Dormant Inertia

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Excerpts from my Whitepaper - Indian Government Websites

Web serves as a medium to communicate. With spate of commercial, communication and entertainment websites it has also turned into an important medium for ‘transactions’ and ‘information sharing’.

The governance system is India is increasingly using the medium of web to share information to the public. Which was helped improve the services and transparency within the system. But within this framework there is a large need for standardization for presentation of information. Which can promote both ease of use as well as strong branding for the government?

These gaps are largely due to autonomous approaches in different bodies of the government publishing such information. As a result large amount of content published by these government bodies contain different approaches for displaying relevant content, divergent branding approaches, and usage of standards for usability and accessibility.

A study of more than 100 government websites, legislative bodies, departments, and corporate bodies have revealed large differences in dealing with the India Government Brand. Some of the large pitfalls appear to be loosely-drawn information architectures and even lower importance to standards, accessibility etc.

We look at some of these key factors which can promote better ease-of-use among these sites. These include UCD, Accessibility Guidelines, W3C Standards etc. we also look at the current branding scenario for the India brand as well as compare these with similar sites in United States and Great Britain.