The title comes from a recommendation of the Power of Information Taskforce.  They commissioned our team at COI to undertake a usability review of government websites, as our mission  is to improve the quality and consistency of government and the public sector online.  

The usability review found that there were many basic issues with the sites they looked at. Over 150 individual usability problems were identified including:

• Failure to let users know where they are in the site
• Inconsistency in page design putting undue stress on the user to recall rather than recognise (increasing cognitive load)
• Use of language that users couldn’t understand
• Linking to documents without clues to the content within

The Taskforce asked us to build a ‘usability toolkit’ setting out the basic usability criteria for government websites. Working with usability agency Bunnyfoot, we’ve developed a toolkit containing guidelines on best practice.  The toolkit has an emphasis on visual learning, making extensive use of graphics and video demonstrations and is designed around eight themes including page layout, navigation and writing content. Each theme has an interactive self-assessment exercise which tests knowledge and is intended to initiate discussion.

The toolkit is open to everyone to use, but there are advantages in registering as this helps users keep track what the content they’ve visited and the assessment tests they’ve completed.  So far 85 people have registered from over 20 different departments across government.

The most popular completed test to date is on page layout (123 completed tests).  It has guidelines about:

• Consistency between pages
• Devoting page space to content
• Screen resolution
• How to un-clutter content
• Styling text for readability
• Effective use of colour

It’s basic stuff but essential knowledge for anyone developing content for government, public sector, or inideed any other websites. There’s also a great video showing how we read text using eyetracking:

So, if you’re in the public sector, don’t waste another minute, register to use the toolkit! It’s easy, you just need to enter an email address and password and, if you work in central government, your department name.

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I was in Boston last week.  It was lovely – the sun streaming through the red fall leaves and it was warm enough to walk around in just a shirt.

The event was the 10^th anniversary of a publisher service that I had conceived and proposed. Others have taken it on to create one of the most significant developments in academic publishing.  The idea is simple, but its execution hard.  That is to link the references at the end of an academic article to the article in another publishers’ database.  The problem is knowing where that other article is and coping with the fact that publishers buy and sell journals, thus shifting them around the place. The journal reader shouldn’t have to know where the cited article is, only to click and (with suitable permissions) get access to it.

We have similar issues in government.  We have data and information that the end-user wants to find that is distributed across many different places, and usually the user doesn’t care about which bit of government provides it. Moreover, there are changes that occur when Departments get closed and created, thus moving their online content around the place.

The two problems are similar – how do you get separate bodies to collaborate and how do you find and link to relevant information and data that will outlast major changes.

The publishers use a handle technology on which is built a Digital Object Identifier system.  Attached to each is a searchable metadata store that includes the current location.  By each publisher uploading all their bibliographic data to a central store, you can form automatic processes that link citations to the location of the cited article.  As articles move, their unique handle stays the same and only the location in the central datastore needs updating.

For government, we considered this but took a different approach to ensure all links work.  This is because government is essentially a closed system. So that is why we have adopted use of URLs as Unique Resource Identifiers, rather than a handle approach.  All websites are archived by The National Archives in such a way that the original URLs can be identified. Then each Department needs to introduce a piece of software that automatically redirects the link to the Department website if still there or to The National Archives if not. That way, links always work.

Both academic publishers and government share another important value for end-users.  They need to be able to know that the information they reach is authoritative. For publishers this means that it is peer-reviewed and the title of the journal broadly indicates the degree of reliance they can place on the results.  For government, the fact that it is a .gov.uk site means that it is the authoritative source of information.  Trust lies at the heart of both systems.

Likewise, end-users need to know if information is the most recent.  In academic publishing the date is the indicator with other information such as whether or not an article has been retracted (for example the original MMR vaccine paper was retracted).  In government, it is important to replace old information with new, while making sure that the old is still available through the archive, to avoid losing part of the history of the country.

