Public Strategist

We can never be a normal user of our own services.  We can temper that by being self-conscious in reflecting on our experiences as users of other people’s. But even that tacitly assumes that we are like normal users, other than in our expertise as providers of a particular service.

But that assumption may be badly wrong if in fact we are unlike typical users in ways which introduce the risk of systematic skews in our perceptions.  And it’s a safe starting point to assert that if you are reading this, you are sufficiently abnormal that you should worry about that distortion (and if follows that I am so much more abnormal for writing it that I am almost certainly beyond hope).

The first step is to recognise that you can only have a personal appreciaton of the usability of a service by using the service.

I spent a great day on Friday visiting a local authority and talking about ways in which local and central government could work more closely together around service delivery, particularly for people we know will have to deal with both (or several) of us. They took me round their one stop shop, and showed me their plans for a newer and shinier one. It was truly impressive stuff. But there was a small voice in my head reminding me of my own experience a few weeks ago at a one stop shop as a resident in my own local authority which, as I reflected then, wasn’t bad, but wasn’t great either. It’s not that the voice was telling me it might not be as good as it looked. It was telling me that I would never be able to tell by looking.

In the early days of the web, the DTI (I am pretty sure it was) won an award for having the best government website. I understood why: it has a level of visual and structural clarity which was well ahead of the standard of the competition. Asked which government site deserved the prize, I would have awarded it to them too. Looked at without any specific purpose in mind, it was superb. But as I discovered when I had to look for something I knew was in there somewhere, it was much less good at meeting actual needs.

Even those who might be supposed to have an experience sufficiently close to the end user to have a reliable understanding of their experience can’t be assumed actually to do so. I wrote a few months ago about the difference between bus drivers and bus conductors which is one illustration of that point, but there are many more to be found wherever you look for them.

The second step is to recognise that whatever your experience as a user, you should not assume that your reactions are normal.

Designers and builders of services tend to assume that we are just like the people who will use those services, except that we have some specialist inside knowledge which gives us a slightly altered perspective. Having acknowledged that, we may – we should – go on to recognise that there are needs some users of the service may have which we don’t share. So we will think about accessibility and plainness of English (to say nothing of plainness of Welsh). But still we are tacitly assuming that while people may be at different points along a spectrum, there is only one spectrum.

I was helped to recognise the danger of that assumption a few years ago by hearing an account of a small qualitative research study into channel preferences, particularly the relative attractiveness of doing things online and by phone. It turned out that what everybody wanted was to be sure that the information they had provided had been correctly recorded and confident that action would be taken as a result. No surprise in that, that’s pretty much what I want too. For me, the conclusion is obvious: given that objective, an online transaction is clearly to be preferred.  I can be completely clear about what data is being captured, avoid having to say, ‘no, that’s B for Bertie’ in increasingly exasperated tones and can be pretty sure that whatever system the organisation concerned has for doing whatever needs to be done next, it knows it has that thing to do. But for a lot of people, it turned out, the answer is equally obvious, and is precisely the opposite. Talking to a person gives you the confidence that the organisation has asked the questions it needs to ask, and as a result knows what it needs to know. Critically, it is felt to mean that responsibility for accuracy and completeness has been accepted by the organisation, whereas self-service data entry leaves an unwanted sense of responsibility somehow sticking to the user. And a human having accepted that the transaction is complete is more reassuring than any form of electronic confirmation.

Bruce Tognazzini has just published an essay on the apparently esoteric topic of whether the navigation of an iphone contacts list is better done by scrolling or searching. If that’s an important issue for you, it’s worth reading.  If it isn’t (as it isn’t for me, since I don’t have an iphone), it’s worth reading anyway, as the core of his argument is much more general. It is in essence that some patterns of thinking are over-represented among those who design and build services, with a real risk that services so designed are optimised for people who think like them, not for a potentially much larger group whose mental model and heuristic preferences may be very different.

For all our bluster about how special we in high tech are, we really tend to think of ourselves as average—average intelligence, average likes and dislikes, average knowledge. We are none of the above. In fact, only one person in the entire world is average, and we don’t know who that person is.

