The federal government has an increasingly tough time satisfying the public, but it does know how to make a decent website, according to survey results released Jan. 25 by the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

According to an aggregate rating of satisfaction with federal services delivered during 2010 as surveyed by ACSI, Americans were satisfied to a degree of 65.4 out of a possible 100 with their government services.

This year's overall satisfaction number is a decrease of 4.8 percent from public satisfaction with federal services in 2009--and it's the largest single-year decline in ACSI federal satisfaction since the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based ACSI LLC  began measuring satisfaction with the federal government in 1994. ACSI measures degree of satisfaction, meaning that the index numbers don't represent the percentage of times Americans were simply satisfied or not satisfied with government services, but how satisfied they were.

The latest quarterly results of the ACSI e-government satisfaction index paints a different picture. The results, sponsored by the also Ann Arbor-based ForeSee Results, show an aggregate satisfaction figure of 75 with federal websites during the fourth quarter of 2010.

Although the overall federal satisfaction and the quarterly e-government numbers measure different time periods, the methodology and sample size behind the results allow comparison, said Forrest Morgeson, an ACSI research scientist in an interview.

Well when compared to private sector sites.

While the average federal score trailed ACSI-measured satisfaction with online industries such as Amazon.com (it had an ACSI satisfaction score of 86) and Google (80), some individual federal websites out performed both.

Two of them come from the Social Security Administration: Its retirement estimator satisfied the public and its online benefit application site both delivered a satisfaction rating of 90, say the ACSI numbers.

Moreover, the average score even outpaces some commercial sector websites, including those of online news sites (74) and social media (70). 

"In general, people are finding more satisfying experiences on government sites than they are, as a whole, on social sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter," said ForeSee President Larry Freed in an analysis of the results.