This approach also underlies the Semantic Web applications we’ve been introducing.  Different types of information are distributed across the public sector, for example jobs and consultations. The question is how to find them and create useful aggregated services from them, both by government itself and for others.  The solution we’re implementing is the use of semantic web and specifically RDFa.  This is because RDFa is being searched and used by Google and Yahoo! and so is findable.  Single point of access services can then be created that point the user back to source.

There are many analogies between academic journals and website publishing in creating a good service for its customers and users.  It is useful to consider these and see how citizens can be given a better experience.  It is also useful to look at a lot of other channels – for example, news and information services.  Websites bring together many different aspects of information and communication and there is value to be had in looking at precedents and taking the best from them, while exploring how to use the Web most effectively to deliver services that online users want.

I felt proud to be back in Boston among old friends from around the world, celebrating something so significant. I’m looking forward to what we can achieve by working collaboratively across the public sector to make an equivalently important step change in user experience.

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Government Digital Inclusion Champion Martha Lane Fox was the Big Thinker at COI last week. She announced the launch of her campaign to Race Online for 2012, which aims to get more people online particularly from socially excluded groups.

Research by Price Waterhouse Coopers shows that 10 million adults in the UK have never used the Internet. 4 million of those are socially excluded, of which 38% are over 65 and 39% unemployed, and it is these that people that Fox is targeting. Her speech was inspiring. I particularly liked her ‘user-centred’ approach. She told three stories from around the country:

• A teacher at a computer literacy centre in Lambeth revealed that many of the students couldn’t read.
• A builder in Birmingham gets the majority of his work by looking online.
• Children on a rough estate in Bristol learned about growing vegetables from older residents, imparting computer knowledge in return.

Martha stressed that it isn’t about IT training, it’s about using computers for relevant purposes such as looking at photos of your grandchildren living abroad, saving money by shopping online or looking for jobs. People aren’t inherently interested in computers but may want to go online if they see that it can improve their quality of life.

Later in the week, I went to the BBC to hear about their new Accessibility Toolkit 2.0 (ATK 2.0) from Jonathan Hassel, Head of User Experience Design. His aim is to improve online experiences for disabled people.

There are 11 million adults in the UK with a long standing health problem or disability that affects their daily activities including their ability to work – and therefore covered by the Disability Discrimination Act. Of these, according to research from the Office for Disability Issues, 47% are over 65 and 43% are unemployed. Startlingly, 58% have never used the Internet.

Jonathan talked about the various barriers to disabled people getting online including lack of interest, lack of means and lack of confidence. These are the same reasons as for the population at large. BBC research into encouraging broadband adoption echoes the experiences of Martha Lane Fox. They focussed on the 21% of UK adults who do not have the Internet at home or use elsewhere. The figures are similar: 10.5 million aged 15+ with and average age of 61 (over half were 65+) and 67% are C2DE compared with 45% of the UK population.

The BBC’s research found low levels of interest (68%), low intention to acquire (82%) and low knowledge (81% knew little or nothing). The primary barriers were low perceived benefits versus cost and low confidence and skills. Secondary barriers include basic affordability, literacy and social exclusion. One participant claimed that:

“There’s nothing on there that you couldn’t get from Teletext.”

The challenge to get people online was acknowledged as being very difficult. Previous messages have failed because messages were not targeted and therefore not perceived as relevant or beneficial. Four broad areas were identified to aid adoption:

• Families and friends
• Media skills
• Easier home internet access
• Affordability and cost

Interviews with recent adopters revealed the power of friends and families, with one man saying:

“I wasn’t confident on the computer until (my son) started showing me bits on his computer.”

They also revealed that people were scared computer courses and the possibility of public humiliation in front of peers. It’s not enough simply to communicate the availability of courses.