Engineers (including programmers), he argues- are typically much more logical, much more abstract and better at rote memory than the rest of us. Unconstrained, that can have interesting results. Tognazzini takes as an example Steve Wozniak, one of the brains behind the Apple II:

[He] later developed the CL 9, the first programmable universal remote control. It featured the keys 0 through F, labelled with the standard Hexadecimal notation so familiar to everyone born with 16 fingers. It enabled you to capture and command 256 different codes spread across 16 invisible “pages.” You just had to memorize the page and position of all 256 of those codes and you could control everything! Woz and about three other people were able to make excellent use of the resulting product. Engineering, even genius engineering (and Woz was and is second to none), must be balanced with equally talented design.

So we need designers too. But that (shades of Officer Krupke) isn’t the whole answer either:

Graphic designers, left unchecked and unschooled, are likely to aim for maximum visual simplicity at the expense of both learnability and usability. Such interfaces require users to discover new capabilities by clicking around and seeing what happens. Users don’t do that. In the most extreme cases, functionality desperately needed by the majority of users may actually be removed from products in the effort to generate visual simplicity.

So it turns out that we also needs human-computer interface (HCI) experts, of which, of course, Tognazzini happens to be one.

The three professions, working together, with a healthy tension among them, produce good software and good products. That balance of power is critical to success.

But even that, of course, is not enough: we still haven’t got to the people who will actually use this service yet. So it doesn’t really matter whether you agree that a constructive tension between the three disciplines Tognazzini discusses is the optimal approach, the question is still whether the people who end up designing and building services are systematically dissimilar to the people who end up using them.

That’s not an argument that those professional disciplines are wrong or irrelevant: on the contrary, they are essential. Nor is it an argument about superiority: this is not a demand to dissolve the people and elect another. It is instead a recognition of the need to correct for skewed representation of different mental models. It is an argument that what seems most obvious may be most dangerous, because it may not be at all obvious to others.

So it’s not just that we aren’t the users, but that we may be too unlike them to understand the gap.

Small footnote:  I know that ‘user’ is a controversial and imperfect word, but in the context of what is being discussed here it isn’t easy to find another one. I have argued elsewhere that ‘customer’ is generally the least worst word, but then and now I am not persuaded that it is a particularly productive debate.

The burial of human remains at sea requires a marine licence.

That must be one of the more arresting first lines of any government web page. Its combination of human tragedy and bureaucratic process packs a lot into eleven words.

You won’t find that line, or anything else on the subject, at Directgov. That’s neither surprising nor perhaps unreasonable. Very few bodies are buried at sea – exact numbers are hard to come by, but estimates are in tens a year, a tiny proportion of the half million or so deaths each year in the UK.

The line instead comes from the website of an organisation little known, I suspect, to non-specialists, the Marine Management Organisation, the core purpose of which has little to do with the disposal of corpses. But getting a licence for burial at sea is without doubt a government service directed at individuals, so in principle it should be found where other such services are to be found, which in the not too distant future means the single government domain. I have no imminent expectation of finding it there (and make no criticism that it won’t be). But it is worth asking why that should be and what it tells us about government more generally.

Back in the early days of e-government, there was a target to get all government services online. Increasing the numerator would help achieve the target, but then so would decreasing the denominator. Creating a definitive list of relevant services was the only way of preventing a percentage score from drifting about uncontrollably. Burial at sea was often the example used in the largely pointless debates which ensued. It was a good example, because it brought together two separate issues:  was this a service which anybody was every likely to want to do online; and were there enough of them to justify putting it online at all?

Entirely expectedly, government information and services follow a Zipf distribution, made famous by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail (but applied to websites at least as early as 1997): there is a small number of things which get an enormous amount of attention, and there is an enormous number of things which get a small – sometimes a vanishingly small – amount of attention. Two lessons are often drawn from that: one good and one potentially very bad.

The good one is that there is great value in identifying the things which most people want to do most of the time, and ensure that they can do them easily and efficiently. The potentially bad one is to assume that the rest doesn’t matter and either ignore it or delete it.

