March, 2008 – Designing the e-government experience through citizen-centered usability

Kath Straub: Hello and welcome. My name is Kath Straub, Chief Scientist of HFI. Welcome to our live webcast presented by HFI's Usability Broadcast Network. The title of today's webcast is designing the e-government experience. And I'd like to introduce to you Spencer Gerrol, our Executive Director and one of my partners in government.

Spencer Gerrol: Thanks for joining us.

Kath Straub: Before we get started, there are a couple of news and notes that we have to do. First of all we want to make sure that you remember to download the free government white paper from HFI's website. You can view our complete schedule of webcast on the same website. And during the entire talk and at the very end you can also submit questions for Spencer and I to address using the link in the lower right hand corner of the webcast itself. Ready to get started?

Spencer Gerrol: Let's get started.

Kath Straub: Alright. So Spencer and I have been working in the government space for quite some time. And we felt we might bring some of that for you today. And one of the things that we think about quite a bit is that government is basically a business that's run on your tax dollars and ours. So it's an interesting space to work on because its our business as well as the work that we are doing at the same time.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. A lot of people don't necessarily think of government as a business, but it has many of the same elements. There are looking to drive towards efficiency. They are looking to please their customers. And so we really want to encourage that. We think of government as a business. And for those tuning in who aren't directly involved in government we also want you to understand that while government does have unique aspects, there are things that will be relevant to everybody because of that business commonality.

Kath Straub: Exactly. And one of the things that we've learnt during this work is that as we go out to talk to citizens and consumers of government essentially that they expect the government to be on line. So this slide that you are looking at now shows some work from the Pew Internet American Life Project showing that when they go out to solve problems, 7 out of 10 Americans expect that government information will be accessible online.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. It's a big opportunity for government to be getting online. And we are going to talk throughout the webcast a little bit about why.

Kath Straub: So thinking about why government should be online, what's the benefit for citizens?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, certainly as we said, government being a business and the thing that comes to mind initially is that there are benefits in terms of citizen satisfaction. One of the goals of government in general is to make sure to please our citizens and provide them with the services that they really need.

Kath Straub: So what is it that you do with government?

Spencer Gerrol: We do quite a bit with government. And oh you mean in terms of me and my daily life.

Kath Straub: Yes.

Spencer Gerrol: And in terms of HFI.

Kath Straub: Right.

Spencer Gerrol: Well, the truth is I mostly interact with government for things like going to the DMV for things like paying my taxes. For the most part I would say it is things that I am required to do by law and I need to do.

Kath Straub: And those are things that you think you could do online?

Spencer Gerrol: My hope and my expectation would be that I could. Government is in the rest of the world and we are biased by things that we interact with everyday. So there has been a big transition in terms of e-services in general, not just in government. I don't expect to have to go to bestbuy. I can go to bestbuy.com, and on that same token I am biased by the expectation I expect to be able to do some of these things that we see in government.

Kath Straub: So some of the things that seem fairly straightforward like when doing your license plate or things like that could be something that you would want to do online rather than wanting to go to the DMV.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely, but you know you bring up an interesting point about expectations, because there is a bit of a bias and it probably comes from somewhere that well, we want to be able to do some of these things online. Government tends to be in some ways behind the private sector. So we don't expect it necessarily right now to be up to the power of where bestbuy might be.

Kath Straub: Okay. So some agencies are further ahead than others, but there are lots of opportunities for both of those agencies to improve.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: And what are some of the benefits of user experience in thinking about web experience for the government, on the government side?

Spencer Gerrol: Ah. Well, one thing that we haven't mentioned yet is that one of the goals of the government is to be transparent. To have the citizens capable of being aware of what's going on. To have the reach to be able to contact every citizen and have every citizen know what's happening in government. And so that's one of the goals and one of the things that I think we can accomplish through e-government. It's a big opportunity for e-government.

Kath Straub: So the ability to actually get a new channel of communication on to the citizens one that's open 24 x 7 and perhaps one that's more accessible to individuals who might not be able to get to some of those agencies as easily as others.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. That's not all though in terms of the benefits for government. As we started the whole webcast talking about how government can be seen as a business and there are business benefits for government to be doing e-government.

Kath Straub: So why don't you speak to some of those self-service benefits then?

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. You know, when they do self-service online and when that is available to citizens, it saves work. It saves time. It saves money. And actually in this case money means tax dollars.

Kath Straub: Exactly.

Spencer Gerrol: And we refer to that as saving money, but with government it is a little bit of a different game.

Kath Straub: How's that?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, it's not completely about saving money. It's about using money effectively. Using money wisely. We're paying taxes. That money is available. But if we can make government more efficient, then we can accomplish more.

Kath Straub: Ah, okay. And one of the other benefits that we've often seen in the work we've done is that when we make things self service, that the individuals who are working in the government agencies can use their knowledge about how government works to help people who really need help rather than help them do routine tasks that they could be doing by their selves.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: So one of the changes that we've seen as we worked in government in the last few years is that we're really moving towards this e-government where the internet is becoming part of the real process of that way government communicates and does business with both citizens and other businesses. So we want to think about what that means as we move forward. On the academic side, actually there are lots of papers out there that talk about the stages that organization goes through as they move through in their evolution towards e-government and even later towards i-government which we'll talk about in a little bit. The first stage actually tends to be a stage where they report. So the internet is used as a place where I can basically tell people what my agency has done, give the statistics that I provided over time internally, but make it accessible for other people to have that information and have that information available for individuals who might not have access to it right away. The second stage is the transaction stage, right. That's the stage where I start to do some e-services and I start to make it possible to do business online. That third stage then is a stage where we interact. I'm not sure we're there yet.

Spencer Gerrol: In some ways we are and in some ways we aren't. I think one of the important things to recognize with this is that government is in many different places in this process. Some agencies are getting into the interaction space. Some are just trying to get into the transaction space. Some are trying to do more of reporting so that more is transparent and they have further reach.

Kath Straub: Well, what would it mean to interact with government online?

Spencer Gerrol: It can mean various things. One of the goals of government in America is to make sure that the voices of the people are heard. And through interaction and through the internet we have an opportunity to make that more possible.

Kath Straub: So be more concrete. What does that mean? What can I do to interact with government other than pay my taxes online?

Spencer Gerrol: Good question. So let's say some thing's happening even just in your local government.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: And you want to have an impact on that. In the you know the olden days, we used to have the town hall meeting. Because then we used to be really have that local presence in that local interaction with government.

Kath Straub: Right.

Spencer Gerrol: But things have evolved and that access on that on to personal level is less available. But we've seen the web go in directions where having those interactions can actually contributing not just in one direction, but a two-way stream is becoming possible. And if government can leverage that, then we bring back some of the fundamentals of what a democracy means.

Kath Straub: So we actually can communicate back and forth with government rather than just doing a transaction which is a sort of a one-way communication.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly.

Kath Straub: Okay. So that's the academic side.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. And Kath, as most of you probably know, and as we said in the beginning as the chief scientist of our organization and has a very strong grasp, obviously, of what those academic view points are, but we in this webcast want to break it down to something that is actually actionable.

Kath Straub: So what you are telling me is the academic side isn't realistic. Is that what you are saying?

Spencer Gerrol: Oh no. It's very realistic. But we want to make sure that we can create a step by step process.

Kath Straub: I see, okay.

Spencer Gerrol: And that people can actually get this done and understand dhow to get that done.

Kath Straub: Okay. So how do we do it?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, there's many stages here and throughout the presentation we're going to walk through these 8 stages, and we've really broken these out to be very separate in order to make it digestible and make it a easy step by step process. It's important to point out that most government agencies are really working on the top 3 may be 4 in some cases, but in many cases moving beyond that.

