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28 Sep 2004

Following on from ‘Opening Up the Interior’

Opening Up the Interior, or ‘making the government navigable’, I think gets to the heart of the matter. And I think government is now suffering from an extreme form of the Red-button fatigue that plagues digital TV creators. Too many citizens have been disappointed, or frustrated, by the government’s endless portal-without-content (http://www.open.gov.uk, http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk, http://www.ukonline.gov.uk, and now http://direct.gov.uk) to listen anymore.

‘Come and look at all our services online!’ has failed as a message, because Government has been saying it untruthfully since 1996.

Open.gov.uk is an interesting case. A great brand, a great URL, did what it said on the tin, has a huge userbase, and Whitehall politicking killed it off.

I think direct.gov.uk is getting closer to the right direction (although they still commit some howlers like opening links in new windows, or having a iframe at the top that hides the search box from mozilla users), but nobody is going to care anymore, and a new approach is needed if we want to drive uptake and awareness of government services. The public have been disappointed too many times.

Mitigation:

The government needs to get really damn good at the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) business, or at least start spending a lot more money on Google adwords than the current forms of marketing.

Furthermore, this optimisation needs to explicitly target service delivery pages of interest to the consumer, even considering practicing Search Engine Inhibition on less core areas of the .gov.uk domain. Optimise the bits that people will use, and let the others, well, carry on, as is. By SEO, I don’t mean paying some shady backstreet blog-spammer to dump direct gov links all over the web, but doing the inhouse, on site best practice that works. legal, decent, honest, and effective.

Because portals are dead. browse-as-discovery is dead. Google is now (or soon will be) the default content discovery mechanism for users.

Fortunately, doing well on google can be exceedingly cheap (despite what people will tell you)

stef

• Posted by Stefan Magdalinski on 28/09/04 at 1:16pm
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