The focus then returned to disabled audiences and Jonathan developed an interesting argument around web accessibility. The most common approach to date has been to focus on delivering inclusive websites. That is, to try to build websites that work for as wide an audience as possible. (Note on terminology here, this isn’t inclusion in the same sense as previously described, which is more about getting people online.) Jonathan’s argument is that this doesn’t work because people have such diverse needs that one design will never work. Websites do allow personalisation through operating system and browser settings but most people don’t know how these work. There’s also the AAA approach which places personalisation controls directly on to the web page. Most people don’t know what “AAA” means either. So the BBC have developed a prototype solution that brings personalisation controls into the browser but through an intuitive user interface.

The idea is that you have preferences for a website, accessible via a link at the top of the site. Clicking on this reveals a set of default options recommended by people with different health problems or disabilities. For example, you can set the colours, text size, font size and weight and so on. This isn’t revolutionary but what’s different is the user interface that the BBC have designed. It’s the first time it’s been done intuitively. And anything that helps create a positive user experience for people online is a good thing. After all, if we’ve worked hard to convince people of the benefits, the last thing we want is for them to switch off because of a usability or accessibility issue. Lets make sure it works for people when they arrive.

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This week has been one of conferences.  On Tuesday was the Public Sector Information annual conference .  It is amazing to think that it is just one year ago that, working with John Sheridan, I presented an overview of how data and structured information could be released using semantic web markup.  Since then London Gazette has been released in RDF/XML and people across government are busy implementing RDFa for consultations and in the public sector RDFa for jobs (for example Jobs Go Public’s local government jobs – LGJobs), the last two to be surfaced through Directgov.

More importantly, well underway is the Prime Minister’s drive for the release of data and creation of a single point of access (currently under development) through the appointment of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt.   As the latter pointed out at the conference this is a single point of access not a single data base – the data will still sit in Departments, agencies and local government websites, but developers will be able to know what is available through some kind of searchable catalogue and get access to it.

He showed us a newspaper for a single postcode that had been demonstrated by some mash-up developers.  This included local data on crime, allotments, bus-stops and routes completely localised, along with lots of other useful information. We all liked it, because at present that data is something that each of us has to build up ourselves and we respond to it immediately as valuable.

The next day I spoke at the Public Sector Online annual conference organised by Kable.  The subject I was given was the cost of websites and I took the opportunity to remind all national and local government webbies that we need to be able to justify the expense of websites and demonstrate their value at this time of financial stringency.  In fact we have a great story to tell relative to many channels of communication, but I am guessing that the Finance Directors don’t yet always see that value and fund invest accordingly.

We’ve issued the standards on improving quality by measuring cost, usage and user satisfaction, following the Public Accounts Committee recommendations.  When these are reported people can start identifying lots of interesting aspects, answering the question, for example, of the value of the website channel to the nation.  Net value could be determined by the total online cost for satisfied minus unsatisfied users and subtracting the overall cost of provision. What we’d like to do is make the data available so that academics and economists can study this in more detail.

As a presenter it felt good to be getting email and comment from the audience floor which I was able to see shortly afterwards and makes a response.  The next conference on the Thursday was created to facilitate this – Government 2010.  Although I was invited to participate in person, I did so by logging in and watching the webstream. Lots of interesting thoughts, some of them inspired by Tom Steinberg’s contribution. 

It brought to mind a presentation from Martha Lane-Fox to COI on the Wednesday late afternoon, when she was asked the question about her experience in working in the public sector as the Champion for Digital Inclusion.  She responded that she had been really impressed by the calibre, intelligence and quality of the people she had met. 

It struck me that there are many talented expert e-communicators across government but hampered by the misperception that Web is IT.  There is an infrastructural element, but too often Web publishing is run as IT processes without the flexibility to change things day by day or initiate new trials or innovate.  We cannot even as I did in the old days, run two versions of a website in parallel and monitor what people do and continuously develop the more successful. 

It is like newspaper editors being unable to change the front page and only being able to stream new text into exactly the same shape of story, without being able to put in a major picture or give over the front page to a single story.  Newspapers and magazines would be very boring without that.  Likewise Web publishing should enable flexibility of all kinds of digital presentation and functionality.

