Just had a look at MyGov website, an initiative by Narendra Modi. Website looks nice.. and I was surprised. Because we know how govt websites generally look like.

This website doesn't look like a govt website until you try to use it ;)
And when you try to use it, It's full of flaws and mistakes... this is a very polite review of the website MyGov.

You can't signup or sign in. Webpage hangs and slow server response time(1.1 seconds), pageload speed varies from 5 sec to 60 seconds(12 seconds being average). References to the tests are given below this post.

Accidently when you do get successful signup, mail arrives in your spam folder.. Again a hallmark of govt websites and govt professionals. So, You can be sure that you are indeed on a govt. website.

This Idea of listening public opinion is nice but implementation sucks... that is my first opinion. And I am expressing this opinion on my own blog instead of expressing it on MyGov website because I couldn't log in.

It should be easy to signup/login. There is no need to be too much focused on security and doing silly things. Images are good, language used on website is nice and friendly. But Technically it sucks. Make it usable first. I think there are some more serious flaws in the code not just the optimization.

“A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.” — Bill Gates

MyGov dev team needs few such developers who challenge themselves and are exceptionally good. Most govt. professional just do what they must do and not what they should do. Ultimately they end up doing things which they shouldn't do. For example, what is the use of captcha when you can't even implement it well and user can't even signup. Internet connection in India is patchy, they should try to keep the webpage size under few kbs. If this website is intended to be used by public on regular basis then they should've atleast optimized the website before lauching it.

My advice to developer team of MyGov website: Remove that captcha from signup page. It's very irritating. Also you are asking users to choose a password which has special characters, numbers, capital and small letters... it's idiotic. It gives a pseudo feeling of security and make people fake believe in security when there is none. Your website is not even using SSL. I'm afraid that on this website users' information is not safe. Optimize your website, improve your code. And try to hire few exceptionally good programmers to do the job and not the army of incompetent programmers.

The website is not even usable forget about security.

"It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit." - John Wooden

Thanks!

References

  1. Page load speed and analysis of MyGov.nic.in by gtmetrix
  2. Page Load speed and analysis of MyGov.nic.in by Pingdom