When “Online” Isn’t the Same as “Usable”: The Real Test for Digital Government

Availability was never the finish line

For years, the story of digital government has been told as a story of coverage — how many services moved online, how many forms went paperless, how many counters closed. But coverage measures the wrong thing. It tells you a door exists, not whether people can walk through it. Research from the Digital Poverty Alliance and Cognizant puts a number on this gap: around 20% of UK adults cannot use digital government services without help, and when it comes to tasks like managing Universal Credit, Pension Credit, identity documents, or visa applications, 60% found logging in difficult and a quarter struggled simply to navigate the systems. Those are not marginal failure rates for services that are often mandatory — there is frequently no non-digital alternative that is quick, cheap, or even available.

Access and use are two different problems

It helps to separate what "digital exclusion" actually contains, because the term gets used as if it means one thing — usually "no internet." In practice, the sources describe several distinct layers, each of which can break a service on its own even if the others are fine.

Read this way, "digital exclusion" is not a fixed group of people who lack broadband. It is a set of frictions that can catch almost anyone, depending on the device in their pocket, the strength of their signal, or how confident they feel about entering sensitive data.

The myth that this is only an older person’s problem

There’s a common assumption that struggling with government websites is mainly something that happens to older users. The research complicates that. Among younger adults, difficulty accessing and navigating these services rose to 40% — roughly double the overall struggle rate for logging in among the wider population, and notably higher than might be expected. The likely explanation is not a lack of general tech comfort but a mismatch of habits: younger users default to smartphones for almost everything, while many government forms — long applications, document uploads, identity checks — were designed with a keyboard and a large screen in mind. Being digitally fluent on a phone is not the same as being equipped to fill in a multi-page benefits form on one.

Where journeys actually break

Instead of treating "digital exclusion" as a single wall, it is more useful to think of a service as a path with several places where people can fall off it.

flowchart TD
 A[Discover the service] --> B[Log in / verify identity]
 B --> C[Navigate the form]
 C --> D[Submit successfully]
 D --> E[Get help if something fails]

Most attention in service design goes into the middle of that path — the interface, the form fields, the visual design. But the research suggests the earliest step, logging in, is where the largest share of people get stuck, and the last step, getting help, is where the experience either recovers or collapses entirely. Of those who called a helpline, 60% found it useful — but others described long waits, only to be redirected straight back to the same digital channel that had already failed them. A support system that returns people to the point of failure is not really support; it is a loop.

Support is part of the design, not a backup plan

This is why Cognizant’s Yatin Mahandru argues that assisted, human support needs to be "built in from the start across citizen journeys, rather than bolted on at the end". That reframes the whole debate. If a service can only be considered inclusive when a phone line, a community group, or a family member routinely fills the gaps it leaves, then the digital channel alone was never the complete service — the surrounding support network always was.

Institutions are starting to grade themselves differently

There are signs the underlying measurement culture is shifting. The OECD’s Digital Government Index places the UK among the strongest performers internationally, particularly on embedding digital thinking into policy design and anticipating user needs, known as "proactiveness". That is a genuinely strong signal about institutional capability — but it is a framework score, built on policy and governance criteria, not a direct audit of whether any single claimant actually completed their Universal Credit renewal without help. High-level maturity and everyday usability can move at different speeds.

Encouragingly, the UK’s own Government Digital Service seems aware of that gap. As part of its Inclusive Services work under the Digital Inclusion Action Plan, GDS says it is trying to build "a consistent measure of whether digital services are reaching and working for the people who need them". That is not evidence of improved outcomes yet — it is a stated intention, alongside updated design guidance and cross-government workshops. But it marks a shift in what "success" is even supposed to mean: not how many services exist online, but how many people can finish what they came to do.

The measure that actually matters

None of this is an argument against digital government — for many people, online services are faster, more convenient, and available at times a physical office never was. The argument is about what gets counted as progress. A rollout target can be hit while a meaningful share of citizens are still locked out at the login screen. Genuine inclusion means designing for the person on a patchy connection and a small screen from day one — not adding support as an afterthought once the "ideal user" version already works. Until success is measured by completed tasks rather than published services, the digital divide will keep being rediscovered, one frustrated login at a time.

Sources

1. Digital government services increase accessibility gap | Computer Weekly
2. Designing public services that work for everyone