This article says the USDA home page gets low satisfaction marks, compared to other government sites, which also are declining in their evaluation.
I'm not surprised, although the page has certainly improved over the years. I don't know all the problems. Partially, I suspect it's because USDA and its customers had a 100+ year history of how to relate and the Internet is very different. Or, more accurately, each USDA agency has its own customers and its own history and its own pattern for dealing with the customers. In some cases the dealing is partially mediated by state agencies (consider nutrition programs) or by private companies (consider crop insurance).
I'd bet (something, but not a lot) that USDA and most other government agencies don't have much feedback on what's working for them and what's not, at least not compared to sites that rely on advertising for finances.
And no one knows what potential uses are ignored. For example, look at what's available on-line for school lunch authorization. FNS seems to have just put their document package on-line. Is there a missed opportunity to have the forms fillable on line? (That's available from other agencies.) But how many school lunch recipients would really fill it in on-line--probably not many. But I'd guess the Secretary of Agriculture has no one looking at statistics to identify the best places to put his Internet assets.
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