Kath Straub: Okay. So let's talk about some of those beginning stages. So the first stage that we talked about is just getting it out there. And what we're going to do is talk through a case study of work that we did with the Bureau of Justice and the Online Crime. The Bureau of Justice Online Crime database is one that allows citizens to find out the crime that happens in their neighborhood specifically. So asking very specific questions and doing some (inaudible) through a carefully thought through interface that allows you to sort of customize the questions you ask to what you need to know at any given time.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: So what kind of things would you want to know about crime in your neighborhood?

Spencer Gerrol: And that's a great point. Because it sounds like something that we typically wouldn't interact with. What are the crime statistics? Why am I going to do that? But it is valuable information to citizens. If you are looking at buying a property and you want to know what the crime levels are in different areas and have that factor into the decision making process, then this is information that'll be valuable to you.

Kath Straub: Right. So in the past all this information was available. But it was available through physical publication to books. And the people that got those books were very highly specifically trained statistics people. So statisticians working in crime may be media people working in crime, people working in law and justice. That's a lot of information there that could be used to useful to other people looking for the kinds of things that you're talking about that previously simply wasn't available.

Spencer Gerrol: How do you get those books?

Kath Straub: that's right. So that was the big problem. You sort of had to be in the know to know where you needed to go to get that information in the first place. So one of the big things about getting things out there is that now the information's available for everybody. So we can get it out there. We can get it out there in the first format often not necessarily the best way to do it. But often the first way to get it out there is just to publish what people had in the book online. That can be good and bad, right.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. I mean we shouldn't minimize it. It is certainly an important step in the process. It's certainly the first step in the process. It also does create usability problems. Just publishing it from print to web is not the most effective way to do it. We see in this example if you look at it what we are outlining here that there's a horizontal scroll. It's a big table of data actually digesting and understanding that information how it can apply to you is not an easy task for most citizens.

Kath Straub: So I get the basic data but there's a lot of processing and thinking that I have to do to understand how this data works for me.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So at least it's there.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: But actually using it is another story.

Kath Straub: Okay. So going from book to web is not necessarily the transition that we want to make as quickly. And the other thing to point out is when you move from one medium to another like this there are a significant usability and accessibility issues that people have to think about. And this particular case was one of the worst accessibility challenges that I've seen.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: So the next step then is to make it useful and usable. So just because it's there doesn't mean it's useful and usable. So in the case of online crime, one of the things they did is they thought through what questions people might be asking, what questions they would ask on a regular basis and they essentially predigest the information so that users can, or they've already answered most of the questions that people would be typically looking for.

Spencer Gerrol: Right and the title of this section of the web page is actually called key facts at a glance. And that's really what they are really doing for you, is they are providing that glance so you can be able to understand the information.

Kath Straub: Okay. So now it becomes a little bit more usable, but I really want to make it useful. To make it useful to me, it has to be about me.

Spencer Gerrol: So how do you do that?

Kath Straub: Well, I think in this case what we were really working on is taking a data mining approach and trying to figure out how to make it possible for people to form their own questions and queries using this incredibly powerful database that was simplified enough so that regular people could ask the right questions to see the data in comparisons they wanted on the screen.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting. So if I live in Washington DC for e.g. and I'm trying to decide whether to buy a house in Dupont Circle or Capital Hill, I could actually look up what's the different and I could apply directly.

Kath Straub: That's right. So you can look at your specific data instead of having to look at a giant volume of billions and billions of data points and having to figure out what it means to you. So that's great transition there and a great improvement. Okay, but even then this is a case of great a improvement in the usability success, but often times when I go to the government websites I find that they are not as usable as I would like them to be. Now given, we are a little bit different than the normal (inaudible), right.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: You and I have a little bit different expectations, but even when we do usability testing and user experience interviews, we find that we want to cross some fairly common problems in websites in government and in web sites in business as well.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the problems that we find that often both from a consulting perspective, but even from a citizen perspective, is you look at these websites and it's hard to understand how it's all organized. It doesn't seem to make sense for how I organize the government in my mind and how citizens do in their minds.

Kath Straub: You're right. So I want to go to a website and find out information about taxes or where to get a fishing license.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: And the problem is that I'm not sure what agency it is that deals with fishing license in the state I'm going on vacation.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So you don't know where to start. But even once you get there, how is that website organized. And you know one of the points in this cloud here is it organized like the government. So that's one of the symptoms that we're realizing.

Kath Straub: So the infrastructure of the website is very much like the infrastructure of the government itself and unless you work in the government, or even if you do work in the government, you may not actually be that familiar with how the infrastructure is organized.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly.

Kath Straub: What are some of the other problems that we commonly see when we look at government sites.

Spencer Gerrol: Outdated content is one of the examples.

Kath Straub: Outdated content. So I had to sift through all this information that isn't really relevant to me and I am not really sure how to tell what's relevant to me and what's not.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And there's a difference to what's important to a citizen and what's important to the government. And we need to create the right balance so that there is the right amount of push and pull there.

Kath Straub: And that's an interesting point, because often times citizens don't necessarily know all the information they need to find. So if a site's designed well or has information presented well, it could help me find what I think I need to find but also give me some information about what I really need to know.

Spencer Gerrol: So how's that done? How do we make that happen?

Kath Straub: Well, that's a good question. One of the things that we have to think about in figuring out how to that's done is to figure out why those symptoms that you had on the previous slide are actually there.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So for e.g. one of the things that we spoke about was that the web page or even getting to the right web pages it's organized as the government is organized. And that's because not the government can help it, but they have an internal focus. They know too much.

Kath Straub: They know too much about what they do and they know too much about how government works. And sometimes it's hard to forget how much you know about your own job.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. Okay.

Kath Straub: Alright. So here's your question. I'm going to throw it right back at you. How do we do that?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, the first thing is to understand what citizens or people within US or any government are seeing and how the site is actually organized. How people see it. How they want to see it. And how to create the right combination of these things. So in the example that we're looking at on the slide now, we're looking at an example from the e-tax service center. This was a great effort that happened in California. And up in the upper left, you see that the government saw it as organized in this fashion. I mean it was a clear hierarchy of information. But when the citizens, and we did some usability testing, and the citizens came to the site and they didn't see it as a clear hierarchy. They saw it as this big jumble of information. And they want to go through the process of understanding how to pay taxes, do I need to pay taxes. There was nothing to walk them through step by step and they had to actually figure out how the government is organized in order to figure that our. So it didn't seem clear.

Kath Straub: Okay. So may be the problem now was the designers knew what they designed. So it was obvious and made sense to them. And since they knew so much about how taxes worked or how the government works in the first place.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: But as an innocent citizen, I don't know any of that.

Spencer Gerrol: Right and even further, the way that they organized it in the first place even if it really did appear that way to the citizens, it's not what they wanted anyway. Citizens wanted for this taxes information to be walked through it with their hand held. It's a complicated topic. It's not something that we can easily understand.

Kath Straub: So really, I'm coming to the government for help is what the citizens were telling us in the usability testing that their trust in the government is going to be a resource of information for them, and they want to be walked through the process in order.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And you need to trust that it's the right order and feel confident that you're doing things right because it's a high risk situation if you don't pay your taxes.

Kath Straub: Right, exactly.

Spencer Gerrol: So what we did is we understood that people wanted to walk through that information in a step by step way and understand in a step by step process how to do that. And so simply what we did was format the site to support that need. So this is a little bit like the earlier example where on online crime they went from giving you all of the data to actually thinking through the data and helping you answer the most common questions that you have as a citizen.

Spencer Gerrol: And in the order that you have it.

Kath Straub: And in the order that you have it.

Spencer Gerrol: The first thing people want to know is you know do I even need to file this particular type of tax in the first place? You know, if so, you know what are the new laws and you know and how do I do that and walk me through that process.