In the physical world, it is more or less essential to cut off the distribution.  A good bookshop won’t just rely on best sellers, but equally there will be a limit to the number of titles it can stock which only sell one or two copies a year. Amazon, with warehouse fulfilment, can do much better than that, and it has been estimated that 37% of their revenue in 2008 came from sales of books ranked below 100,000.* It would be supreme folly for Amazon to announce one day that they were rebuilding their web presence and would henceforward only cover the top 100,000 titles.

Government is not Amazon. Web pages are not books. Analogies are flawed. And yet.

The question of how the government’s web presence should be culled and curated is not a new one. It has been around in various forms since the earliest days of e-government, documented perhaps most clearly and consistently by Alan Mather. At least as far back as 2003 (and actually well before then)  he had a strategy which looked uncannily like that of  the single government domain:

• Fewer websites not more. Kill 50 websites for every new domain name.
• Less content not more. Delete five (or fifty, or five hundred) pages for every page you write.
• Solve the top 50 questions that citizens ask … and structure your content around those first. Then do the next 50 and the next. The people who know these questions are the ones that answer the phone in your call centres, the ones that write in to your agency and the ones that visit your offices for help; likewise, they visit accountants, advice bureau, charities and so on.
• Test search engines to see how your site ranks – both from a mindshare side and for individual queries.
• Impose rigorous discipline on use of “words” – plain speak.
• Impose even more rigorous discipline on the structure of the content, including metadata so that it’s easy to read – by people and by search engines.

Or in other words, start at the top of the Zipf distribution, and work systematically along until you stop. Tom Loosemore has a pithier version which means much the same:

'Every superfluous page we create is one more dead end for an angry, frustrated, confused user ' - @GovUK team seeking the irreducible core

6 September 2011 9:26 am via twiccaReplyRetweetFavorite

@tomskitomski

Tom Loosemore

Taken as expressed, it’s hard to disagree with the approach Tom and his team are taking. But a great deal hangs on the word ‘superfluous’. In this context, I think it is being used to mean two quite distinct things, but risks treating them as one. The first is rot, decay and duplication. Too much money is being spent very inefficiently to maintain – or all too often to fail to maintain – information which is poorly organised, hard to find, badly maintained and structured round what organisations do, not what people need. The second is obscure specialisation: there is a vast amount of information which most people don’t want or need and won’t ever want or need, and its existence makes it harder for the important stuff to shine through.

Focusing on an ‘irreducible core’ is a very good way of tackling the first problem, but risks overlooking the second. Whether that is a bad thing is a contingent question which is not inherently an easy one to answer, and which potentially raises some awkward questions about the singularity of the single government domain. There are three basic options:

1. Everything goes into the single pan-government site
2. Popular and important stuff goes into the single pan-government site and the rest goes somewhere else
3. Popular and important stuff goes into the single pan-government site and the rest doesn’t go anywhere

To an extent this is (or can be made to be) a matter of timing – pursuing Alan’s idea of tackling the problem in fifty-question chunks. But even with that approach, sooner or later we get to the question of whether enough is enough. In order to know that, we need to understand two things.  The first is the value to users of the long tail  – government’s version of Amazon’s 37%. If it is high, or to the extent that it is high, the choice is between options 1 and 2. Neither is entirely attractive: option 1 risks compromising the quality and clarity of the much smaller set of key services; option 2 creates a messy boundary and breaks the principle that there is one place to go. If though the value to users of the long tail, or some furthest reach of it, is relatively low, the choice is between options 1 or 2 and 3. And if option 3 is even to be considered for some subset of information that might otherwise have been included, that raises a very big question.

Luckily, GDS is full of exceptionally smart people (and now even fuller) and better still, they have invented the needotron. That’s the right systematic approach – but I will be fascinated to see whether they find a way of creating the right long tail, and of stopping the tail being so unwieldy that it trips up the dog.

*These numbers are hard to make intuitive sense of. Amazon are currently claiming to have ‘over 750,000′ books available for the kindle, which sounds like more than enough for anyone – yet I regularly find that the books I actually want to buy are not among them.