Martha went on to say that public sector had many initiatives that needed joining up, not into a major programme, but under a banner that allowed lots to participate and encouraged a movement of activity adding up to more than the sum of the parts.  This would be a good description of what we want to do with the release of data and information for re-use.

A busy week of engagement that was encouraging as I and colleagues across government make the changes that support the directions sought.  What we do is often the road-building for the Ferraris (I wish!) and transport lorries that support trade to run upon, but without it they wouldn’t move.  So onto to improving quality of what we do in a measurable way, demonstrating its value to the nation, and structuring information for others to use and innovate. 

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Today the official accessibility guidance was updated to allow a choice of either WCAG 1.0 or WCAG 2.0 as the minimum standard for public sector websites:

Compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines is acceptable at Level Double-A of version 1.0 or the equivalent level in version 2.0. Future policy and timetables for implementation will align with European Commission recommendations on the adoption of WCAG 2.0. Planned future updates to this guidance will include details of the specific conformance requirements for version 2.0.

- Paragraph 5, Delivering inclusive websites (TG102)

My last post on accessibility suggested it would be a good first step. The suggestion was generally supported, not least by Jack Pickard, who since his initial response has written a more detailed article. In this, he sets out what he thinks the appropriate level of WCAG 2.0 should be for public sector websites. It’s an excellent article and will certainly help COI to develop the accessibility guidance further and smooth the transition to version 2.0. If you have a view on this, I urge you to read Jack’s article and comment.

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It’s been a busy week.  I have often talked about the way users now behave on the Web, in response to organisations’ approaches to branding.  Mostly people use search, not only for finding things they don’t know about, but also locating the sites for things they do, but either cannot or don’t see the need to recall the URL.  Recognising this changes the way that we promote and advertise services. 

It’s not that Web search engines are the new government portals (see Persuasive Content’s nice comments on my keynote address to public sector IT Directors) but, because that is the way that the majority behave, they have become portals to all information.  What we are doing in government is working with people’s habits to make it easy for them to get to the public sector information and services they need and that we want to encourage them to use. 

There are implications for branding – and that has been the focus of most conversations this week.  Many still think of branding as the logo or, more generally, the visual image.  But that is a tiny aspect of branding.  Thinking of John Lewis or Waitrose or Morrisons, conjures up notions of quality, reliability and cost with associated personal and internalised reactions, such as ‘my kind of place’ or ‘good value for money’ – which their straplines reflect and differentiate from each other.

The key is what people know and think about the organisation and what you want them to know and think about you. That is done through language and positioning relative to other services – hence the importance of the Title and Description fields in the Web page metadata along with Search Engine Optimisation, and straplines that people use to describe the site.  The kinds of words we are working to have associated with many government digital services are authoritative, trustworthy, up to date, and comprehensive. 

Search engines are not the only routes; link text on other websites, blogs and tweets are also widely used word-based access points and create an aroma about your site.  What people say in the blogosphere is influential – hence the guidance to civil servants that moves beyond mere permission towards a positive encouragement to get involved and participate on the issues for which they are responsible (see Engaging using social media).  

Web presence is about building reputation and credibility for a particular audience through what is offered and their experience of interactions with the organisation.  A branded Web presence has to think through SEO, SEM, linking and social media strategies to do this.   It is what you and others say, and what you choose to use, that currently create brands on the Web rather than a logo.

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We’ve been helping Cabinet Office with the Prime Minister’s initiative on data release.  Called Making Public Data Public, the PM appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt in June to oversee the creation of a single online point of access for all public UK government datasets.

On 10 June in his statement to the House of Commons on Constitutional Renewal, the PM announced that ‘… I believe we should do more to spread the culture and practice of freedom of information…So that Government information is accessible and useful for the widest possible group of people, I have asked Sir Tim Berners-Lee to lead who led the creation of the World Wide Web, to help us drive the opening up of access to Government data in the web over the coming months.’

