FCC.gov: Poor Usability and Public Disservice

Nancy Scola of TechPresident offers this fascinating observation: Poor web usability can be a form of government malfeasance.

At the confirmation hearing of Julius Genachowski to head the Federal Communications Commission, Scola reports that Sen. Jay Rockefeller pointed out that the agency doesn’t make it very easy for the public to find out what it’s up to, thanks to its lousy website.

Quoting from a 2007 GAO report: “. . .[I]t is nearly impossible to find information on the FCC’s website,” and some public information is simply not to be found.

I hadn’t been to the FCC’s website. I wondered just how horrible it could be.

This horrible:

Yes, this is the FCC's home page

Yes, this is the home page. Not an index page, or a search results page.

It’s your “Welcome to the Federal Communications Commission” page, home of the agency which, among other things, “educates and informs consumers about telecommunications goods and services and engages their input to help guide the work of the Commission.”

FCC responsibilities include

• the  national Do Not Call registry
• the digital TV transition
• the national broadband access program
• all that unpleasantness about obscenity, Howard Stern and wardrobe malfunction

and much more.

This is a significant portfolio, full of matters of considerable public importance.

So let’s explore a timely issue: Let’s say you’re looking for something about media ownership. Maybe you’ve read something about how, with media businesses struggling, some argue that restrictions on large companies owning a lot of different communication properties should be loosened.

Let’s dig in!

Credit card disclosure statements? No, the FCC communicating with the public.

Yipes.

The headline suggests this is a report of a 2006 review of ownership policies. But the first paragraph says it was completed in 2007. And responding to a request that came in 2006. And that “modest” changes were made in 2008. At the bottom you’ll find description of some of these changes in baffling language: Regarding television station ownership, for instance, it says: “The Commission concluded, in the Quadrennial Review Order, that the 2004 legislation precludes it from reviewing the 50% UHF discount in quadrennial review proceedings.”

Let me rush to say: I do not for a second blame  the civil servants who run the FCC web operations. In my experience, federal web leaders are not just up to speed on web use, but taking a leadership role.

No, the fcc.gov site appears to represent a failure of leadership–or, at the very least, a failure of the public communications agency to place much value in communicating with the public.

But to Scola’s point: Poor web usability–usually the domain of user-experience geeks and interface designers–really does have political implications.

Just as it’s possible for a politician to say “it’s in the 2,398-page bill, we can’t help it if nobody bothered to read it,” a political appointee can say “it’s on the website, we made it public. All you had to do is search.”

[Ah, OK, let's try.

FCC search, actual size

Box shown actual size.]

The good news: Genachowski is among many other things a web guy. He has served on boards of directors of some highly usable web ventures as Motley Food, Web.com, Ticketmaster, Expedia and Hotels.com.  He is a founder of  LaunchBoxDigital, a group that provides microfunding to web startups.

So he knows from good websites. As an Obamacist, he’s committed to the whole transparency thing.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the FCC will be doling out millions to provide broadband access to rural America. That’s an important goal.

But it would be nice if a little bit of that money were devoted to recovery and reinvestment in the FCC website.