Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

Here’s a personal anecdote from a moment of clarity I had yesterday…

My day was interrupted by an unexpected adventure involving my youngest child and the emergency room. Luckily, everything ended OK, no stitches even, and the hospital staff were wonderful. The whole family was able to go out for Vietnamese soup and fried rice for dinner even.

What’s this got to do with government e-communications? Here’s what happened:

Mid-morning, I got a very terse phone message from my significant other telling me we had to take our son to the hospital ASAP. Of course this set off a panic reaction causing me to fly out of the office grabbing coat and mitts and pulling them on as I was running for the door.

But not before I paused for a moment, to think "where the hell is my Blackberry" – then locate it and slide it in my pocket.

That moment of hesitation was very telling. Mobile communication capacity is *extremely* high on my list of personal priorities.

Well duh. Aren’t we all like this?

Here’s where the link to government e-communications comes in: knowing in an abstract way that the digital channels enabled by mobile devices are becoming more important is vastly different from actually taking it into account when considering how citizens digitally interact with us.

Frankly, I find that in my day-to-day work, mobile is mostly still an afterthought and the decisions we make about our web presences are guided by the desktop experience. We might console ourselves with "the CSS templates fix presentation for mobile browsing," and give it no further thought. However, my "moment" yesterday viscerally hammered the point home for me – this paradigm is going to flip, and we will get to a point where we must prioritize mobile over the PC in our decision-making about our web content. It’s only a matter of time, so we need to get ready for it.