Infographics in Gov 2.0

Posted on July 26, 2010 by Russell Shepherd

The White House blog has a post about the Create an Infographic about Childhood Obesity Contest. (The deadline for the contest has already past, sorry to all the would-be designers.) I really like this contest for three reasons. First, there are some fantastic submissions listed at GOOD. I think that Jenn Cash’s submission deserves to win because it is informative, thought provoking and good looking. But, the submission from BetheCatalyst.org is my personal favorite:

BeTheCatalyst.org's Submission

BeTheCatalyst.org's Submission

While it may not be what we think of as an infographic, it definitely is the kind of message we need to right now to put national priorities on the right track. This is an example of how e-government initiatives can make government more democratic.

Collaboration

The second reason I really like it is the collaboration between First Lady Michelle Obama’s Lets Move! campaign and GOOD.is. GOOD is an online and print magazine where socially minded people and organizations share projects, news, ideas and so on. GOOD’s content focuses on information and design, which makes it well-suited for e-gov in the US. Sometime I peruse their projects and infographics section for great ideas and inspiration. (Aside: I doubt the way GOOD markets itself as “for people who give a damn” really grows it’s audience, it seems about as effective a PR slogan as Dawkin’s Bright’s movement.)

In most e-government strategy white papers, collaboration is part of the holy trinity of e-government buzz words, along with transparency and efficiency. However, the specifics of collaboration goals are usually vague. The US Open Government Initiative evaluation questionnaire, for example, has 5 out of 28 questions dedicated to collaboration, but no suggestions or examples of satisfactory projects can be found in the OGI paperwork.  This project is that missing example. By teaming up with a forward thinking online magazine targeted at a creative audience, Lets Move! nailed it. I also love the way they use the White House blog, which I hope other people besides myself read, to spread the word to an audience that may not pay attention to children’s issues or design journals that often (fat-cats). Okay, fat-cats and their aides might not read the White House blog, but they are a hell of a lot more likely to see it there than at Lets Move!‘s website. This bring me to the third reason I like this contest:

Web 2.0

The third reason, this project does web 2.0 right. To start with, Lets Move! has a facebook account (27,000 likes) and multiple twitter  accounts, and GOOD has an AddThis like widget for all it’s posts. In fact, as I looked around at Lets Move!‘s web 2.0 features, I realized I have to right a separate post to talk about them all.

More importantly, the contest takes web 2.0 to completion by not only utilizing the usual suspects Twitter and Facebook, but also creating a citizen-centered project. It gives users ownership by letting them create the content, which is the whole point of web 2.0.

Infographics role in Gov 2.0

Openness is one of those vague words often praised by politicians who pass e-government strategies. The US strategy for strategy for making openness measurable was forcing every agency to provide 3 new data sets to Data.gov, one of which had to be “high-value” (the US is one of the only governments to use qualitative methods in evaluation, which I think is a good idea). The problem is, data is only one part of openness. Take a look at this diagram of Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisodm (DIKW) Hierarchy I grabbed from Wikipedia:

DIKW Hierarchy

DIKW Hierarchy

By itself, Data.gov is at the first circle. Openness requires that data become readable and understandable information. Infographics are one of the tools that let users create that new layer of meaning.

Posted in E-gov | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Government Portals: Less is More

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Russell Shepherd

I have to present a set of recommendations about the Taiwanese government portal site, and I’ll be using the guiding principle of less is more. When I first looked at the site, I was worried that I had gotten myself in over my head and there was no possible way to fix this thing. Then I remembered, I don’t have to actually fix, I just have to tell other people how to fix it. That still isn’t entirely easy. The site has a lot of problems: it’s way to complex, not very attractive, contains too much text and too many meaningless graphics. To really solve these problems, I have to understand how they specifically apply in this case and, very important, label them so other people can understand clearly how to proceed. If I can turn this spaghetti bowl of bad design into a series of bit-sized problems, we should be able to tackle it.

