Serious Design Failure At USAspending.gov?

theodp writes "Over at Intelligent Enterprise, Seth Grimes declares the Federal Government's USAspending.gov website a travesty, calling it 'almost a parody of a government-transparency site.' Among the faults cited by Grimes is a botched 'Federal Spending FY 2009 YTD' pie chart that graced USAspending.gov's home page. Not only were the sizes of pie segments not in proportion to the percentage labels (due to a Google Chart API error), the colors in the pie chart didn't even match the colors and values in the table immediately below the chart. Lucky for the Feds, Grimes didn't get a chance to look behind the curtain at the Federal IT Dashboard, where they forgot to remove a (commented) reference to a Google spreadsheet that states 'These totals are pretty poor numbers' (Google workbook). Oops!"

Comments

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[q-the-impaler]

That's a big problem with government: they don't compensate high performers appropriately. Furthermore, they routinely compensate poor performers and promote them out of departments.

Re:Criticize the Numbers Not the Presentation

[CodeInspired]

Having never done this before, the government is bound to have problems. All of them do when they try new things.

Like a public health care option?