This blog has not had a substantive post for quite a while. There’s no particular reason for that, other than that I find that the longer I haven’t written something here, the harder it feels to write anything, so the longer the gap keeps growing. So this is to break the cycle and blow the dust off, with some substance to follow soon. There’s a post coming up which was 95% written two months ago, after that I will discover if I can remember how to string two sentences together.

It’s not iterative if you only do it once.

Paul Hammond

We are not the customers of our own services. And even if we think we are, we are still not: we know too much, we cannot stop thinking as provider or designer.

Sometimes we are the customers of other people’s services and that holds up a mirror – sometimes a very distorting mirror – to our own. Even then, of course, the perspective of someone who is then tempted to blog about the experience is not wholly to be relied on.

A couple of days ago, I went to buy some parking permits from my local council. I am not going to give a blow by blow account of the experience. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great either. There were lots of small ways in which it could have been better: here are three where service design could be improved.

The first is a point of measurement. There is a ticket based queuing system – take a ticket and wait for your number to be called. Screens show average waiting time (with the average while I was there going up by about a minute for every minute of elapsed time, but that’s another story). But there is also a queue to talk to a receptionist to get a ticket in the first place. So the queuing time being measured is a process management view, not a customer experience view.

Having got a ticket, the next thing is to wait. That turned out to be very confusing – numbers were called apparently randomly, so both giving no indication of progress up the virtual queue and making it impossible to know whether your number had been called or not. I assume that there was a process going on of assigning cases to appropriately skilled staff members, and so in practice several queues running not just one. That’s perfectly sensible, but would be a lot less confusing for customers if the queues had distinct number ranges. To make matters worse, one of the display screens showed ticket numbers in the queue – but only some of them. If the number one higher than mine has been called, and if my number doesn’t appear on the screen, should I start worrying that I have missed my turn? As it turns out, no, I didn’t need to have worried, but it was hard to be sanguine at the time.

The final point is that ineffective innovation can be a long term burden. The time came to pay for my parking permits. There was nothing so obvious and straightforward as a normal card reader. Instead, I had to be led to a payment machine, the like of which I had never seen before and which had clearly been intended to operate on a self-service basis.

attempted self service which fails is more complicated and expensive than not attempting the self service in the first place

In theory you put in a reference number, a postcode and, of course the card details, and got in exchange a receipt to be exchanged for whatever it was you had paid for. In practice that had clearly proved to be too difficult, so members of staff now walk the length of the building and enter everything except the card details, then stand around waiting for the payment to go through. The net effect is the worst of both worlds, with more staff time used than necessary to deliver a more disjointed service. That neatly illustrates two important points: attempted self service which fails is more complicated and expensive than not attempting the self service in the first place; and, to adapt Jakob Nielsen, users spend most of their time making other payments, so prefer your payments to work the same way as all the others they already know.

