Picture this: You need a passport. You have heard about eCitizen. You sit down with your phone, open the site, and start the application. Forty minutes later, you are on your third attempt. The page timed out twice. One section asked for a document you do not have in digital form. Another wanted a file format your phone cannot produce. You close the browser and decide to visit the office in person.
That experience is not unusual. According to a 2025 study published in the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, half of the respondents who had used eCitizen for passport applications found it helpful. The other half found it not helpful at all. That is a split that tells you something important: the platform works for some people and fails for others. The difference often comes down to design, infrastructure, and how well the system matches the reality of the person using it.
Kenya has made real progress in putting government services online. The government has launched 5,000 services on the eCitizen platform, according to an Open Government Partnership commitment report from 2023, with an ambition to reach 12,000. That is a serious effort. But putting services online is not the same as making them work well. The gap between launching a portal and having citizens actually use it without frustration is where the real work lies.
What Useful Portals Do Right
A useful citizen service portal does not just exist. It works for the person on the other end. That means three things.
They match how people actually use the internet
Most Kenyans access the internet on a mobile phone. According to the Communications Authority of Kenya's Q2 2025-2026 Sector Statistics Report, there were 30.7 million smartphones and 32.1 million feature phones in use. That means a significant number of people are on phones with limited processing power, small screens, and expensive data. A portal that loads slowly on a 3G connection or requires a desktop browser is not useful to these users. The best portals are built for mobile first — lightweight pages, simple forms, and minimal image downloads.
From our experience at KEPAS, we have seen that even a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a noticeable drop in form completion. On a mobile data connection, that delay is often longer. If a page takes more than five seconds to load, many users simply give up.
They guide the user, not test them
A good portal assumes the user is not a digital expert. It uses plain language, clear labels, and logical steps. If a user makes a mistake, the error message tells them exactly what went wrong and how to fix it. A study published in the International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science (IJARCS) in 2016 found that 82% of eCitizen users surveyed found the platform useful, but 40% reported experiencing hardware or software problems. Many of those problems came from unclear instructions or forms that did not work properly on their device.
A useful portal also saves your progress. If you are filling a long form and your connection drops, you should not have to start over. That sounds basic, but it is not universal.
They work when you need them
A portal that goes down during peak hours or crashes when too many people use it is not useful. According to a 2025 study published in Discover Global Society, 30% of users surveyed reported experiencing service outages when trying to access e-government services. That is nearly a third of users who cannot complete their task because the system is unavailable. For a citizen trying to pay a fee or submit a document by a deadline, that is not a minor inconvenience — it is a real problem.
From our experience, 30%of users surveyed in a 2025 study reported experiencing service outages when accessing e-government services in Kenya. That is nearly one in three citizens who cannot complete their task because the system is unavailable.
What Frustrating Portals Get Wrong
The frustrating portals share a few common patterns. If you have used any government portal in Kenya, you have probably encountered at least one of these.
They ignore the cost of data
A portal that loads heavy images, runs unnecessary scripts, or requires the user to download large PDFs is expensive for the user. Kenya's data costs, while dropping, are still significant relative to income. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) 2022 report cited in the Discover Global Society study, high data costs and patchy rural coverage remain persistent barriers. A portal that burns through data is one that only the well-connected can afford to use.
The best approach is to design for low-bandwidth conditions. Compress images. Minimise scripts. Offer a text-only version. Let users download forms as PDFs but also provide an online form that does not require a download.
They assume everyone has the same device and connection
A portal that works perfectly on a fibre connection in a Nairobi office may be unusable on a 3G connection in a rural area. According to the Communications Authority of Kenya's Q2 2025-2026 report, mobile data subscriptions in Kenya reached 58.5 million. But connection speeds vary widely. A portal that does not account for this will frustrate the very citizens it is meant to serve.
The solution is not complicated. Test the portal on different devices and connections before launch. Build in offline capabilities where possible — let users fill forms offline and submit when they have a connection. Provide a USSD option for critical services. These are not luxuries. They are necessities for a country where connectivity is not uniform.
They do not explain why something failed
A frustrating portal shows a generic error message: "Something went wrong. Please try again." That tells the user nothing. Was it their internet? A server problem? A missing field? A file that was too large? Without specific feedback, the user has no way to fix the problem. They try again, fail again, and eventually give up.
A well-designed error message tells the user exactly what happened and what to do next. "The file you uploaded is larger than 2MB. Please reduce the file size or choose a different file." That is actionable. The user knows what to do.
From our experience at KEPAS, we have found that simply improving error messages and adding clear progress indicators can reduce form abandonment by a significant margin. Users are patient when they understand what is happening.
The Infrastructure Reality
Not every problem is a design problem. Some are infrastructure problems. According to the Kenya National Digital Master Plan 2022-2032, Kenya ranks 116th on the UN E-Government Development Index. That places us ahead of Zimbabwe but well behind South Africa and Tunisia. The ranking reflects not just the quality of government websites but also the underlying infrastructure — internet penetration, electricity access, and digital skills.
The 2025 Discover Global Society study found that 74% of users surveyed experienced long waits when accessing e-government services. That is not always a design failure. Sometimes it is a server capacity issue. Sometimes it is a network issue. Sometimes it is both. But from the user's perspective, the result is the same: a service that does not work when they need it.
The lesson for anyone building a digital service for the public is this: test under real conditions. Do not test only on a fast office connection. Test on a 3G network at peak hours. Test with a phone that is three years old. Test with a user who is not comfortable with technology. If it fails in any of those scenarios, it will fail in the real world.
What This Means for Organizations Building Their Own Portals
If you run a SACCO, a school, a hospital, or a county government office, you may be thinking about building a portal for your members, parents, patients, or citizens. The lessons from eCitizen apply directly to you.
First, know your user. If your members are mostly farmers in rural areas, a mobile-first portal with USSD backup will serve them better than a desktop-only site. If your patients are mostly urban professionals, you can afford a more feature-rich portal, but you still need to optimise for mobile.
Second, test early and test often. Do not wait until the portal is built to find out that it does not work on the devices your users actually have. Involve real users in the testing process. Watch them try to complete a task. You will learn more in ten minutes of watching a user struggle than in a week of internal testing.
Third, plan for failure. Your portal will go down at some point. Your payment gateway will fail. A user will upload a corrupt file. Design for these moments. Give users a way to contact support. Let them save their progress. And when something goes wrong, tell them clearly what happened and what they can do about it.
The Bottom Line
Kenya's government has made a real commitment to digital services. Five thousand services on eCitizen is not a small number. But the work does not stop at launching a portal. It continues every time a citizen tries to use it and either succeeds or fails.
The difference between a useful portal and a frustrating one often comes down to attention to detail. Does it work on a slow connection? Does it explain errors clearly? Does it save progress? Does it respect the user's time and data? These are not technical questions. They are human questions. And they are the ones that determine whether a portal actually serves the people it was built for.
The next time you find yourself stuck on a government portal, frustrated and ready to give up, remember: that frustration is not inevitable. It is a design choice. And it can be fixed.
Want to see what this looks like for your organization?
Talk to Us on WhatsApp