Usability and the White House Email System

The New York Times reports about changes to the White House email sys­tem that make it less user-friendly. After read­ing the arti­cle, I decided to take a look for myself and here are a few things which could help improve the system:

First of all, a progress indi­ca­tor should show how many more pages are required in order to com­plete the email. This would allow peo­ple to quickly under­stand that this may be a length­ier process than they expect and give them an indi­ca­tion of how close (or how far) they are to com­plet­ing their communication.

The men­tion of I want to write a sup­port­ing comment/differing opin­ion as the first item is a bad approach. While I under­stand that it will make it eas­ier to quickly assess the level of sup­port or dis­sent on a par­tic­u­lar issues, the approach likes gran­u­lar­ity and inspires instant sus­pi­cion of darker motives. A bet­ter way to approach this would be to include this as a later step in the flow, ask­ing whether the writer sup­ports or opposes the pol­icy or other (the other cat­e­gory allow­ing for peo­ple who are not fully in sup­port or dis­sent on a pol­icy to offer suggestions).

The next issue is in the break­down by cat­e­gories. Here, I would rec­om­mend that the sys­tem allow for a more gran­u­lar approach, first let­ting users decide whether it is a par­tic­u­lar pol­icy mat­ter (for exam­ple, a bill cur­rently in front of con­gress), a gen­eral com­ment on a par­tic­u­lar topic (maybe using the dif­fer­ent gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions as a top cat­e­gory and then break­ing it down to the indi­vid­ual issues). The rea­son for this approach is that it would allow to get a much bet­ter redi­rec­tion and could, under­cover, also allow for mes­sages to be sent to a par­tic­u­lar per­son in a par­tic­u­lar depart­ment, hence increas­ing the chance of a quick response.

For exam­ple, an email on Inter­net usabil­ity could be sent to the web­mas­ter team of the site, as well as to some of the peo­ple respon­si­ble for Sec­tion 508, as well as to some­one in the president’s office han­dling those issues. This would make for a more respon­sive government.

Instead of using a select box, the issues should be included as links, with a “more info” but­ton next to each of the links. Click­ing on that but­ton would state the White House posi­tion on that par­tic­u­lar issue, allow­ing to later select if you are writ­ing to sup­port or protest a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion. This would also help in edu­cat­ing peo­ple about the president’s posi­tion on listed issues.

As it cur­rently stands, the con­tent orga­ni­za­tion makes it look as if there were a lim­ited num­ber of issues the president’s office is will­ing to dis­cuss and as if the issues on the list are not part of the agenda, and there­fore should be ignored. The lack of an “other” cat­e­gory re-emphasizes that feeling.

Once you have selected the proper topic, you are pre­sented with a form ask­ing for con­tact infor­ma­tion. That form should include a promi­nent link to an expla­na­tion of the White House’s pri­vacy pol­icy (did you know that, by law, the site is sup­posed to retain all emails it receives for a period of 12 years?) This will help peo­ple bet­ter under­stand how the data will be han­dled and can help alle­vi­ate concerns.

The review screen should present the data in a clearer form. A good way to do so would be to high­light the head­ers infor­ma­tion (from, name, address, etc…) in a sep­a­rate block than the rest of the message.

That’s about it, off the top of my head. I’m sure oth­ers will find more fault with the sys­tem but I hope that this will con­tribute to the dis­cus­sion. I know that some of the TNL.net read­ers are mem­bers of gov­ern­ment (or at least read this site from gov­ern­men­tal loca­tions) so hope­fully, those usabil­ity rec­om­men­da­tions will make their way to the right place and the sys­tem will be improved.

As a side note, I recently heard that Bill Clin­ton did not use email much dur­ing his admin­is­tra­tion because of the heavy require­ments for record-keeping. Email reten­tion is a prob­lem that is the bane of many orga­ni­za­tion, both gov­ern­men­tal and cor­po­rate. It looks like this new email sys­tem is designed to bet­ter han­dle that kind of data. I wish the web­mas­ters at whitehouse.gov much luck in fig­ur­ing out how to fix it.