I got what I went for, I didn’t have to wait inordinately long, the service was friendly and effective. But it could – and I think should – have been just a bit better still.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• Betagov blues.. « Digital by Default Outside of Hercules House ‘digital by default’ seems a long, long way away and requires making compromises in order just to get some momentum. Small wins are achievable (and you can bet we celebrate each one!) but getting anything larger out of the door requires considerable patience and fortitude.
• How to be good at work | Stephen Hale Personally, I am much better at my job because of social tools. I’m better informed, often helped by others, better connected, more grateful, and more ready to share my own thoughts than I would be without tools like Yammer, Twitter and blogs.
• It’s the end of the web as we know it « Adrian Short The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void.
• Nik Cubrilovic Blog – Logging out of Facebook is not enough Privacy today feels like what security did 10-15 years ago – there is an awareness of the issues steadily building and blog posts from prominent technologists is helping to steamroll public consciousness. The risks around privacy today are just as serious as security leaks were then – except that there is an order of magnitude more users online and a lot more private data being shared on the web.
• Prototyping as an ethos | Brian Hoadley So if we take our responsibility seriously, why don’t our clients? Why do they so often try to cut corners, cut out research and prototyping, shudder at the idea of iteration (which will equal cost now but provide potential benefit later), and railroad us down an agile path that promises iteration, but so often delivers linear, scaled-back development with no opportunity to evolve already built functionality?Prototyping and testing gives you a real opportunity to test, iterate and re-test. It allows teams to incorporate learnings (other than their own) so that the end results more closely resemble the type of result that users might actually find useful.
• Schneier on Security: Complex Electronic Banking Fraud in Malaysia The criminals use a fake card to get a new cell phone SIM, which they then use to authenticate a fraudulent bank transfer made with stolen credentials.
• Schneier on Security: Complex Electronic Banking Fraud in Malaysia [comment] One problem with multi-channel authentication is that the owners/maintainers of the individual channels may be unaware of the consequences to the end-user of their security weaknesses.
• Should you launch at a conference? – Joel on Software We probably could have brought it to market after three months. That would have been ever so lean. There was a strong temptation just to dump it on the world super-early and spend the next year iterating and improving.We didn’t do that. We worked for nine months, and then launched. I couldn’t stop thinking that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. We got 131,000 eyeballs on 9-month-old Trello when we launched, and it was AWESOME, so 22% of them signed up. If we had launched 3-month-old Trello, it would have been NOT SO AWESOME. Maybe even MEH. I don’t want 131,000 eyeballs on MEH.
• A Cohesive & Unified Identity for British Government — Paul Robert Lloyd If we want to talk about reducing bureaucracy, and simplifying government, then surely we need to think abouthow it can be representedwithone singlecommon identity rather than a multitude of different logos.
• Older freemium app users fork over cash, younger users spend time — Tech News and Analysis Younger users spend more time in freemium apps but don’t plunk down as much money while older users are the opposite, less free with their time but more likely to open up their wallets.

I herby declare, “arguments not aphorisms” to be my new aphorism (not argument).

Tom Coates

In the continuing fight for the greater availability of public information, it may seem churlish to observe that sometimes what’s wanted is not more information, but less.

The picture above shows a typical display on a Countdown sign at a London bus stop. This particular stop has buses from two routes. At a quick glance, you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s going to be a long wait for a 2, while three 88s roll past ahead of it. Actually, the sign shows no such thing: the bottom three lines cycle through all the buses known to the system, so the second, third and fourth aren’t showing. Nor indeed are the eighth and ninth, which at that moment were 20 and 23 minutes away respectively. But if you want to know when the next 2 is due, you will have to wait  for the sign to cycle round.

I would be prepared to lay considerable odds that there is not a single person standing at that bus stop who has the slightest interest in the fact that a 2 will be along in 16 minutes, still less (if that were possible) that there will be another one in 20 minutes. What they care about is that the next one is three minutes away, and right now the sign isn’t telling them that. In extreme cases, there are so many buses stacked up in the queue that they come and go faster than the display can keep up with them – the screenshot on the right (from James Darling’s minimalist site) is from the bus stop with the most extreme case of that problem I have come across.

There are no imaginable circumstances when it would be useful to know that that the sixth bus to Marylebone is coming in 26 minutes, when you are already standing at the bus stop. But there is potentially much greater value in that information when you are not at the bus stop at all. So for Countdown at bus stops, perhaps the solution is simply to show less. The first and second bus due for each route served by the stop might do it (though capping by either time or an arbitrary number of buses shown wouldn’t).

But the moment you are not at a bus stop, the ideal solution changes radically, for two reasons. The first is that the information is now informing a different decision: whether now is a good time to be going to the bus stop in the first place, with opportunities for trade offs which exist only because the information has been liberated from the bus stop. The second is that the small screen in my pocket can comfortably show me the next twenty buses; the much bigger screen attached to the bus stop struggles as soon as there are more than four.

The point of this is one which at one level should be trivially self-evident: what counts as good information depends on the question you want to answer or the problem you want to solve, and more information may not be better information. But since there are many different questions and problems, it would be folly to think that there is a single best way of selecting and presenting the information. Part of the power of open data is that it creates the possibility for highly specialised solutions – as Adrian Short has both elegantly argued and practically demonstrated. James Darling’s account of why he built his version and what he and others have done with it is also well worth reading.

