'Used Gov' and Social Messaging

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen and his team at the Nielsen Norman Group recently released a research report on the design and usability of social messaging and RSS feeds. In the outline of the findings Nielsen posted on his Web site, he bluntly states, "we have a long way to go to improve the usability of social network messaging and RSS feeds."

He immediately goes on to explain that, with services like Twitter, user confusion often starts with the account name. And from his research, he singles out the U.S. Department of Education, which tweets under the moniker of usedgov, which is easily interpreted as "used gov."

Nielsen calls it "off-putting," and moved on to his conclusion, but it got me thinking.

Government Web sites are only now coming into their own. For years, agencies fell into the all-to-easy trap of organizing their site structures according to their agency's organizational structure instead of according to audience needs. Is this happening all over again with social messaging?

For example, FEMA maintains a slew of Twitter accounts named according to FEMA regions, like femaregion3. Until three minutes ago, I didn't know it was Region III that served the mid-Atlantic region, and I doubt most people do. I don't have a better naming strategy in mind, but for a number of agencies, it's probably worth investigating.