A Conversation With ITIF About the State of Federal Government Websites

At the beginning of 2017, the ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) released a report that benchmarked 300 federal websites in four areas: page-load speed, mobile friendliness, security and accessibility. Some sites fared better than others, but the report highlighted that our federal sites have a ways to go (DigitalGov included) in these areas.

Looking at these four metrics is important as they directly impact our customers’ first perceptions of the quality of our government’s digital services.

Since it’s been nearly six months since the report was released, we wanted to check in with ITIF and see what they’ve learned, what they’ve heard from agencies and what their future plans are to build on this research. ITIF will also discuss their report and methodology behind it.

Disclaimer: All references to specific brands and/or companies are used only for illustrative purposes and do not imply endorsement by the U.S. federal government or any federal government agency.

Federal agencies can register their mobile products—mobile websites and native apps—on the U.S. Digital Registry to verify that they’re mobile-friendly, authoritative sources of government information. Learn more about the Registry (there’s also an instructional webinar), and sign up here.

If you have a .gov or .mil email address and would like to connect with other feds in these fields, check out our Communities page to find out how to join the Listservs for MobileGov, Government Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), Web Content Managers, and more.