Kath Straub: So I need to know enough about what you need which is different from what I know to anticipate what your next question is going to be so I can be there to answer it.

Spencer Gerrol: That's it.

Kath Straub: It is essentially what the website is doing is creating that conversation.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So one of the methods that we want to use in some of this research is to delve into some of the more advanced methods here. We have an example here of I-Track and you want to walk us through what we learnt in this I-Tracking example.

Kath Straub: I felt this would be an interesting example because of what it showed us even in the course of a short period of time is that people change their behavior on the site. So if you are looking at the image on the left, what you see in the red spots is the hot spots. And I know we've talked about this in a few other webcasts is that people were sort of looking all over the page, but a short time later if you look at the image on the right, you'll see that there are cold spots over most of the page. People learn pretty quickly in experience with this website and in exposure to this website that there were certain parts of the screen that were not interested in. And it turns out in this page that it's some pretty high quality real estate.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly. You know they were drawn to that area when we delved deeper into the I-Tracking data because it's in the prime area. Because it's that prime muse and they expect important things to be there. But as you are saying, they quickly learn that that's not where important things live.

Kath Straub: Which is really unfortunate because that means a lot of the space that could be used to have that conversation that guide me through the things I really want to know gets lost because I've learnt to ignore other parts of the site.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. And the California tax service center took this to heart and actually made changes because of it.

Kath Straub: Okay. So the next step is actually giving that self service piece out there.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay.

Kath Straub: So the first example that we have in this self-service piece is one we've really actually translated from the paper space to the paper space online to actually a wizard to help users move through the business logic of government. And there are some cases where the business logic of government is quite complex. But I as a citizen may not need to understand or may not be able to move through all of those questions themselves. So in this case, we took a very complicated form and we worked with our partners in the government site to understand how the business logic underlies the decisions that you're making filling out the form. This is the form that a lot of people filled out that didn't really mean to fill it out. And that resulted in a lot of unhappy citizens, because they lost money when they actually submitted the form and found that they didn't need to.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting.

Kath Straub: Or other people didn't understand that they needed to have certain kinds of permits because the system is so complex. So what we ended up doing is working with the business side to understand what the logic was and simplifying the questions much like triple tax. So that you had a series of easy questions that you could answer that were straightforward. They weren't simple, but they were important to making the right decisions and finding the consequences that you need. So...

Spencer Gerrol: We're seeing multiple parts of the process here because in the first place they did get it out there. They put that form online.

Kath Straub: That's right.

Spencer Gerrol: They provided the self service. But it wasn't there yet, because it wasn't usable.

Kath Straub: Right. So citizens had the form, but they couldn't do it themselves. Now in the paper world, it was the same way. Citizens had the form and they had a difficult time doing it themselves. So in this case, we not only got it online, we've improved the process for the citizens. If you look on the right, these are pretty easy questions to answer. Where is your headquarters located where you can sort of pick your flight.

Spencer Gerrol: They didn't even have to read the question.

Kath Straub: That's right. And do you own of these vehicles? It's much easier to do it this way and be able to point at what you know and then that takes you through a series of logical questions that decide and tell you what you need over time.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting. You know an important part of self service is that it does benefit the government if we do think of the government as a business. And they are looking to create efficiencies. When you provide self service, it means that you have to use less government support to be the interaction mechanism for the services.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: And so what we have here is an example from the Federal Aviation Administration. And what they did is put a self service tool on their website in order to handle a lot of the questions that people were coming in and struggling with.

Kath Straub: So how did they answer the questions before that website was here?

Spencer Gerrol: They would email. That was very common. They would call. And these all think this is a big labor intensive thing for that Federal Aviation Administration.

Kath Straub: So the FA would actually email back individual answers to individual questions one at a time.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly. And if you calculate how much time on average it takes to do those emails and the amount of emails that are coming in, you create a very, very strong ROI case.

Kath Straub: Now if I remember correctly, there was something about this fact that made it even easier, right. People were asking more questions via the fax than they had via email.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. Because some citizens wouldn't actually make that extra effort to go and call or email. And so what you're doing is you are not only supporting the citizens who would write the email but now don't even have to because they can find it online. But you are also supporting the citizens who otherwise may have just given up and not answered that question.

Kath Straub: So they would have left without knowing it all.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly.

Kath Straub: So a win for both sides in this case.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure and one point that I want to make sure is clear is that we reduced the call they reduced the call via the email volume significantly, but that equates to money. So they ended up saving 2.2 million dollars a year because of this effort.

Kath Straub: Great. Alright. So those are the kind of changes that we are looking for in saving your tax dollars.

Spencer Gerrol: That's right.

Kath Straub: And part of it is that we want to think about it, it's not just doing these one off changes, right. It's not just changing one thing at a time but actually figuring out how well you're doing. That's part of getting back to business.

Spencer Gerrol: Right, okay.

Kath Straub: They want to be able to track and be accountable for the changes that I've made and I want you to be able to report to me how you've improved this system and made it better with your usability.

Spencer Gerrol: Very nice. Let's take a look at some examples of how to do that.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: And also understand a little bit of why it's important. And the California Government went you know actually at this point 7 years ago went through an effort to redesign their website and there is a ranking about all the state websites in the United States and they were ranked #1. Five years later, however, because they didn't track improvement and continuously improved, they fell behind. And in just 5 years they dropped all the way to 47.

Kath Straub: 47 is a big drop.

Spencer Gerrol: It's a big drop.

Kath Straub: And it raised a little alarm in California.

Spencer Gerrol: It did. And you know therefore they decided to do something about it and I'll spoil the end of the story a little bit here, but in only about a year and a half later, they are up to #12 again.

Kath Straub: So a big jump back up. So room to improve.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And ways that they can improve will be to continue and track and measure the things that they're working on.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And they've learnt their lesson to not just drop it for another 5 years but to do that continual improvement.

Kath Straub: Okay. So some of the way that they might be able to do that are some of these base line and some of these methods that we have showing here.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely, yes. So these are some of the ways that you can collect data about the effectiveness or the efficiency of a website. You know certainly web analytics is an important one. Understanding from an expert review, best practices perspective, What's working what's not, understanding from the user's side the usability testing aspects and like we said before, this can all ultimately lead to return on investment cases. For e.g. the call volume would equate to money quite easily as well.

Kath Straub: Does it make sense to use more of these than one?

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. You converging different methods is a great way to establish a bigger picture of what's really happening out there and how your changes are actually having an effect.

Kath Straub: Okay. So it is not just enough to record it once that you want to record it over time.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. That's a very important part on two levels. One is that you make sure that you are pointing in the right direction. But you also get support from the organization for doing these types of efforts. And so if you can demonstrate to the government at large, to your organization, to your leadership that you are increasing the success of your website and you are doing a great service, you can do this more over time.

Kath Straub: And really establishing that what you are doing is having an impact over time.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: So showing with hard numbers.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. And the example that we're looking at from the State Personnel Board is that one of the key functions is to find the job there. And before that it was a very difficult task. And after we designed the site, we saw the success rate of actually completing that task sky rocketed. It also took a lot less time with the task.

Kath Straub: Time on task is something that we often wonder about in a website though, right?

Spencer Gerrol: That's true. In some cases, time on task is not the best measure in terms of the web. In this case you can see that the difference is so great that it probably means something.

