Bad government Web sites are bad for democracy

Bad government Web sites, it seems, go hand in hand with people feeling bad about being American.

Testing a sample of six federal Web sites, the research firm Forrester rated the Internal Revenue Service's the worst, and the Department of Veterans Affairs the best. But even the VA site provided a worse consumer experience than the most poorly-reviewed corporate site. The customer experience "is disastrously weak," Forrester said. Across the board, government Web sites meet the expectations of their users only 33 percent of the time, according to the report. And the worse people felt about their interaction with a government Web site, the more they felt like second-class citizens and less optimistic about the future of the United States. Forrester plans to take a look at a wide variety of federal sites, but in the meantime suggests, surprisingly, that government Web sites should not try to appear efficient. People like sites that feel like humans made them, the firm says.