Betagov, Betagov - wherefore art thou Betagov?

With apologies to the Bard. As you might recall from your A-Level English, Juliet's lament means 'why are you Romeo?' rather than 'where are you, Romeo'? Indeed, over 2012 people might be asking where Betagov has gotten to. They've got a lot of user testing to do before they come up with something that isn't worse than Directgov itself. Combining a government supersite with accessibility is like ... damnit, Dorian ... Shakespeare would have nailed that with a simile. What's wrong with you tonight?

Nonetheless, the question that the test subjects, the big players like DVLA, DWP and Student Loans Company and eventually GDS themselves are going to be asking is: why do you have to be a Betagov at all? What was so wrong with government services having a website each?

GDS are doing their homework, of course:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/01/27/search-data-user-needs/

There are over 300,000 searches carried out weekly on Directgov, with over 125,000 different search phrases. The most popular term, ‘jobs’, is searched for 4,500 times a week. At the other end of the spectrum there is a ‘long tail’ of 100,000 phrases that are only searched for once ...

Using this data to identify needs that are not being met by government can be daunting. However, it is possible to filter or group it to pick out emerging trends and unsatisfactory user journeys.

125,000 different search phrases. I would expect the number of different search phrases was somewhat lower on each of those 287 websites you killed and absorbed like some glutinous horror from a John Carpenter film. You're going to have your work cut out improving public services now.

It's OK though, you give one example of something Directgov's dramatic intervention managed to improve -

During the run up to a recent Christmas, a growing volume of searches that included the words ‘Christmas’ and ‘payment’ was spotted. We also noted that users were not clicking on the (irrelevant) results presented to them. Delving deeper, we were able to see what else those users looked for. This identified an unmet user need: benefit payment dates over the Christmas period. HMRC published an article on Directgov and, as we were able to supply the relevant keywords that users were searching for, the search engine-optimised article ranked well in Google quickly.

Do HMRC not listen to customer phone calls at all? Or check their own web analytics? I would have thought that people have been phoning up about their xmas benefit payment dates every single year since the dawn of the welfare state. Some local knowledge would have paid off there.

Luckily Directgov swooped and stuck their HMRC article on a seperate supersite; and thus another feel-good piece of anecdotal evidence about public services being improved by centralisation was born. [note before publish: explore Spielberg metaphor here].

I expect you've got your beady eyes on the vast HMRC website these days; not the complicated transactional stuff where you submit your tax returns, of course - just the pages of static content. They should be easy enough to prune, transplant and paint a non-branded Betagov white. You'll be needing some success stories in the next couple of years so converging HMRC might do the trick.

Haha, oh dear, I slipped into the second person again. I used that trope on my last post. Probably best I leave this one be. Maybe I'll go and comment on GDS a bit.