The first words that appeared in my mind when I saw the site were: out of date. Like, 1998 out of date. Things like color scheme, white space, typeface – all that artsy stuff. The only was to solve this is to redesign the site, but I’ve learned from experience that if the first thing you tell an organization is they need to redesign their site, they won’t listen to anything else you have to say. Never open with a vague solution, most intelligent people will smell a rat. Instead, I set about quantifying the problem.

Understanding the Problem

First, I turned to Webpages as Graphs, which visualizes the HTML elements on a page. From this you can get an idea of the complexity and make up of a page’s code. I then compared it with the USA.gov home page, which is a pretty good government portal that everyone around here looks up to. That’s right, thanks to President Obama’s Open Government Initiative, we Americans can be proud of our e-government. Here are the results (click to enlarge):

Taiwan Portal Visualization

US Portal Visualization

US Portal Visualization

These graphs tell us two things about the Taiwanese site:

1. There are more elements.
2. It is coded with an outdated technique: tables.

To make it a little clearer, each of those dots represents an HTML element, something like <div> or <a>. The color coding tells us what type of element it is, black is the root node <html>, blue are links, violet are images, green are the <div> tags essential to CSS, and red are the dreaded table tags.

At this point, it’s important to remember that the purpose of a portal site is to act as a gateway, a one-stop-shop for citizens to access existing government service and organizations. Very plainly, this means there are going to be a lot of links (blue). This means we have to change how we measure the signal-to-noise ratio. Designers borrowed this concept from engineering sciences (Garr Reynolds expounds on it well at his blog Presentation Zen). In a regular site, links often dilute content, especially lots of menu items.  But in a portal site, links are the content. Most government portal’s content, including the US, the UK, and Australia, are almost entirely links.

As for the red nodes, tables went out with the dinosaurs, there just isn’t any reason to use them. Everything we need to know about coding standards can be found over at www.w3.org.

Design and Content Flow

Now we know there are a lot of structural elements which manifest as visual junk dragging down the site. That’s easy enough to fix in a re-do by using contemporary coding techniques and good design. Except the good design part isn’t very easy. Good design is all about visual queues, does the user know where to look, do they feel it’s easy? Since apparently lots of people like the new USA.gov, I used Bubbl.us to create a mind map of the content flow, check it out:

US Portal Content Flow

US Portal Content Flow

It didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. Purple nodes are links, green are labeled sections, blue are unlabeled grouping of items that are pretty obviously grouped, and red are multimedia/interactive elements. I made those elements red because they usually draw a lot of attention. I actually really admire the flow, even when you map out the elements in a simple fashion, it’s pretty intuitive. That said, it’s a little shallow on content side. It might be better to integrate some of the content instead of linking to separate pages for everything. Take for example the topics section, why not take a play from the Australians or Brits and list a few of the most popular subtopics under each.

I was contemplating starting the content flow mind map for the Taiwanese portal site today, when I was interrupted by a sudden realization. I think I know what inspired their design:

Comparison with Yahoo Taiwan

Comparison with Yahoo Taiwan

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Powerpoint, begone!

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Russell Shepherd

I am not a fan of Powerpoint. As anyone who has experienced Death by Powerpoint can tell you, it is a truly numbing experience. How many meetings or lectures have you attended where the speaker’s otherwise perfectly good content was ruined because they bent their thoughts to fit  Powerpoint’s linear and bulleted style. Edward Tufte captures everything wrong with computer slideware in his well known essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. (President Obama selected Mr. Tufte to create Recovery.org, a fantastic example of how to display lots of detailed information. Check out Bob Garfield’s interview with Mr. Tufte at On The Media.) Back to why Powerpoint is bad. In a 2010 New York Times article, General H.R. MacMaster called Powerpoint “dangerous” and observed that, “[s]ome problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” The General is correct, and while the Powerpoint presentations I’m forced to sit through might not be costing lives, they are making work harder.