Kath Straub: It probably means something that I can get through it pretty fast. I don't have to. I can still look around and play on the website, but it's important to me that I could execute my task quickly if I want to.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: Okay. So they both are important. And then once you've established the base line and done a little bit of that make off testing or done a little bit of that post redesign validation, we also want to continuously track as well. So this is one of my favorite examples from an intranet at the US Court. Interestingly, the idea that an intranet would be an important government is just the same as an intranet would be important in business as well, right. So we're doing the same kind of support. But in this case what we're looking at is I've simplified it a little bit giving us only 2 years instead of the consistent years across is tracking the same questions over time. So this is an interesting problem because you have to think about proactively what tasks and what questions are important. What are users coming to my site to do. And then set up the questions so that you are measuring the same tasks from year to year to year to year. It takes a certain amount of discipline.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And a certain amount of understanding what people are coming to your site to do. Because if we test one set of tests in year 1 and another set of tasks in year 2, it's not clear the comparison makes very much sense.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. But what you're doing is you are understanding first of all what's important to be done in that website and how well and how successful that is and make sure that you don't drop from 1 to 47.

Kath Straub: Right.

Spencer Gerrol: But actually go in the other direction.

Kath Straub: Right. And so this is an important example because it shows that there are organizations out there that have been doing this for quite a long time.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: In fact in this case for 7 years or so. Every year we have a new feedback on how the improvements are being made that shows consistent progress over time.

Spencer Gerrol: So they really know what's going on.

Kath Straub: They really have a program that's making, trying to make it work better. Okay, so now we've got it out there. We've got the tracking improvement. So we can justify what we're doing we're showing it has - it's making a difference. What are the next steps after that? We are going to talk a little bit about making it engaging.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. One of the things that we've seen especially in the private sector, the web is going in the direction of actually making more persuasive and more engaging sites. Does that matter to the government that why would they need to be persuasive? If I want, I need to pay my taxes, who's persuading me to do that? Why would the...

Kath Straub: So may be there's only one place that I can pay my taxes.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: But in fact, there isn't. There are a lot of places that I can information about how to pay my taxes and sometimes that information on the non-government sites isn't quite accurate. So the government agency ends up cleaning up after the other folks who are keeping up as well as they could be on the other side.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. And I can also do it through the old paper means. But that also ends up as we talked about before with self service costing the government more money.

Kath Straub: Right. So there ae certain kinds of tasks that might be open to doing in the web. Right now on the web it looks like for the government, people are doing a lot of research.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: Not necessarily as much transaction as they could be doing to save as much as you had talked about earlier.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: So the question is how can I help citizens understand that the web is the right place to do these tasks.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. Well, let's actually talk about the real and can comparison that we are making. What's that all about Kath?

Kath Straub: Well, so we've focused a lot for the last few years on usability and what it means to do user centered design and can people submit their taxes, can people find the information that they need, but I think, and that's the part that we are getting pretty good at. We understand that. We understand the task flow. We even understand how to go out there and find out how to prioritize the tasks or may be what order to work in. But the question I think that you've been working on most recently is how do I do the persuasive part. Where does the persuasive part fit in and how can I make the experience such that I have an opportunity to do this with the web and I'll choose to do this with the web because that makes more sense. And it's quickest and most efficient for me.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. You know, yesterday over lunch our President mentioned this phrase that the science of irrationality and it turns out that there is a lot of research to support that the decision that we make are not all logical. Sometimes...

Kath Straub: Not?

Spencer Gerrol: No. In fact you are making decisions based on emotion more of the time than on just logical...

Kath Straub: And you think that applies in a government space as well.

Spencer Gerrol: I think it can. I think that we should take a look at different ways that it can apply.

Kath Straub: Okay. Let's do that.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay. So let's start on a level where we are talking about something like California lottery. This is something which is actually more business like. They are selling something.

Kath Straub: But they're not selling tickets on the web yet.

Spencer Gerrol: No, they're not selling tickets on the web. But they want you ultimately to buy.

Kath Straub: Okay. So what can I do on a website that could be of interest to me, then? Why would I go to the California website.

Spencer Gerrol: That's an important question. The #1 reason people go to the website is to check if they won, to check their numbers.

Kath Straub: Oh, so I miss it in the newspaper may be and now I want to go back and check a couple of days later?

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly. You know you probably in your lifestyle didn't get a chance to catch it on television. And may be you're not looking in the newspaper and so there you go.

Kath Straub: Okay, so you've gone back to get it out there. So the information is on the web.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: What does that have to do with persuasive design?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, getting it out there is not the full battle. Because they are ultimately – ultimate goal is to actually make it a better experience for people.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: And to engage them more.

Kath Straub: Okay. I'm still not with you.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay.

Kath Straub: What do you mean? How is this persuasive?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, one of the research methods that we do is to better understand the emotional triggers that people have in their interaction with lottery even outside of the space of the web really what this is all about for them. Where's the irrational piece?

Kath Straub: Okay, so work with me on this. When I'm a non-lottery player, because I get the statistics. But there are people that play lottery and so I would guess they play for the sense of winning. So I want to play because I could win. I want to play because I could win.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. That's the immediate assumption. That you are playing because you could win. But when I actually asked people in the interviews, do you actually think that you're going to win? Lots say, well, not really. That's not a really rational choice, is it?

Kath Straub: No, it's not rational at all.

Spencer Gerrol: So what's the science of the rationality behind this?

Kath Straub: Well, let's see. So we'd have to be looking for some other kind of motivation that would drive me to play. So what other motivation could I possibly have other than I'm going to win big money.

Spencer Gerrol: Well, one of the things that came up often is hope. And so if we can leverage on the hope and make people realize you know it's the dream that people are chasing even more so sometimes than actually concretely thinking if they're going to win. But that's not actually the main thing either. One of the things that is a key factor in this is people play because it's fun. There's a thrill associated with it. They have this sense of anticipation that builds up. They buy the lottery ticket. They drive it home. They are wondering if they are going to win. And that sense of anticipation thrill is part of the reason that people do this. It's fun for them.

Kath Straub: Okay. So have this sense of anticipation and actually when I watch it on TV, I watch the guy with the ping pong balls, right.

Spencer Gerrol: That's right.

Kath Straub: And they come up one at a time and it takes a long time and this is the kind of thing you are talking about?

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah, because that coming one at a time is something that builds that anticipation. You know 9 comes up oh my God! I have a 9. Am I going to have the next one. Oh no, I didn't have the next one. And it's a really, it's an exciting process.

Kath Straub: Getting excited. [Laughter] So how do I do that on the web?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, let's take a look at how they actually were doing it. Here we have a table. It's a listing of the winning numbers. You find your date and you kind of look down the list and you see if you won or not.

Kath Straub: Okay. That seems pretty boring to me. How can we make it more exciting. How can we make it more like the ping pong ball?

Spencer Gerrol: That's the key. That's the key. So one thing we can do is realize really what's popular out there on the web these days. And we know that u-tube is a big deal.

Kath Straub: That's right.

Spencer Gerrol: Videos on the web are a big deal.

Kath Straub: In fact I think that same pew report that we talked about earlier has showed that the use of video on the web has increased almost two fold in the last even just a year.

Spencer Gerrol: That's right. And so we can actually bring back that experience of watching on television, but you don't have to tune it at the right time. That's the problem with television right now. And you can actually go and click play and have that experience of watching the balls come out one at a time.

Kath Straub: So it's the best of both worlds.

Spencer Gerrol: It can be. But it's not necessarily the best of the best.

Kath Straub: Why is that?

Spencer Gerrol: Because there are other ways that we can consider doing this and there is something that we are working on right now. So what if I could actually type in my numbers and now we are going back to making it specific to me. And then I had this immediate sense of anticipation which is built up right before I hit that moment. I can see people actually on their computers closing their eyes and hitting the go button to see if they have won. And then it could come out like an animation and it could come out one at a time.

Kath Straub: I see.

Spencer Gerrol: And it could really build on that sense of anticipation and then it will be more usable too, because it could tell me right there if I won or not and how much.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: One of the problems is people don't understand that aspect.

Kath Straub: Okay. So this is an unusual case, alright. You started up by saying lottery is a little bit more like business. That it is about like a standard government agency.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah.

Kath Straub: Because of what they do.

