What 'boring' content actually is, and why it's the right answer for government

The best content I have ever written for government was boring. Predictable headings. Plain sentences. No surprises. Calm enough for someone reading at 11pm on a Sunday with a Centrelink letter in their other hand.

The content marketing industry would call that a failure. In government, it is the trust signal users need.

Boring content for government is not dull, lazy, or uninspired. It is structurally predictable, calm in tone, and factually specific. It is built for people whose stakes are high and whose attention is low.

When I led ACT Government's whole-of-government digital consolidation, we cut average call centre time from seven minutes to four. We did it by stripping the personality out of the content and replacing it with structure. Predictable headings. Step lists. Numbers in tables. The pages got more boring, and the calls got shorter.

What 'boring' actually means in government content

Boring is the wrong word for what we actually want. Better words are predictable, scannable, and trustworthy.

A predictable page tells a user where the answer will be before they have read a sentence. A scannable page lets them find that answer in five seconds. A trustworthy page does not surprise them with a tone shift, a clever turn of phrase, or a marketing aside when they are looking for the income threshold for a payment.

The Australian Government Style Manual is built on this premise. So is WCAG 2.2 and the principle of consistent navigation in success criterion 3.2.3. Predictability is not a stylistic preference. It is an accessibility obligation.

Why high-stakes audiences need boring content

Most users on a government website are not browsing. They are anxious. They are looking for a payment, a deadline, an eligibility rule, or a number to call when something has gone wrong.

Anxiety reduces cognitive bandwidth. So does fatigue, English as a second language, low literacy, screen reader use, and trying to read a page on a phone in a waiting room.

Content marketing advice (open with a hook, write a story, build voice) assumes a leisurely reader who is choosing to engage. That is not the user on housing.gov.au at midnight. Borrowing voice rules from a SaaS blog into a government page is a category error.

Where 'engaging' goes wrong

I have reviewed hundreds of government pages where someone has tried to make the content 'engaging'. The pattern is consistent.

The page opens with a rhetorical question. The headings are clever rather than literal. Calls to action are softened with feeling words. The actual answer, whether that is the eligibility rule, the form to use, or the deadline, is buried under three paragraphs of context.

The user does not need context. The user needs the answer. Burying the answer to seem warmer is not warmth. It is a usability failure dressed up as tone of voice.

A worked example

Imagine two versions of a page about a hardship payment.

The 'engaging' version starts: 'Life can throw unexpected challenges at any of us. If you are facing financial difficulty, we are here to help you find your way through.'

The boring version starts: 'You may be able to get a one-off payment of up to $1,200 if you cannot pay for essential costs like rent, food, or medicine. You need to be over 16 and have less than $5,000 in savings.'

The first version is warmer in literary terms. The second version is warmer in practice, because it answers the question someone in financial distress actually opened the page to ask.

What boring content design looks like in practice

If you want your government content to do the work boring content does, the rules are well-rehearsed.

Use the answer as the opening sentence. Use literal headings, not clever ones. Keep sentence length under 25 words on average. Write at a Year 9 reading level or below. Use the same word for the same thing every time, even if a thesaurus would prefer otherwise.

This is not a creative constraint. It is the APS Digital Service Standard translated into editorial practice. Boring content is a discipline. It is also the most respectful thing you can do for a user under stress.

The question to ask

When the next round of feedback on a government page comes back asking for it to be 'more engaging', ask one question first. Engaging for whom? If the answer is the executive who signs off the page, the page is being designed for the wrong reader.

The reader is the person trying to find the answer they need. Boring is what gets them to it.

Photo by Lauren Sauder on Unsplash.