Design State: A weblog about government web design

I was interviewed by Steve Hargreaves at CNN Money for an article about the federal government’s stimulus tracking site Recovery.gov. Entitled Recovery.gov’s citizen accounting effort, the article examines the efficacy of the site in terms of its goal of being an unprecedented example of government transparency.

The government’s http://www.Recovery.gov/ is supposed to be the place where everyday citizens can go and see exactly who’s getting the $787 billion in taxpayer funds designed to boost the economy.

“This is your money,” reads a statement on the Web site’s homepage. “You have a right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.”

Yet the first thing one sees on the homepage is a big pie chart saying 60% of the money is going to states and 40% to local governments, hardly the detailed breakdown the government has promised.

Recovery.gov’s citizen accounting effort, Steve Hargreaves, 19 March 2009.

The general consensus seems to be that the site could be much better, but it’s a step in the right direction. Only time will tell. Some of the things I’d like to see on Recovery.gov include:

• Front page notifications of updated content, not just news items which mainly seem to be PR blurbs;
• Get rid of the annoying pop-ups that appear when you click on an external link. This is the web equivalent of Microsoft Vista’s abominable User Account Control, a “feature” deliberately designed to annoy users. When you close the pop-up you aren’t taken to the external link. Apparently what you have to do is click on the link inside of the pop-up to actually leave the site. If I click on a link, I want to be taken to the referenced file, not receive a confusing pop-up that makes me click on the link within the window to get where I was trying to go in the first place. Designing for the lowest common denominator is a sure way to destroy the user experience;
• Granular RSS feeds for each specific category of reporting. WordPress does this natively, and it very useful for sites with broad topical range where only certain types of information are going to be of interest for folks; and
• Make finding information more intuitive. I thought clicking on the Accountability and Transparency link made sense for finding the information I was looking for, instead it just goes to a page of memorandum boilerplate. You end up having to click through all over the place, and sometimes leave the site altogether for a State’s stimulus site to find any meaty information.