Spencer Gerrol: I think you're right. We need to ask does this apply or how does this apply elsewhere in government.

Kath Straub: Okay. So let's ask that question.

Spencer Gerrol: One of the big problems, actually that government is dealing with in general is hiring. The baby boom generation across the country is about to retire. Many governments are losing 40, 50% of their staff in the next 5 years.

Kath Straub: So how are they going to deal with that then?

Spencer Gerrol: They need to be more competitive in the job market in making people want to come and look for the...

Kath Straub: So how does that tie back to your persuasive design?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, this is the marketing effect. So part of persuasive design is marketing. So how can you make it appealing to me to come work for California? There actually is a bit of a stigma sometimes with working for a government. And there's a lot of reasons why people don't want to do it. There's also a lot of benefits that they don't realize. There's a lot of exciting things about it or important things about it that people don't necessarily think about any way. And so we need to bring those persuasive aspects back in. It's also important to not forget about the fact that government has competition too, and sometimes doesn't realize it. So in this case, if you want to go find a job where you may go?

Kath Straub: Right. So what we're saying is that the persuasive design has to be in the government website that I look at to find out if I want to work with the government as well.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. Because you know they are used to jobs for things like Monster.com. And if we're having a much more stale experience with the jobs that we are encountering on the state website, then where is the motivation for the things that seem more exciting and the experience that seems more exciting from the private sector websites doing a very similar thing.

Kath Straub: I see. So in fact I might chose not to pursue a job at all at the state if the state website isn't professional, and exciting, and engaging. Not just that it is not telling me about the things that would make we want to work there in the first place.

Spencer Gerrol: I would say absolutely.

Kath Straub: Okay. Let's move a little further.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay.

Kath Straub: So we talked a little bit of persuasive design and persuasive emotion and trust. Now you are going to tell us a little bit about what it means for the future, right. Those of us on the other side of the age divide are used to information in websites. We have cell phones. We may not use them as effectively as the younger generation. In fact, the way that the younger generation, which would be you, use this technology is very different than the way that I do.

Spencer Gerrol: That's true actually. And you are speaking to the reporting aspects. But remember in the very beginning we talked about this idea of the democracy and government being able to support that democratic process. Me being able to actually contribute in a way, and with some of the technologies that are available now and some of the direction the web is going, that back and forth is happening more across the web as a whole. And government can leverage that in a very important way.

Kath Straub: I see. So we're talking about using things like facebook or some of those other kinds of communication tools and social networking tools in the government space as well.

Spencer Gerrol: That's right.

Kath Straub: So here's a good example of that.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. And actually this example is great. And is this actually a government website?

Kath Straub: It is not a government website. It's a site that does work that government is interested in and that government actually responds to, but it was created by citizens.

Spencer Gerrol: So it's filling a need that the government isn't filling even though it's a government topic.

Kath Straub: Even though it's a government topic. So in this particular site, fixmystreet.com is a site that in Britain you can use to report a problem by uploading a photo from your camera [laughter]. I am having trouble with this whole technology thing right now. From your camera and report a problem and then have the government actually or have the right agency deal with it.

Spencer Gerrol: So (inaudible) I'm participating, I'm seeing a pot hole and I'm feeling in power to say snap, upload, fix my pothole.

Kath Straub: And in fact, they give you feedback about whether they have fixed it or not as well. So yes, you speak directly to your government in a way that's easy to you. And they respond to you. The government sites in this area have exactly the same functional, but people use this site or tend to use this site instead. Probably I think because it's much easier to remember fixmystreet.com than it is to remember whatever the government website url is.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure. It would probably be something like dot/reporting.gov.

Kath Straub: I don't know that we can even guess.

Spencer Gerrol: Yes. [Laughter].

Kath Straub: Well, here's another example. Tell us a little bit about the second example.

Spencer Gerrol: Well, this is really speaks to the idea of the democratic process and involving citizens. So this actually comes from WASA and the actual mission statement of the entire thing is actually giving a voice to the people.

Kath Straub: And so this is another case where it's not the government doing the work. It's actually the people presenting the work.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. And so they're having an impact. They are being able to see what's going on and they're being able to contribute and comment.

Kath Straub: So this is getting back to your grass roots again.

Spencer Gerrol: It is. And again this is not something that the government created because the private sector or people in general are feeling that void and this is something that the government more and more needs to realize is a very important aspect.

Kath Straub: Ah, so this a virtual town hall almost except the government isn't involved yet.

Spencer Gerrol: That's a great analogy. That's an important point. So you know we mentioned facebook and we mentioned the story about the lottery, social interaction and creating that motivation and encouragement through the social interactions is also an important aspect of the persuasive design and an important aspect of the future, you know, some would say the present.

Kath Straub: Right. Or even so we look at people using facebook and tools like that, they're using them to filter the information that's coming in. So the information is coming to me at a given time is coming through a set of trusted advisors, right. So you point me to something else on facebook and I sign up. I might be looking for information and comments. It's almost my own personal portal, but it's a portal that's created by advisors that are trusted advisors to me.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And it's also effectively advertising it, right. You know you've had the winning numbers up there. You have the jack pot up there. We are leading towards actually more engaging features that you could actually participate in games for e.g. Not even necessarily for money but to create a connection with that games that you want to play or you are more interested and then may be you'll take that (inaudible).

Kath Straub: So sort of a win, win. The business wins and the citizens or rather participants win as well.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. Because remember, part of the reason they are playing really is for fun.

Kath Straub: Great, okay. So now we want to talk about some of the harder pieces, right. All of these pieces are interesting and they are focused on one of two projects at a time.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: But making this real, making it actually part of the whole government experience is an organizational shift as well.

Spencer Gerrol: It is. And you know as a business, this does apply to the private sector as well. But in the government space it's an even bigger thing. It's an even bigger organization.

Kath Straub: So we're going to move from e-gov where the website is essentially a tool to provide services to i-gov where the website essentially disappears and it becomes a communication channel. It's not the means to the end but rather just another one of those ways that government can reach out to me and the government becomes one big thing.

Spencer Gerrol: But what does that mean, e-gov, i-gov. What's i-gov?

Kath Straub: Well, I-gov is integrated government, right? So i-gov when I talk, when we talk to citizens in usability testing, they often fail to recognize or realize that the government is made up of all these different agencies. Certainly, they know that all those agencies exist.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: But they don't really think about those in their day to day life except may be tax or MVA or DMV.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. Earlier in the actually the beginning of the presentation, we talked about things being organized actually within a site the way that the government organizes things. But now you are actually talking about across the broader scope of government. It's organized in a government way which isn't necessarily in line with how citizens think and how they organize things.

Kath Straub: Okay. So we want to talk about that for a second. So we talked about the academic version of how this works so report, transact, interact. The next phase there and actually it's not really a phase so it can happen all the way along these three things is to integrate. So what does it mean to integrate?

Spencer Gerrol: What it means is that you are understanding how citizens think of the web and they don't necessarily see it in the same silos that the government sees themselves in.

Kath Straub: So may be they think of it in terms of the things that they want to get done that day rather than who's going to do it for them.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly. So what we should do is at least we're not going to make the agencies disappear of course.

Kath Straub: I don't think they'll let us.

Spencer Gerrol: No. [Laughter] I don't think it would even work.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: But what we do want to do is organize it in a way that citizens because they probably don't understand and don't want to understand the complicated aspects of how it's organized, don't have to see it, don't have to deal with it. And if I just want to do a particular task, pay my taxes, apply for a job, all the things that we've talked about, I can go and do those things even if they are handled all over the government as a whole.

Kath Straub: I see. So actually I'm only seeing one government then.

Spencer Gerrol: Exactly.