Some people argue that Powerpoint and other slideware, such as Google’s alternative, have their time and place. I say that their time and place was twenty years ago in a sleepy lecture hall.

Out with the old, in with the new…

So when my boss asked me to look over the presentation he will be giving to a visiting official, I took the opportunity to put in my two cents. After doing as he asked and correcting all the language mistakes (I work in Taipei, and all the international meetings are held in English, so I’m quite handy), I began retooling the presentation with Prezi.

If you haven’t used Prezi yet, here is the breakdown. It’s a browser based presentation editor that doesn’t use slides. Instead, there is one large palette on top of which you add various text and visual elements. You can then zoom around the palette changing your “camera angle” and even zooming in and out. Prezi works well for showing big-picture ideas and then zooming in to give details. It also fits well to a narrative style, but isn’t limited to a linear progression and bulletarchy like Powerpoint.

See for yourself:

You can check out the original presentation (.ppt), and then compare it to my Prezi. Just remember, this is a side-project and may take a week or so to finish.

Note: I used Gliffy to update the look of several of the original charts and clip art style graphics.

Posted in Tools, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Powerpoint, begone!

In E-gov, Web 2.0 is more than SMO

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Russell Shepherd

Yesterday, I and some other members of my department attended a talk by John Liao concerning the social media optimization (SMO) of government portal sites. John has some really good ideas, and I really suggest taking a look at his blog, if you read Chinese. It seems the talk he delivered to us a little more simple on the social media side, but heavy on the government initiative side – which seems appropriate given the audience. I drafted up a mind map about E-government and Web 2.0 from his talk:

E-government and Social Media Mind Map

E-government and Social Media Mind Map

Here are a few observations from this mind map:

  1. Governments must engage in SMO (social media optimization) as well as SEO (search engine optimization), but this is only the most superficial element of e-government implementation.
  2. The connections between government generated and user generated content focused around the mutual use of blogs, but the direction was pushing our from government content, not in. This implies that government created content on Web 2.0 services, such as blogs, facebook, and multimedia (flickr, Youtube, etc.), are the essential success factor in establishing communication channels with users. Government-side blogs are used to gather numerous other kinds of social media into one news paper like source, and provide subscribers with RSS feeds. Posts can vary in content from a photo of government officials on vacation, to announcing new flagship e-government services such as tax payments and health insurance tools.
  3. The best method to attract new users through Web 2.0 services is generating consistently interesting or attractive content in at least one medium (e.g. text, video, photo).
  4. The above techniques for drawing the attention and establishing communication channels which users will pay attention to are wasted if actual government services are not accessed.
  5. The most important step is creating government services which people need.
  6. Identifying peoples need via market research is a priority, in this regard, government may need to think more like business.
  7. This is the start of T-government, or the use of E-government to transform the internal structure.

In actuality, only one element of SMO is difficult to achieve – the reorganization websites in a citizen-centric fashion. For example, we no longer should be listing services under the websites of the individual departments providing the service, but rather listed by category in one place, up front, on the government portal. The reorganization will require a team, or at least a project manager, working across many departments. The technology to accomplish these tasks is already being used within most governments, and can be deployed at low cost. One point often overlooked in the optimism surrounding e-government is that the crux of this change is both organizational and societal, but not technological. There is no digital panacea for bridging the gap that exists between most countries’ governments and citizens.

The more key element of developing successful e-government, and by far the more difficult, is new service development. While challenging, changing government’s new service development process to be focused on citizen-centric e-government has the potential to unlock the transformational power of e-government initiatives. This later stage of e-government, called t-government, may very well change the way decisions are made inside the bureaucracy. T-government will create a new set of decision making processes, starting as at the new service development level, which will inherit the democratic, cloud sourced, and decentralized nature of the Web 2.0 platform.

    Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on In E-gov, Web 2.0 is more than SMO