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Welcome, to The Perfect Curve.
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Read the rest of Wimbledon .
So here's my analysis of what happened the last couple of days:
First of all, there's no point blaming the people who didn't vote (and by extension, blaming the demographic of young people who didn't vote) for the Tories winning. as with anything where the decisions are made by the people who bother to turn up to decide, elections are won by the people who bother to turn up to vote. Nobody has any idea how the people who didn't vote would have voted had they voted - that's the point of them not voting, they didn't vote because there was nobody they wanted to vote for. One can't assume they'd have all voted Labour, just as you can't assume they'd instead have all voted Tory, Libdem, Green, UKIP, or Christian Peoples' Alliance (Proclaiming Christ's Lordship). They could have voted to entrench a Tory majority even further as likely as they could have voted to bring about a Labour government.
There's also no point blaming the Tory newspapers - whilst its true that newspapers form an essential part in forming opinion, ultimately newspapers are in the sales business; they know that if they present opinion which veers too far away from the opinion of their customer base, their customers will leave for an alternative product. The other reason why there's no point blaming the Tory newspapers is people don't read newspapers at anything like the level they used to - and of course, us in the social media advocacy world have spent [...]
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www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - Thinking a bit further ahead
simon gray — 2013-11-28, 17:05:14Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
Our primary focus for this project is on delivering an improved website in 2014 which will meet the needs of users and ourselves for the next few years, and which will be scalable and extensible for the few years again beyond that.
Whilst the world of the internet is still a fast-moving world, there’s no denying that the world of the local government internet is…
…a little slower! When dealing with technological changes, in most organisations which are relatively small or on which the organisation’s whole business model is predicated on the technology for service delivery it’s relatively easy for them to quickly embrace change and innovation and incorporate it into the business. But in local government, whilst its easy for webteams who live and breath internet technology as part of their working days to get excited about emerging technologies, inevitably the transport planners, the road safety officers, the social workers, the swimming pool lifeguards, the bin collectors, and the parks attendants who deliver the overwhelming majority of council services will by [...]
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In group Public / Third Sector Digital www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - To feature or not to feature? Where information turns out to be not as important to citizens as we expect it to be!
simon gray — 2013-11-06, 16:28:50Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
For many working in some form of communications function in local government, winter is our favourite time of year. Why, you may ask? One word:
Gritting!
We love gritting in local government communications – it’s the nearest we get to taking part in the excitement of 24 hour rolling news coverage; eyes are constantly tuned to the Met Office hourly forecast to see what the temperature’s doing, ready to push out to the Twitter Gritters the notice that the wagons are going out to treat the roads. And most council websites naturally have a prominent link to the gritting information on the home page, because it’s important, and therefore popular, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
Like most councils, ever since I remember we’ve every winter put a link to our gritting information on the home page, and for the last couple of years since we’ve had the current version of the home page, in the ‘most important’ popular pages section (our place for top tasks) in the left hand third of the upper half of the page. [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - To feature or not to feature? Where information turns out to be not as important to citizens as we expect it to be! .
In group Public / Third Sector Digital www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - A usability review of council websites
simon gray — 2013-10-31, 11:31:44Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
We of course have our own ideas about what makes a council website usable – and part of the point of sharing the work in progress of this project here is to test if our ideas are shared by our citizens and our industry peers. But it’s always best practice not just to rely on one’s own generalist expertise and one’s own individual consultation work, but to also engage the advice of independent specialist experts, to either verify your own findings or alternatively shed light on where your own proximity to a project might be skewing the results in favour of what you might want them to be – this process is sometimes known as red teaming.
To that end, we commissioned some independent usability experts from AbilityNet to do some work on our behalf – a quantitative benchmarking exercise of a number of other council websites, and a qualitative focus group exercise looking at our current website together with our plans for the next one.
To summarise a definition of what ‘usability’ [...]
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In group Public / Third Sector DigitalOver the last week or two at work I've actually started being a little bit naughty.
The webteam in Birmingham here, like many council webteams, sits within the Customer Services division of the council, rather than within either Corporate Communications or IT, like in many other councils. This means the word which underpins all the work we do is the word 'customer'.
Being frank, I was never particularly happy about us being moved from comms to cs when it happened - as a person out on the street who buys things, my overwhelming experience and view of 'customer services' is they're the people you take a faulty product back to, who spend a lot of time trying to pursuade you it isn't faulty, or the people you complain about an intangible service to, who spend a lot of time telling you the majority of their customers think the service is just peachy. I, frankly, have never been happy about my job being associated with that sort of thing.
I've also never really liked this description of our website users as customers, but it's only in the last few weeks or so I've been able to really crystalise why I've never really liked it. The first reason is one which I've shared a lot in many arenas, and which underpins a lot of my discomfort with a number of current council website trends - customer services divisions of councils seem to have quite a skewed view of who their customers are, focusing on the people [...]
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In group Public / Third Sector Digital I only ever use search, nobody uses menus, nobody scrolls down the page, it needs to fit on the screen
simon gray — 2013-08-29, 09:42:26There have been many a time I’ve sat in a meeting or been at an event, and I’ve heard the phrase ‘I only ever use [x], nobody ever [y]s’ in the context of a discussion of user behaviour on the web.
It’s an attitude which is not just the bane of all local government web officers’ lives, but actually is the bane of all people who spending a significant amount of their time making things for the web, as opposed to just consuming things on the web.
When the person in front of you declares that they never use menus, that they only search, even their own personal description of their own behaviour can be suspect. All web users will have their default preferred strategies for navigating around a web site – but the point is different web users have different preferred strategies; some people will prefer to use a menu, some people prefer to start off with a search box, and some people will jump straight to the A-Z section, if one is present. It’s also the case that – whilst a casual user might lose patience and go elsewhere if their preferred method doesn’t work for them – a persistent user will fall back on one of the alternative methods available to them, especially if the alternatives are clearly visible.
Sometimes the same user will have different strategies depending on their knowledge of what they’re looking for – an expert user might know exactly what to type into the search box to find [...]
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In group Public / Third Sector Digital www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - The importance of Eccles cakes to channel shift, or the value of less important content for search visibility
simon gray — 2013-07-31, 14:20:12Back in late September 2012, as part of my work at Birmingham City Council, I instigated and led on a programme of incremental improvements to the council's website, blogging about the ideas and progress along the way, taking inspiration from Shropshire Council's Project WIP and the Government Digital Service work on www.gov.uk. The site on which I blogged has been taken down now, but I thought it worth reposting the more broad-reaching content from it here.
In thinking about the future shapes of our council websites, we all of course understand the need to perform brutally honest ROTE analyses of every single page on our sites, and likewise we’re all geared up for restructuring our websites and the content in them according to properly thought through content strategies.
So we know we need to get rid of those pointless pages about stuff the council has nothing to do with such as the history of Birmingham’s canals, or the history and recipe behind Eccles cakes, right?
Not so fast!
Both of those pages – canals on our own website, and Eccles cakes on the website for Salford City Council, are both in the local history sections of the website, and whilst some people might suggest the responsibility of councils for the curation and dissemination of local history might be tenuous in the modern era, it still does remain a function of many council library services. So you might believe – as actually I did until relatively recently – that whilst this content belongs [...]
Read the rest of www.birmingham.gov.uk Alpha project - The importance of Eccles cakes to channel shift, or the value of less important content for search visibility .
In group Public / Third Sector Digital