Quality Framework review

By the way, I have a feature in eGov Monitor today on the 'Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design: Usability issues for government websites'.

If you're interested in public sector issues, you can sign up for the - free - weekly at http://www.egovmonitor.com/

It's interesting how Government departments still post documents to the Web without checking the information they're putting out there. The BBC reports today, in an article entitled 'The Hidden Dangers of Documents', that "Your Microsoft Word document can give readers more information about you than you might think".

Mark Ward goes on to describe how, "The time when most information tends to leak is when you are using a document that has a number of revisions or a number of people working on it," quoting Nick Spenceley, founder of computer forensics firm Inforenz.

According to Ward, "the UK government has now largely abandoned Microsoft Word for official documents and has turned to documents created using Adobe Acrobat which uses the Portable Data Format (PDF)".

And he goes on to further quote Spenceley: "I'm not sure many people check Word documents before they go out or are published."

Well, if we look at what we get on the Office of the e-Envoy website, there's both a PDF version and Word version of the Quality Framework, and the Word version, with 'Track Changes' switched on, reveals a surprising amount of history about the document. This includes the names of companies that have clearly supplied content for the report, allowing us to see why certain information was included.

Since writing the piece for eGov Monitor, I'm being inundated with emails from both sides of the Pond, telling me about what people have found in the Framework report behind 'Track Changes' (I haven't gone through it myself, as I just don't have the time). This information is already being posted by others to the Web, on sites such as Webword. It has to be said, such information makes the Government look just a little foolish.

Postscript:
Here's the original eGov article from 18 August. Usability News republished it on 19 August.
Then Ann Light followed up with her own piece on Usability News.
And I wrote a follow-up on Usability News.
The original piece was blogged on Webword, with a number of comments, and has now been added to the Usability Views Usability Heretics collection.
And now the follow-up article has been added to Usability Heretics too.