Adobe Digital Government Index results shine light on US states’ need for personalization
Digital access has become a necessity for everyone across the country. At the same time, public needs are increasingly more diverse and digital expectations are higher than ever.
The stats below underscore just how challenging it can be for government agencies to meet those needs.
- Forty-eight percent (48%) of citizens expect government services to be personalized — with more than half of Gen Z (54%) expecting personalization.
- One in five US residents speaks a primary language other than English.
- Fifty-three percent (53%) of mobile users will leave a page if it takes more than three seconds to load.
- Only 28% of residents say they’re satisfied with state government services.
Government agencies must ensure their websites provide equitable access to information and services for everyone, regardless of disability, location, income level, English proficiency, or available technology.
We’re seeing this focus on equitable access happening in states across the country as agencies look to deliver on the promise of efficient, easy-to-navigate personalized experiences that connect users to the right information when they need it.
2024 Digital Government Index for US States
Adobe developed the annual Digital Government Index for US States to analyze how state governments are progressing in their digital services transformations and what they can do to deliver higher quality experiences. The index’s goal is to help states benchmark their performance and identify strategies to advance.
When we deconstruct the user journey into multiple touchpoints (such as web visits, email engagement, account creation, customer support calls, and so on), we identify the metrics that matter most. The Adobe Digital Government Index tracks the metrics that make or break experiences — from site speed and search to personalized recommendations and language translations.
The 2024 edition marks the third iteration of the annual report as well as the addition of a new assessment category — personalization. The index also broadens its scope to look beyond the primary web portal and also consider the authenticated dashboards that states use to measure service delivery.
Putting numbers into context
Before we examine the personalization findings, let’s compare states’ 2024 performance with their performance in previous years. Until now, the index assigned a score of 0 to 100 to each of the 50 state portal websites based on the average of their scores across three categories: customer experience, digital equity, and site performance.
- Customer experience (CX) measures a state’s ability to deliver seamless user experiences that enable self-service and build trust. Adobe surveyed 1,000 residents across 50 states and examined primary sites on both desktop and mobile.
- Digital equity parses out how well a state lets users of all ability levels access government services. To measure this, Adobe assessed all 50 state websites for accessibility, mobile friendliness, readability, and language translation options.
- Site performance measures an agency’s ability to provide a fast and functional website across devices. Adobe crawled 50,000 websites to assess desktop speed, mobile speed, SEO performance, engagement, and site health.
While states improved their scores only slightly from 2023 to 2024, most are now providing the basics of a digital foundation — a web portal that is generally usable, accessible, and more digitized. Top performers have shifted their focus to personalization. By proactively delivering the right service to the right person at the right time, states can begin personalizing their digital experiences.
Casting the spotlight on personalization
Personalization will play a huge role in moving states toward the kinds of experiences residents expect and deserve from their government. Adobe measured personalization by evaluating how effectively states provided relevant experiences at various touchpoints throughout the user journey. We measured personalization capabilities across all 50 state websites — simulating both first-time and repeat visits over multiple days. We used several metrics, including:
- Availability of a personalized account dashboard
- Relevance and consistency of content across channels
- Ability to pre-populate forms with personal information
- Use of geo-based personalization
- Delivery of personalized emails related to previous activity or relevant services
- Ability to provide an authenticated (logged-in) experience to repeat visitors
Spotlights and trends
This year’s index revealed some interesting trends.
- When it comes to personalization, 19 out of 50 websites (38%) offer a personalized dashboard. But no states sent personalized follow-up emails, such as recommendations for related services, after a user had enrolled in a particular service.
- All 50 state websites passed the test for mobile friendliness, compared to 47 out of 50 states last year. While state websites still perform 66% faster on desktop than they do on mobile, there’s not as much of a disparity as there was last year, when websites performed 75% faster on desktop.
- When it comes to accessibility, we found that state websites had an average of 13 critical or serious issues. This is a slight improvement over last year when sites had an average of 14. This year 17 out of 50 states (34%) had 10 or more accessibility issues. This is an improvement over last year, when 23 of 50 states (46%) had 10 or more issues.
Below, you’ll find this year’s results for top performers overall and in each category.
Top 5 overall:
1. Maryland
2. New York
3. Oklahoma
4. Maine
5. Washington
Looking at the top performers in each category, we see how the addition of personalization led to a dramatic shift in overall rankings. Maryland came first in that category, which catapulted the state from number 20 to number 1 overall under the new methodology.
Top 5 performers by category:
- Personalization
- Maryland
- Oklahoma
- Washington
- Maine
- Wisconsin
- Customer experience
- California
- Colorado
- Oregon
- Alaska
- Ohio
- Digital equity
- New York
- North Carolina
- Massachusetts
- Oregon
- California
- Site performance
- Missouri
- Virginia
- Arizona
- Rhode Island
- Colorado
Top 5 biggest movers by score:
- Hawaii — 10.16-point increase
- Ohio — 6.25-point increase
- Colorado — 5.65-point increase
- Arizona — 5.38-point increase
- Kansas — 4.52-point increase
Personalization is essential to experience-driven government
The Digital Government Index for US States isn’t just a ranking system. It’s a way for state governments to understand how they can evolve to meet the diverse needs of their residents. This is what experience-driven governments are all about.
To put a finer point on it, an experience-driven government does five things:
- Reaches residents on their preferred channel
- Enables digital self-service
- Delivers responsive content on any device or connection
- Offers multi-language personalization
- Recommends next-best actions, programs, or services
This year’s results show that, regardless of its ranking or score, every state has work to do. Every step forward counts, and with Adobe’s experience-driven government framework, governments can build equitable, personalized experiences for their unique body of constituents.
Behind the scenes, experience-driven government builds on three pillars: data, content, and journeys.
- Data includes both the analytics and insights that inform agencies of performance and profile resolution information — like demographic data that a user has given consent to share.
- Content includes the images, videos, text, and other assets that form the foundation of the digital experience. Consistently branded, tagged, and managed content improves user experience and accessibility.
- Journeys connect data and content to orchestrate delivery of the best messages to each customer at the right moment. Like the other two pillars, journey management should consider multiple channels, including email, text, social media, and paid ads.
We reviewed all 50 state websites for implementation of the solutions that make a complete technology stack to deliver experience-driven government.
For years, industry partners like Adobe have been addressing these challenges with innovation in the private sector. We’re ready to help state governments by meeting them wherever they are in their modernization journey. Making digital experiences easier for those who need them most has become foundational to state government missions, and Adobe can help states take the right steps to become fully experience-driven.
Learn more about how Adobe helps fuel experience-driven government and creates personalization at scale.
Brian Chidester is the head of industry strategy for public sector at Adobe and the host of “The Government Huddle with Brian Chidester” podcast from GovExec. Formerly, Chidester served as the industry vice president for global public sector at Genesys. He also has held global public sector leadership roles with OpenText, Arrow ECS, and S&P Global. Chidester holds a B.S. in Communications Studies from Liberty University. He is a board member for the University of South Florida — Muma College of Business, an advisor to the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance at the World Economic Forum, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Recommended for you
https://business.adobe.com/fragments/resources/cards/thank-you-collections/government