The intention is that a single online point of access becomes part of the routine operation of Departments with a live site running by the end of the year.   The Cabinet warmly endorsed all the actions the project is taking on the 15th September, after a presentation by Sir Tim.  I’ve helped by preparing a communication and engagement plan, David’s been supporting through his work on RDFa implementation across government and Adam drafting the guidance for Departments.

Colleagues in COI have been working on the site and there is an early preview of what the site could look like that was available yesterday for the developer community.  The project is appealing to open data developers to work with government to get this right. Developers can join in by signed up to the Google Group.

The developer community is full of bright ideas of how to use government data and what they need to develop public services – just look at some of the great initiatives started already: Show Us a Better Way, the Power of Information Taskforce, MySociety and Rewired State.  It’s work in progress, and there’s still a lot to do. You can follow progress on #opendata on Twitter.

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In the current climate of open, transparent and accountable government, it is now mandatory for government websites to have stats audits. But how did this come about and why is it beneficial?

Policy background

Back in July ’06 the National Audit Office published the results of its survey of Government on the Internet. The results were pretty shocking:

Over a quarter of government organisations still do not know the costs of their websites, making it impossible to assess whether they are value for money

16% of government organisations have no data about how their websites are being used, inhibiting website improvements.

The quality of government websites has improved only slightly since 2002.

These findings were used as evidence before the UK Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearing in November ’07. PAC recommended the development of a single set of measures for government website costs, quality and usage which were to be reported centrally. Government’s response to the PAC Sixteenth Report was laid before the House of Commons in September ‘08.

Consistent data

The single set of measures was developed and is now in place, but how can the data be collected reliably? Measuring website usage can be done in a number of ways with sites using different methods, tools, standards, filters and terminology. To get consistency is a real challenge.

The media industry has solved this problem. Advertising revenue is based on the number of Ad Impressions – like Page Impressions but for ads – and rates vary with volume of site usage. Advertisers need a reliable way to ensure return on investment. They need to know that the websites on which they are buying space and surfacing content measure usage accurately and consistently. The solution is to insist on a site audit certificate.

Government websites don’t tend to generate revenue from advertising – although the practice is not forbidden in principle – but they are accountable to the taxpayer. Surely taxpayers have the right to expect a decent return on their investment? If I visit a government website, how much does it cost me? Is it value for money? I want to know!

The ABCe audit

In May 2009, COI appointed ABCe to be the sole auditor of government websites. ABCe is the industry owned website auditor and is the standard for the media industry, both for media owners and media buyers. COI has negotiated cost savings for the taxpayer by centralising the spend. The average cost of an audit is approximately £2,500 compared to £4,000 if departments went to ABCe independently. By the end of the financial year, all websites run by central government departments will have had one month’s usage data audited by ABCe.

The bigger picture

Why go to all this trouble and is there any benefit to the government departments themselves? Aside from increased accountability to the taxpayer, departments do stand to benefit from the increased rigour in site measurement and evaluation. Website audits are the first step towards properly managed performance improvement. It is only with consistent and reliable data that performance metrics – or KPIs – can be developed. These are things like:

• Average number of Visits per Unique User which measures how often a user returns to a website (customer loyalty)
• Average number of Page Impressions per Visit which provides a measure of user engagement (sometimes referred to as stickiness)

When usage levels are considered alongside costs, we can also begin to consider value for money metrics such as Cost per Visit.

Central reporting of quality data also enables benchmarking of government websites against each other. For example, if I get an average Visit Satisfaction of 70% for my website, how do I know if that is good or bad compared to other websites in my sector? With a standard set of core survey questions, this is now possible. It is also worth mentioning that local government are ahead of central government in this respect. Because of initiatives like the SOCITM Website Take-up Service and Gov Metric, Local Authorities have integrated satisfaction benchmarking into their site performance management.

Monitoring KPIs over time is a key business tool for demonstrating performance improvement which is so important for getting the appropriate level of investment in government digital media.

