Why the public sector must take the World Wide Web seriously

Almost 30 years after the internet was born, creating a powerful two-way communication link for citizens to deal directly with (among others) governments, public agencies are still struggling to fully embrace what have become their (digital) front windows to the world.

A decade of investment and embrace of modern web design standards means most government websites are not the catastrophe many of them were in the early days. Back then, agency websites were typically run by IT units, managed more like an archive of what was keeping an agency busy rather than as a vibrant, customer-focused shopfront.

Home pages were static and large slabs of content were too often locked up in hard-to-search, badly written PDFs. Site performance was variable, and one-minute page downloads were not uncommon.

Most public-sector websites have been modernised with the shift to cloud-based publishing systems, templated designs and style sheets, and the adoption of readability scores, plain English principles and accessibility practices.

Agencies such as Services Australia have invested heavily in their digital channels, partly because their users demanded it, but also to reduce the high cost of face-to-face service delivery.

Navigating the alphabet soup

At the same time, there was a proliferation of single-purpose websites and domains, building a complex architecture of sites that tended to reflect the portfolio structures of government. This left users to navigate an alphabet soup of websites to find what they needed.

Research says the biggest gains in terms of website visitors finishing their task come from grouping content based on either life journeys (such as the birth of a child) or specific topics of interest (COVID-19, cost of living or floods).

Victoria was the first big jurisdictions to seek to unify its content into one top-level domain; NSW followed with its “one CX” (consumer experience) program. These are efforts to ensure users have to learn their way around just one website.

NSW is well advanced, with more than 40 big agencies now migrated to the nsw.gov.au domain. There were almost 1000 sites in NSW; each site integrated into the top-level domain delivers an estimated $20,000-a-year saving, and once the program is completed, net savings of more than $10 million a year.

Poor metrics

But the real gain for public agencies is bringing agencies websites onto a modern, well-secured publishing platform supported by best of breed analytic and optimisation tools.

Corporate sites typically are designed for sales, supported by powerful marketing and analytic software, known as digital experience platforms or DXPs.

The top-level metrics for business sites focus on sales volumes, new customer acquisition and retention, and most private-sector websites work to a relatively settled set of performance indicators.

Usually, web teams are supported by even larger marketing and sales groups whose primary job is to find customer leads and convert them to sales.

In contrast, the core functions of government websites are to inform and provide internet-based services. Some of these visitors are completing a transaction (such as paying a fine or tax) only because they are legally required to do so. This limits the opportunity to “surprise and delight” customers.

Marketing is still a dirty work in government and other than the big state and federal service platforms, there is little internal capability for designing and executing modern digital campaigns that DXPs are designed to deliver.

Globally, there is no settled analytical framework for the public sector. This means there is a wide variety of performance indicators, but no whole-of-government approach, or focus for assessing and optimising a government’s digital presence.

The lack of top-level strategic goals, such as the time taken to find information or to complete a transaction, how comprehensible the information was and user satisfaction, leads to managers focussing on tactical metrics such as time on page and users who leave the site.

At its worst, page views and user visits become the lead KPIs. Agency leaders are fed complex dashboards detailing website performance, but there is little insight into whether the core business purposes, such as better health or less homelessness, are being achieved.

Customisation and context

Nor is there much sense of what website growth and improvement looks like. The private sector obsesses about journeys, pathways and completion rates, using an omnichannel model. In most public agencies, website users are still tracked separately from visits to apps, shopfronts and call centres.

Neither is there any systematic triaging of users so that offerings can be customised to individual visitors.

Users from Bondi and Broken Hill are lumped together and fed one-size-fits-all content and formats, no matter which web or social channel they engage through.

This ultimately requires a more robust identity system, and there is widespread expectation the Thodey myGov review will finally push the government to deploy a national digital identity scheme, and recommend that the Commonwealth formally anoint australia.gov.au as its primary digital presence – similar to gov.UK.

A recent global Adobe study of government websites found Australia had an overall performance score of 58. This placed Australia in the upper end of the emerging category, well behind leading private-sector organisations.

The public sector is notorious for poor content curation and failing to retire out-of-date articles. This means there are often several versions of similar content, but little guidance as to which piece is current. The study found half of users typically had to visit five sites before discovering what they needed.

Poor mobile design, readability and a notorious lack of multilingual content further thwart attempts to engage with people.

Government websites typically work to a standard of year seven reading. But with almost 45 per cent of adults unable to read beyond primary-school level. this means large slabs of the population are effectively excluded from them.

And two decades after Blackberry pioneered the mobile web, the Adobe study also found many government websites were still poorly designed for mobile delivery, often taking twice as long to load as desk-top versions.

Leadership issue

Public agency sites continue to rank poorly despite the billions of dollars pumped into digital transformation every year over the past decade. Almost all of these challenges are essentially web hygiene issues which, with the right executive focus, can be remedied.

This suggests the dismal website performance is down to agency leaders’ and ministers’ lack of interest or knowledge.

At a time when engagement and authentic participation are considered key to building trust, authority, brand presence and relevance, too many agencies leave their websites to be run by junior officials.

Rather than seeing their websites as central to their agencies’ relationship with its citizen stakeholders, many sites are still framed around industry and provider interests – a telling sign where leaders’ attention really sits.

This is evident in the design and content hierarchy, with citizen and consumer editorial too often hidden deep down in site architecture. Little time is given to headline curation, search optimisation, content design and the type of endless A/B testing and optimisation that is standard practice in modern web teams.

The lack of ministerial and secretarial interest in web performance comes as the federal government works up a new charter of engagement and partnership, a strategic response to a world where government no longer knows best.