Kath Straub: So show me an example of this.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay. So this is an example from the jobs website which we referenced a little bit earlier. And actually, I'm not sure if I gave the answer away yet or not, but if you wanted to get a job with a particular state government, in this case California, where do you start? Where do you go?

Kath Straub: I don't know. Do I go to is there one place that I can go to look for jobs or would I look to the individual agencies or is there one location that handles jobs for some areas and not others, a permanent IT person?

Spencer Gerrol: Sure, I mean these are all fair questions. What do you think a citizen's perspective is on that?

Kath Straub: I just want to go to one place.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. And so here we have all these options of places in the cloud that we have here. And somebody you know some of these things sound pretty good. Cal jobs is a possibility, government jobs.com is a possibility. But which one of these is right. And if I go into google and I have to pick one of these, how do I know which one to go to?

Kath Straub: I don't.

Spencer Gerrol: And by the way, do you know which one is the right answer?

Kath Straub: Which one is the right answer?

Spencer Gerrol: The right answer is spb.ca.gov. Did you know that it was a place where you could get a job?

Kath Straub: What is an spb?

Spencer Gerrol: It actually stands for state personnel board.

Kath Straub: So once you know it makes sense.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure, but does it make necessarily more sense than employment development department?

Kath Straub: No. I wouldn't predict either of those.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay.

Kath Straub: So what's the ideal then?

Spencer Gerrol: The ideal is to go with something that's intuitive and even a url that's intuitive and combines all of these services. So for e.g. jobs.ca.gov when we asked citizens and state employees to make up a website that they would type in and go to or what search terms they would use, they often and actually most commonly overwhelmingly said jobs.ca.gov. They know that .ca.gov is a way that it tends to end there and it's jobs for CA.

Kath Straub: Yes.

Spencer Gerrol: (inaudible) formula.

Kath Straub: I think this url is an interesting question for government sites because search engine optimization is not often something that government sites are really doing well yet. And so they may not be optimized in google. So finding that agency spb or edd might not be the easiest thing to do.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: So these urls being transparent turns out to be important.

Spencer Gerrol: I love the example of fix my street for that. Because that is an intuitive way to think about it.

Kath Straub: Exactly. Because that's what I want to do. I want to fix my, in this case, I want to get a job.

Spencer Gerrol: That's it.

Kath Straub: Okay. Oh, here's another example of the same sort of thing, except in the previous example we were talking about just integrating over California agencies. In this example, we are actually talking about integrating over California and Federal. So here we've got the California agencies working in collaboration with the IRS.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: To create taxes.ca.gov.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And let's take a step back and actually understand a little bit about you know again if I want to do something with taxes, where do I go. And the difficult part is there actually is no one place. Board of equalization, employment development department, and franchise tax board are all in the state level. They have something to do with taxes. They all work together to make this happen. And then even like you are saying on the Federal level, the IRS.

Kath Straub: And I don't really want to have to go to two separate sites for... It's all taxes to me.

Spencer Gerrol: And how do you even know which one to go to?

Kath Straub: I wouldn't know.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay.

Kath Straub: So let's kind of move forward a little bit. So the last thing that we want to talk about is how to get this movement started.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: Right. So again we're going to go back to California. Actually when we started to work with the California portal group, they were having this problem of having gone from 1 to 47 and having some really challenges with the standard because the web masters were feeling that the tools provided for them weren't meeting the needs that they wanted to they needed to fulfill. So they really understood that usability was an issue and they wanted to do it. But they didn't have the tools or the resources or the community to be able to build around that.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting. So how did people respond internally to that issue?

Kath Straub: It was an interesting situation to walk into, right. And you remember this because we walked in and people were ready to change, but they just wanted the infrastructure. The web masters were very ready to move forward.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And the infrastructure was starting to be there but it wasn't keeping up with what the webmasters wanted to do.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting. So we're talking about usability on a different level. We're saying not just make it usable for the citizens, you know the people out there coming to the website.

Kath Straub: That's right.

Spencer Gerrol: But make the process usable so that you can actually get there and tackle you know numbers 1 through 6 that we've talked about.

Kath Straub: That's right. And this is one of the big challenges about the standard, right? If you're going to give me a standard and you want me to deploy it, it better be usable for me and there better be a good goal for me and a good business reason for me to take advantage of the standard.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah, that makes sense.

Kath Straub: Okay. So there were several levels of people that were involved in this process, the state agency leadership was obviously very important, right? They had to put the objective out there and they had to support it by creating the system, creating the opportunity, and creating essentially the vacuum that the rest of the team could step up into.

Spencer Gerrol: Interesting. So it's both, it's top down and it's bottom up.

Kath Straub: At the same time, right. So they had to provide a context so that the webmasters would also be able to do their job and do it better. And in their case, they created a community that recognized that collaboration was going to work better. They had essentially hundreds of organizations trying to recreate the same wheel. Well, let's have them work together and create some efficiencies in that space as well.

Spencer Gerrol: And that recognition is really a key aspect. You want to recognize the individuals and the agencies who are contributing to the process.

Kath Straub: That's right.

Spencer Gerrol: So that we have the positive reinforcement.

Kath Straub: And I think part of the important piece in California was that they were recognized before they were rolled out too. So even before the standard got rolled out, there was a very clear sense and a very clear understanding that the webmasters were contributing and their work was becoming part of that living standard that was evolving over time.

Spencer Gerrol: So they didn't feel like it was enforced on them.

Kath Straub: That's right.

Spencer Gerrol: They were part of it.

Kath Straub: But this isn't an easy thing to do and the biggest thing that California did and the biggest thing that organizations have a hard time with is that those webmasters all have a mind of their own. And they all want to contribute. So there is a little chaos. It's going to be there.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: But embracing that chaos is part of the process because embracing that chaos lets you understand where the opportunities are and where the talent is and sort out who's going to contribute what and how you can do this most efficiently.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And then in their case, we also were careful to make sure that the tools that we provided for the webmasters were useful and usable. So as you said earlier, just like we wanted to make it useful and usable for the citizens, we needed to make it useful and usable for webmasters so that they would engage it all.

Spencer Gerrol: And so.

Kath Straub: And then.

Spencer Gerrol: Go ahead.

Kath Straub: And so then they were rewarding the contributions that we talked about before, small incremental process, small incremental developments that we can see a lot. You talked about that a lot, right?

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. You know, one of the reasons that we actually strayed from the academic model of those three steps which are a little bit more nebulous into the 8 steps that we are presenting here today is actually to make it digestible way to accomplish these things and just concentrate on one goal at a time so we can see that we're making progress. And that really brings us to the next point that we need to actually demonstrate that progress, recognize that progress, and track it with hard data so that people can see what's happening here and the improvements that are being made.

Kath Straub: And that part of that is viewing those webmasters as part of the process. So part of both the consumers and the end users and part of the process that has to make that happen.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: Okay, and for California, the impact is pretty big. So in 2001 when they had the imposed standards that the webmasters had to (inaudible) whether they wanted to or not, often agencies needed outside help and it was very costly doing it to enact the standard. In 2007, they did a lot of this work internally. And that meant people were invested and involved and they were doing the implementation and transition internally as well. So the savings across the agencies was millions of tax dollars.

Spencer Gerrol: An estimated 56 million dollars.

Kath Straub: A pretty big chunk of change.

Spencer Gerrol: Wow. And so they can actually use that this really ties it back to where we started in the first place. It's a business and I've seen returns on these investments. And I can use that 56 million dollars to contribute to other things which are important because we actually save that money.

Kath Straub: Right exactly. So just tying it all together, getting you've been doing this all along the way, right? Government is really a business and we want it to be accountable in the same way we want businesses to be accountable for stock holders.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. But is it just like a business? Is it exactly like a business?

