Today I had a very bad experience with one of the Government websites. I wanted to do marriage registration. It's been over 2 months already and some of my friends mentioned that it is more convenient to do the registration online. But usually, people pay to some broker a lump amount and the broker will get it registered and there will be no work for the bride and good. We did the same for my sister's marriage but I did not want to pay so much to the brokers as the option is available online. Today I wanted to explore the Government website and find out the procedure.
First of all finding, the right website was a big challenge for me. There were two websites available and if I search Google, I get the wrong website. It looks like a transformation is happening from the old website to a new website. There was no information about the same on the old website except for the fact that the links were broken there. It was horrible user experience.
In one of the video tutorials, I managed to find out the right website and reached there. After reaching there, there was no straight forward option available to do a marriage registration. Then after checking the tutorial video, I found out that I will have to first register with the website to be able to use the features of the website. How will I know about this as a new user? If I had been the developer for this website, I would have not given this horrible user experience to the people.
I have to admit that not all government websites are like this. There are some of the central government websites that are perfect and up to the trend. These regional websites act as a shame for the state. I don't know if I can make this public statement but as I'm just sharing my user experience, I feel that the Government should take initiatives to hire some good developers to design these websites. They might have focused on the security aspects and all that but would have missed a lot in the aesthetics part.
Look at the above image, it is from one of the government websites. The drop-down shows Hello world. Being a developer I feel ashamed very to see this. I don't know how I can help my government get a better website. If there is some way I can help the government to build a better website, I would definitely do it. I guess the government should also think about outsourcing the website development and maintenance tasks to some of the reputed IT companies. We have numerous IT companies available who can do a great job in terms of website development.
Well this is not a complaint as such but wanted to share my frustration after seeing the website. Also, this is just one example that I'm giving. There are many similar government websites that give a horrible user experience.