One of the comments to that post links to a more radical approach still: stop making it about the buses (tubes, trains…) at all, and turn it round to be about the passenger, in a form of extreme hyperlocalism:

As the about page says, if you live exactly 6 minutes from Sunset Tunnel East Portal, 8 minutes from Duboce and Church, and 10 minutes from Church Station you may find it useful too.

But enough. I have a bus to catch.

I had hesitated to write this post at all – there is only so much bus stop nerdery any self-respecting blog should contain, and I am already well over quota for this year.  But I took heart from Paul Annett’s meticulous deconstruction of a bus stop indicator at Heathrow, so here it is.

When the data seem to point to an unexpected finding, always consider the possibility that the problem is a feature of the data, rather than a feature of the world …

When I discover something surprising in data, the most common explanation is that I made a mistake.

John Kay

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• My speech to the IAAC | Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent In the time of revolution, and believe me this is a revolution – easily on a par with the renaissance, or the Enlightenment – the translator has a very important role to play. The communicator, the person who makes the facts palatable to all sides, is the only conduit through which real change can be made.
• Nick Bradbury: Privacy is Important Today’s software developers need to look at privacy the same way they’ve learned to look at security: it’s not an add-on or a feature that customers have to turn on, it’s something built-in that shouldn’t be turned off.
• Seth’s Blog: The obligation of the adjustable displayThe Catch 22 of engineering feedback: “The only person smart enough to understand this warning doesn’t need it.” That’s over, I’m afraid. You have unlimited paper and a pen with plenty of ink. Be clear, enunciate and tell us what to do, please.
• FixMyTransport emphasises flaws of government IT | Guardian Government Computing | Guardian Professional What makes FixMyTransport different to some of government’s sizeable IT failures is that it focuses on the user and what they want from a site, rather than what it can give them.
• UX and the Art of Digital Appropriation | Brian Hoadley User experience is pervasive. It is ubiquitous. Companies and agencies need to step back and realise that the concept of user experience will mean change in the way their businesses operate. It’s too big to be owned by any one team, shoved down any one silo. It is too fundamentally important to leave to any one concept, methodology or team. To understand user experience is to create a fundamentally open and collaborative environment with a healthy exchange between and amongst users, businesses, agencies.
• Data Won’t Solve Your Problems Fewer and fewer problems these days are technical. We have the data, and we even have the power to slice-and-dice it a million different ways. Never before have we been able to accumulate, manage, and analyze data to a greater depth than we can today. Here’s the problem: we don’t know what questions to ask of our data, nor what to do when he get an answer.
• Financing efficiency | Blog Government needs to realise that more risk transfer doesn’t lead to better risk management. There are a variety of types of risk involved in each project. Government’s aim should be to transfer only those risks that it is within contractors’ powers to mitigate through innovation and efficient delivery.
• Why I’m not on Google Plus – Charlie’s Diary Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It’s nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it’s to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they’re pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it’s not a real identity to them: it’s a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won’t magically induce civility: the trolls don’t care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.
• The Difference Between UI and UX | Design Shack At the end of the day, that is all we get to leave the user with: a memory. As we all know, human memory is astounding but it’s imperfect. Every detail contributes to the ingredients of a good user experience, but when it all comes down to it, the user will remember products in somewhat skewed way. UX contains a much bigger picture than UI does but it still relies on the smallest details to drive it. This understanding is the most powerful asset anyone can have in product development.
• Why It’s Good that the Internet Is Changing Our Brains – Technology – GOOD We all want to believe that as humans, we control our tools, not the other way around. Clark would argue the exact opposite is true, and for the better. After all, how can we say our brains are all we need to be our “real selves” when we have so much stored and invested in our outside technologies? Maybe we’re not losing our “selfhood” at all, but creating mega-selves. Perhaps we should be thinking of our presence on the internet, our phones, and our hard drives as equally important parts of us—really clever parts who can tell jokes in 140 characters or less.