Mobilizing Our Government Websites

By John Landwehr

As politicians prepare for the 2016 elections, leveraging mobile devices and social media will be central to how candidates build support and spread their message. However, even the most technologically-savvy candidates have not been campaigning for the use of mobile technology to support more efficient and effective government-to-citizen interactions.

Recently released studies indicate the rapid rate of mobile adoption among US citizens – across the country and of all ages. Earlier this year, Pew Research shared the results of its report covering smartphone usage in the U.S. One of the more intriguing findings shows that 19% of Americans who own a smartphone indicate that their smartphone is their primary means of accessing the internet.

If nearly one in five American citizens only uses a smartphone to access the internet, shouldn’t the government be supporting this substantial group? Not just the federal government, but state and local governments should also ensure that their entire web properties are mobile-friendly.

While looking at the top 20 government domains visited over the past 30 days, according to analytics.gov, to see if they have mobile-friendly sites – the results were less than desirable. Out of these top 20 government domains, only 8 had mobile-friendly websites!

But these issues can be fixed, as many of Adobe’s customers – both in the public and private sector – have used Adobe’s Experience Manager to quickly and easily maintain public facing websites and applications tailored to the needs of all popular consumer devices. We have government customers at the Federal, state and local levels that are implementing AEM across their systems, and providing seamless mobile experiences for citizens.

As smartphone usage continues to grow, we hope that the public sector will respond accordingly with websites and applications that provide effective communication tools for all citizens.