Central reporting of Visit Duration is a contentious issue. While it is probably not useful to compare websites on this metric – a long time on site may indicate a high level of engagement or a site that is difficult to navigate – it does provide interesting census-level data. Measuring Visit Duration enables Government to calculate the total amount of time spent on its websites by citizens. We can begin to get a picture of the value delivered to citizens by government online. For example, if we compare the cost of delivery to the cost for the citizen then we can begin to address the cost-benefit of online services to the citizen. Now that would be interesting!

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I’ve been pondering on what kind of online feedback would best help improve our public services.  Of course, government already has it in some places – on NHS Choices, through third parties such as Patient Opinion, and for many local government services (that’s where I live).    

 The citizen might give a description and rating of an experience (just like restaurant and hotel reviews), an observation note (low hanging trees over pathways, abandoned cars) or photographs with GPS reference.  What we lack is any kind of consistency. 

•  How might the citizen expect to do it? 
• Where would they find where they could give such feedback?
• What kinds of descriptions and information will be required?
• Are they hampered by yet another interface, or are there similarities to make the feedback process familiar?

 There are a number of approaches:

• Set a common framework, so that when feedback mechanisms are implemented, people can learn what to expect
• Adopt some leading examples and copy across the different public sector websites
• Setup a few Web Services that deliver the feedback functionality to many different websites, so that users have the same experience wherever they go.

 We not only hinder the citizen in their ease of reporting (thereby potentially adding to their distress or preventing them from complimenting the service), we also lose something much more valuable – the ability to analyse where small changes across public services could result in maximum effect.

 Those are systemic aspects that are not visible because believed specific, until some grunt work is done on the feedback in a comprehensive way.  For example people’s experience of hospitals may  be coloured by the difficulty or ease of getting there, or delays in responding to enquiries may be a generic response within certain organisations, rather than team specific.  We don’t get that kind of information unless we start to listen to citizens in a more comprehensive way about their experiences of public services. 

 So how can we best do that online?

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Many people want to be able to contribute to the development of government policy, either as key stakeholders or citizens.  The problem is finding out about what is going on to which they can contribute.  Key stakeholders get invited – for example the British Chambers of Commerce or the British Computer Society.  Others are aware through looking at the website, setting up alerts or monitoring via RSS, or through other means including links and third party information.

What would be useful is one place to find all the consultations that are open at any time.  Harry Metcalfe sought to do this in his service www.tellthemwhatyouthink.org, but found the identification of where all the consultations were and the different ways they are structured difficult in providing a full list.  Of course a list that looks complete but isn’t is the most frustrating of all  – potential contributors don’t know what is missing and may miss something important because they are not looking elsewhere.

The Consultations Code committed to a complete list of open consultations.  This is now being formed with Directgov with a target date of the end of the year.  And we’re doing it using semantic web mark-up (RDFa) so that anyone can extract the data and use it.  I see the possibility of key stakeholders downloading the information about consultations directly onto their websites and providing online response forms using social media tools that can then be integrated and fed back to government.

The commonest question I get, is why not use plain old XML data streams?  We could, but there are many useful aspects to open government if we use semantic web mark-up.  Before that stage, putting all descriptions of consultations into a common form, helps people identify quickly what is relevant and allows people to bring together into new services.  Ensuring each has a URI by a single web page to itself (using the URL as a URI), allows reference to where all the documents are.  Making them indexable by Web search engines (not all were!) means that people can find all the different consultations, including relevant ones, even if you didn’t know of all the organisations that have consultations.  Finally putting in RDFa markup means that they are re-usable, so third parties can encourage participation.  Government providing a service by creating a single list from this data on all the different public sector organisations is just one use of that data.

Formal consultations are only one way of many that seek to engage the public.  We could apply the same principles – and display them in a single place – for other time-limited means.   And we could bring in statutory notices that include such items as planning notices, which are mini-consultations, encouraging people to comment.  When I go onto my professional sites, I want to see relevant policy discussion.  I also want to do so in my personal life – identifying all those changes that might affect my locality and my interests.

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