Kath Straub: No, in fact it's not. Because government has some unique characteristics as well. And one of the biggest ones I think that we talk about all the time is the user group is America.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. That's a big challenge, because when your user group is that diverse and there are so many different objectives and motivations, it's very difficult to understand. And it makes it a bigger challenge to design for everybody.

Kath Straub: Okay. So we're going to transition over here a little bit into the question and answer period.

Spencer Gerrol: Great.

Kath Straub: And I just want to remind the people that are watching that in fact you can still continue to submit questions. Submit hard ones and Spencer will answer them. [Laughter] well, we are going to the question and answer period, right. So here's one that was sent in. And I'm going to throw all the questions to you and you're going to field them, okay. Where is the prime real estate on web page?

Spencer Gerrol: That's a very good question. And there are multiple answers. There is a very simple answer where we can say you know people who have learnt English as their first language, we are left to right, top to bottom. And so if we look at the top, and of the side and that area of the side, you know that would be prime real estate. But that's not necessarily true in all cases, because our eye movements and what calls our attention is biased so much by all the visual design aspects. And so by making use of sizes, shapes, colors we can change what draws attention in what order. And so the prime real estate is something that we actually have a lot of control on. And it's an art form. There's a science behind this. This is really what I feel is all about isn't it? That we understand how people think and how visual processing happens and what causes attention and how to guide the eyes around the page.

Kath Straub: Okay. So basically, there is no answer. The answer is it depends.

Spencer Gerrol: The answer is it depends. And the answer is that you need to take a look at the research and apply it.

Kath Straub: Okay. How about this one? Are there usability issues involved in translating government sites into other languages?

Spencer Gerrol: Very important question. And something that we deal with on a regular basis. And the first thing I just want to point out is that the word translating is not really what we want to do. Translating means just taking the same thing and turning it into another language. But there are different needs, motivations, understanding perceptions that all need to be taken together. Cultural differences when you are looking at this as well. And we need to take that into account and actually localize instead of translate. The other key thing that I would say to answer this question is that much like the 8 steps that you have in front of you, we want to make this a digestible process, something you can take action on. It can be overwhelming. Governments realize we're not the first ones to go into governments that tell them that they have a lot of Spanish speakers in this state. There are a lot of Mandarin speakers in this state. But they are overwhelmed by it. And they don't know exactly what to do about this. So I think we would follow some of the same things. First of all, prioritize what's important in general, what's important to that audience, get it out there, consolidate it.

Kath Straub: Well, are there differences between what's important to an English-speaking audience and French, and Spanish-speaking audience?

Spencer Gerrol: There would be a difference. There are certain things that are important to everybody. Everybody has certain things that you need to do when you're interacting with the government. But there are certain things that are very specific to foreigners and people who's like first language is not Spanish. In fact I actually, I shouldn't tell this story, but I will. I actually had a participant. We were doing some Spanish usability testing. And I had a participant start crying during the usability testing.

Kath Straub: Crying?

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. I am not kidding. She was engaged and you know in Mexico and she lived there. Her parents had already moved to the United States and they learnt English and they helped her move over. The plan was for her fiancée to move over later. The problem was her parents later passed and she was trying to do this on her own, but she didn't become proficient in English fast enough. I shouldn't say fast enough, but at that time she was not proficient in English yet. And it put so much strain on the relationship, because they weren't providing this key information about moving to the US as a foreigner in the language that it needs to be in. and so she really was – it put a lot of strain on the relationship and it ended because of that. So the government certainly has a very strong impact and there are certain things that are specific to a certain audiences.

Kath Straub: Okay. So we have to, it's not just translating. It is almost interpreting and understanding that the perspective is very different.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: Here's an easy one. Where can the state website rankings be retrieved from in the web analytics that you showed? The web analytics are unique to all the agencies.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: So that's work that they do and they publish internally. The website rankings are part of the digital government.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And places like Bryant University run rankings every year and run studies every year looking at the various kinds of tools and resources that see into governments and the federal governments and international governments put out and rank those various governments.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay. So it's happening from unbiased institutions.

Kath Straub: I would say so. You want to think through though when you look at those rankings what their ranking's based on.

Spencer Gerrol: Right, what it all means.

Kath Straub: So it you know how are they thinking about things? Are they thinking about things in terms of user experience, in terms of the tasks that they really need to get done, in terms of what kind of media they have. So you can't just look at the rankings necessarily. You have to sort of think through what their ranking and if those are relevant to what you are actually...

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And so that brings us back to the fourth point we made about tracking improvement. So you need to track your improvement and understand where you are in many different ways. You can't just rely on one metric.

Kath Straub: So it's a continuous process.

Spencer Gerrol: It is a continuous process. And it is something again we are converging methods to really understand the bigger picture.

Kath Straub: So there are multiple methods that I want to bring together over time to track because each has a little bit of a different perspective on what I'm doing. And that builds into almost a continuous usability program.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. Each one has it's own data dated outputs. When we look at all this data together, we really understand what is happening and how things are evolving and how they should evolve.

Kath Straub: And how they should evolve. So that's giving me some direction about making some finer tuned adjustments to my side over time. So whereas I start out in a reporting stage doing holistic changes and making the whole site better and the whole site usable in the first place, once I've gotten to the point where it's pretty usable and I've kind of got a good understanding of what my end users are coming to, now I want to continue to make refinements.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And the web analytics piece is a great way to do that because you can do it on the spot. You can turn on a dime. You can actually look day to day what's happening, what's changing, make changes, do AB testing or multi-variant testing and understand when you change these particular aspects what ends up being the result of that and then be able to make those changes according to the evidence.

Kath Straub: Good. And so there are ways to use things like analytics if AB testing is a little more sophisticated, then you are ready to jump into yet...

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: There are ways to use things like your analytics to help you understand which sites are working better or which designs are working better in real time.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So take one step at a time. That is an important piece of data.

Kath Straub: Okay. So here's another question for you. How do you design content that supports comprehension and reinforces usability?

Spencer Gerrol: (Inaudible).

Kath Straub: Content is a tricky one, because content has one of those questions about where we said one of the unique things about government is their user group is everybody.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: And everybody means people who are very good readers and people who aren't such good readers. The thing about creating good content is you have to think about the literacy issues, right. And so literacy is one of our big challenges. A lot of times we talk to people about the level they try to write their websites into almost first grade level. And taking government (inaudible) in training into first grade level is not trivial.

Spencer Gerrol: Oh, not at all.

Kath Straub: But does it annoy you when you feel like a site has been not necessarily done down, but made down into a level that's readable by everybody?

Spencer Gerrol: Actually, you know, some people might thing that. But the truth is when you make something easier, when you make it easier to understand, easier to comprehend, quicker to get through, then it does actually help everybody. It's not something that would frustrate people or just make their job easier.

Kath Straub: Okay. So it is sort of like curb cups. Curb cuts help with the exception of icy places in the winter.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: Curb cuts turn out to help out everybody, not just the individuals who might be in wheelchairs.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely. And the same applies to accessibility in general on the web. So we're doing things to make it accessible for people who are blind for e.g. But some of the same things help anybody.

Kath Straub: Okay, so here's a good question. What's the best way to engage participation and gather input from citizens during development phase first and then afterwards once they are deployed?

Spencer Gerrol: Ah, well. You know you ask them. For e.g. usability testing or user research. So start out by going out there and understanding from your user groups what they need, what they want, how they think. And then base the design largely on that.

Kath Straub: But asking them, so I go out on the street and I just say, hey, what do you want your government website to do?

Spencer Gerrol: Actually, you can. But we usually take a little bit more of a formalized process than that.

Kath Straub: And I think you probably want to, right? Because will I tell you what I want to do and what I want to do might be slightly different things.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: And how I think I do things and how I really do them also might be slightly different.

Spencer Gerrol: So the research methods are key.

Kath Straub: Okay. So we want to have some rigorous methods around how people are really doing things.

