We often visit a local government website for a simple purpose: find street sweeping hours, pay a parking ticket. Instead of clarity, we’re met with a labyrinth of links, random information, and dead-end pages.
The Library of Babel is a 1940s absurdist short story about overwhelming knowledge and the search for something meaningful. Its author, Jorge Luis Borges, describes a library that contains all possible knowledge–every book ever written and every book never written.
Somewhere within the nonsense, there’s true knowledge. It’s elusive and the search for it drives people to madness.
And no, Borges never even had the pleasure to appeal a parking ticket on a government website.
Here are a few content design strategies to prevent the chaos of government babel.
Optimize for search
Help search engines find your content:
- Use clear page titles and meta descriptions
- Review keyword analytics for words and phrases people use
- Make search prominent on your site
Structure content
Use structure to organize your information:
- Consistent and predictable layouts
- Helpful, sequential headings
- Bulleted lists
Stop making PDFs
Governments typically have a lot of PDFs and most are not accessible. It’s expensive to remediate them and no one likes PDFs anyway.
Instead: default to web text wherever possible.
Avoid FAQs
FAQs often become long, unwieldy lists of every question ever asked. Some have never been asked at all.
Instead: organize information logically with helpful headings.
Limit pages to essential information
Your website isn’t an encyclopedia. Too much information overwhelms people and leads to unnecessary phone calls.
Keep content relevant:
- Lead with the most important message
- Review regularly
- Help people do things
Remove old information
Your website isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s the foundation of your customer service.
Keep content current:
- Move historical documents to archives
- Remove information if no longer helpful
Final thoughts
In the chaotic Library of Babel, readers are left confused and overwhelmed.
“We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future…”
When people experience this frustration on a government website, it limits access and erodes trust.
Let’s leave the absurd to philosophers and make government websites that clarify, rather than confound.