one target
audience as six to eight people. It acknowledges that the budgets
allocated to government websites vary greatly and suggests that
students, public sector personnel or family members of staff could
be used as "approximate target audiences".
What worries me is the suggestion is that e-government is, in
theory, supposed to shrink the size of the public-sector workforce,
directly or indirectly. But it isn't. If anything, it's getting
larger every week, until it reaches the point where everyone who
isn’t working for IBM, Capita or EDS is working for the civil
service, including Charlotte.
Shouldn’t websites be usable and friendly from day one? Or has
any sense of quality - “what is good and what is not good and how
do we know these things”, to quote Socrates - flown out of the
window?
Perhaps it’s a "king’s new clothes" phenomenon, where everyone
involved approves a website which is, demonstrably, awful, a kind
of collective insanity which isn’t confined to the public
sector.
So, instead of recruiting families to assist in usability
testing, let’s start worrying less about guidelines and more about
accessibility and what this really means in, first, making
government websites attractive and useful enough to encourage
people to use them, and secondly for government departments to
grasp that delivering a website isn’t the end of the process, it’s
the beginning of another, much more difficult one.
What do you think?
How can the government make its websites more accessible?
Tell us in an e-mail
>> ComputerWeekly.com reserves the right to edit and publish
answers on the website. Please state if your answer is not for
publication.
Setting the world to rights with the collected thoughts and
opinions of leading industry analystDr Simon
Mooresof Zentelligence.
Acting globally, Zentelligence (Research) advises
governments, suppliers, business and the media on the evolution,
application and delivery of leading-edge technologies and
specialises in the areas of eGovernment and information
security.
For further information on Zentelligence and its research,
presentation and analyst services visitwww.zentelligence.com