Spencer Gerrol: And we want to make sure those methods can be replicated so that we can actually have consistent data over time.

Kath Straub: Okay. But the bottom line is what you said in the first place you said you ask them. Or you ask them or you watch them doing these kinds of tasks.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So usability testing is a great example of that.

Kath Straub: So how do you, here's a great follow-up to that. How do you determine when a website is usable or not?

Spencer Gerrol: You have to actually keep in mind that they probably will never be usable enough because technology keeps changing, people keep changing, expectations keep changing. You can see that the private sector's making progress all of the time, and so is government. But we need to keep up with the changes or we do the example we talked about of dropping thing from #1 to #47 very quickly. So you have to keep this going and continue to improve.

Kath Straub: Okay. So let me ask you to go back to the organizational development question, because I think one of the more radical things that we talked about is the idea that we want to erase the boundaries between agencies. So that's easy for us to say, right.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: But in real world, there is turf wars, there's a history of the agencies having their own data.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: There's the history of the agencies wanting to hold on to their own data. And obviously, no agency or no business is that collaborative necessarily.

Spencer Gerrol: Sure.

Kath Straub: So we have to convince these people that they want to collaborate. So here's a question that someone sent in. How do you convince an elected official that citizens don't care what department provides as a service. They just want to pay their taxes or apply for a permit. This is a turf issue. How do we ever comment?

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And you know all along we've been talking about data. And one of the beautiful things about data is that it serves two purposes. One is it points us in the right direction. It tells us what to do with the design. But you know a government as you said, is notorious for all these politics. And the data also helps us break through the politics. Because if you give people evidence and help them support decisions through evidence-driven decision as opposed to opinion-based decisions or political decisions then it is actually hard to argue with that evidence. And it gets everyone on board collaborating and realizing that they are actually are answers to these questions and with the right data and the right evidence you can answer them effectively.

Kath Straub: Well, I think also thinking through the agencies that we've worked with on collaborative sites like taxes or like the portal or some of the other federal level sites, have had one key thing in common and that's leadership that gets it.

Spencer Gerrol: That's right. That's an important aspect. You know we talk about a lot of the idea of a usability champion or user experience champion. And that's somebody internally within the organization who realizes the importance of it and champions it through the organization.

Kath Straub: Is that the same as in businesses and in government you think?

Spencer Gerrol: It may be a tougher challenge in government in some ways, but I think it actually falls on the same fundamental idea. What do you think?

Kath Straub: I think that this whole process of collaboration is really tricky process no matter where you are. Often times we've seen it thinking all the cases that we worked on together it's been a grass roots effort.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: So the grass roots started and the grass roots group actually began to collect data and do some of this continuous usability stuff to build the business case to take up to the higher levels of the management and of the agencies, and then got the attention of a forward-thinking leader.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. You know sometimes when we are (inaudible) organizations, we use the government as an analogy of doing some of the same kinds of things. So for e.g. most companies have business lines. These business lines are just like agencies. They are silos. And if the silos see themselves as being individual entities, then they don't collaborate and they don't actually in their case produce cross sales and up sales. And so just because insurance business is in this business line and loans are in this business line, doesn't mean that there shouldn't be a connection. Because, excuse me, both are for my car, right? So if I'm going to get a car loan, then the next logical step might be for me to get car insurance, right? And so the same thing applies if we can actually break down those barriers and remove the silos, then we will actually create more business success in the private sector as well.

Kath Straub: o you are almost thinking of the cross sale and up sale in government as well.

Spencer Gerrol: So there can be that parallel. So it's really more about discovery in that case. So it's discovering other things that are out there, more than selling.

Kath Straub: Okay. So here's another question and someone said what do you think about the future of mobile usability in government?

Spencer Gerrol: Ah, it's certainly a very important aspect. And like we've been talking all along with things like you know there's web 2.0 so there should be government 2.0. You know mobile web is one of the most important things that's happening in something that's become more and more prevalent and people are using their mobile devices to do just about everything. You know when we first went into California and we had a stakeholder interview with the CIO of the state, and we said what's your vision, I think the first thing he said was I want people to pay taxes on their phone. It sounds kind of crazy, but it's not at all. I think that's where the future is and it's important to see that ahead and enough ahead of time that we can react and we can actually drive towards that. So whether or not people will pay taxes on their phone is a different question, but the vision is the important aspect.

Kath Straub: At least whether they'll do it next year.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: Okay, so one more question. Actually this is a lead in from the one you just had. Is there a difference between web 2.0 applied to a commercial site and applied to the Federal Government space or the government space in general?

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So in either case they had some things in common. I am sure there are differences.

Kath Straub: What are the common things first?

Spencer Gerrol: Well, first of all, one thing that's happening in web 2.0 in general is people see it as a technology. And this is okay. We can do Ajax and we can put something where people can comment online. And we can create a social network. But the problem is why? First the step according to our methodology is actually to realize the need and to react to that need and then create web 2.0 environments that fit that need so that people actually use it.

Kath Straub: So I think we're seeing a need already, right, because the examples of web 2.0 and the government space that we pointed out today. And there are web2.0 sites out there. There are social networking sites out there in the government space already.

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: But the ones that we pointed to today were ones that were created by citizens recognizing the need rather than government agencies themselves.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And so what's happening there is that the need is being established externally and being fulfilled externally.

Kath Straub: Okay.

Spencer Gerrol: Or being understood. You know an example of web 2.0 you know depending on how you define it of course, gone in the wrong direction is at one point in California the old website, you could actually customize your home page of the California home page. And I thought this was a great way to actually create a personal interaction.

Kath Straub: And from the developer's defense, this is showing that they understand their technology and showing how they can bring their technology to bear.

Spencer Gerrol: Absolutely.

Kath Straub: I think the problem in that case was I would probably not visit the California portal site too often as yet, so the idea of having a customized site doesn't necessarily make sense yet.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. And so and it may make sense in the future too. So that's the other thing. So they realized the need. They had the vision but the first step is actually to do the research to understand what that need is so we can fulfill it in the right way now and have the vision of how to change that in the future.

Kath Straub: What about the differences between the things I might do in a commercial site and a federal site?

Spencer Gerrol: That's a great question. What are your thoughts on that?

Kath Straub: Well, I think that there are certain interactions that I would have with the government that I might not have with commercial agencies. For instance, some of those things that you were talking about in the very beginning that have been lost over time like commenting on rule-making, commenting on government and allowing me to do something other than submit a form or submit an email so that I can actually see and experience some of the commenting that's happening and understand the back and forth between the government and the populace that are working through this rule-making process, right?

Spencer Gerrol: Right.

Kath Straub: I think one of the great things that we've seen and one of the great challenges that we've seen in almost every agencies that we worked with is that they want people to do commenting, but people don't even know what that is any more often.

Spencer Gerrol: Right. So we're getting at again what the root of government is all about and trying to support that through things like web 2.0.

Kath Straub: So 2.0 gets us back to almost the e-democracy topic.

Spencer Gerrol: Yeah. We go back to be able to go to your town hall meeting.

Kath Straub: Okay. I think we could go on for a long time, but we've run out of time. So I just want to give a few concluding reminders here. An archive of the broadcast will be posted on the website in a couple of weeks.

Spencer Gerrol: Okay, good.

Kath Straub: And the white paper will be available for download indefinitely, we think. And you want to check out that webcast schedule as well. So in 2008 we have several webcasts coming up. You'll notice that this was the first one that we had in a targeted specific area.

Spencer Gerrol: Government.

Kath Straub: Right, government. And I think that the next couple of webcasts are also targeted to very specific experiences in very specific sectors as well. So the next one is April 24th an End-Time User Experience in Human Factors in Health Care and we look forward to seeing you there.

Spencer Gerrol: Thanks for listening.

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