So you want to build a new council website, but why? What's wrong with your current one?

simon gray — 2023-09-28, 18:25:55 - 967 words

The public sector digital legend that is Dave Briggs has recently started a collaborative project, the New Council Website Playboard - a shared generic high level plan for councils to use as a starting point for their own website redevelopment projects.

One of the cards I've added to it is 'Carry out an Irritations Audit'.

What does this mean? Well, pour yourself a drink and get a biscuit and I'll tell you.

If you're wanting to rebuild, redesign, re-whatever your council website, then there's obviously something wrong with the existing one. In my experience, what people feel is wrong with it boils down to one of two things (or sometimes both) - either the technology that makes the website happen, the web Content Management System, or the content itself. This analysis of what might be called the Problem Statement often ends there - 'our CMS is old now' or 'our site is too hard to navigate'. Teams might dig a little deeper and do something of a content audit to decide what pages are no longer relevant (or outdated, or trivial...), or they might have concluded there's no way the existing CMS can be adapted to deliver pages meeting modern accessibility [...]

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Make a plan for the system going down

simon gray — 2023-08-30, 11:41:52 - 370 words

So it's looking almost certain that what caused the UK National Air Traffic Services' computer system to go down for several hours was some dodgy data in an inbound flight plan.

Make a plan for the system going down .

To Microsite or Not To Microsite, or, What’s the council website actually for?

simon gray — 2023-08-15, 18:49:44 - 2048 words

I’ve not been involved in council website content for a good few years now, but obviously that hasn’t stopped me taking an interest in it. 

In my early years working in local government, my job was as Web Communications Officer, working initially as part of a directorate — a group of related service areas — communications team, then moving to the Corporate Webteam in the Corporate Communications team. As a directorate Web Communications Officer it was essentially my job to take facts from service areas within my team’s portfolio and turn those facts into engaging web copy. Sometimes I got to play journalist a little too, such as when I attended the statutory public inquiry associated with a major infrastructure project within my portfolio and summarised the proceedings as part of the latest update on the project for the website. 

One of my regular frustrations during that period was the near-daily occurrence of me walking out into town for lunchtime and seeing the headline boards in front of the newsstands selling the city’s local paper, splurging a big announcement about some big new initiative within our portfolio, and seeing that headline would more often than not be the first I’d heard of [...]

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Information Governance and the PSNI data breach

simon gray — 2023-08-09, 07:21:15 - 523 words

On the PSNI data breach, it’s important to remember there’s an individual somewhere who right now just wants to find the Marianas Trench and dive into it. Their management chain, mindful of their own legal and financial liability for the breach, will be looking to shift as much blame as possible down the tree to the individual.

They’ll point to the annual mandatory training all employees have in information governance, and say it’s therefore entirely the individual employee’s fault that this monumental stuff up took place.

No.

Mandatory annual information governance training does little to actually prevent accidental data breaches from occurring; the purpose of mandatory information governance training isn’t to prevent breaches, it’s so that when a breach happens the organisation can throw their employee to the wolves and say ‘well the employee had their training so it’s not the organisation’s fault the breach happened, it’s the individual’s fault’.

In the ærospace industry, a staff member screws in a bolt, a supervisor watches the bolt being screwed in, and an inspector agrees with the supervisor’s assessment that the bolt was indeed screwed in properly. And every week, there’s a big meeting where everybody shares when in the last week they realised they [...]

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How about a LocalGovDigital consultancy?

simon gray — 2023-08-07, 17:14:09 - 627 words

In the LocalGovDigital sector, within our respective councils we spend an awful lot of money engaging consultants to help us do things.

Sometimes, the expenditure on the consultancy is genuinely justified - there's a skills gap within the organisation that training won't adequately fill immediately, because skills require experience as well as knowledge, and the consultants can provide both for the period of engagement; if the consultants are good, and the contract is robust, the terms of engagement for the consultancy will include proper knowledge transfer to enable the organisation to not need to engage the consultancy again.

Sometimes, the consultants are engaged not because of a skills gap, but because of a capacity gap - the skills exist within the organisation, but there are four people employed to do the job and there's a temporary need to do eight people's worth of work in a short space of time. As it happens, that's how I entered the sector in the first place, though it would be an exaggeration to say I was employed as a consultant!

Sometimes, though, there isn't actually a skills or capacity gap at all; there's the unflattering characterisation of consultants that what they do is interview all the staff [...]

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Should the council have a citizen app?

simon gray — 2023-06-28, 18:25:34 - 719 words

Tl;dr - I refer the reader to Betteridge's law of headlines.

But if you have a few moments spare in your busy day, the answer in most cases is the same, however there's a more nuanced argument to the question than just a single word.

It's a question I've seen many times in LocalGovDigital circles, and since it came up again in the Slack group recently I thought it might be helpful to put my answer to the person asking the question there in the form of a post for a wider audience.

So the first and foremost question for any council considering building an app might be what is the established clear user need for an app that a good mobile-first website can't provide?

And by 'established clear user need', I don't mean "as a civically-engaged citizen, I need to tell the council about a pothole or some flytipping I've just seen whilst out and about, so that I can drive safely along that road next week". The question is, is there a clear user need for an app which a user will download to their phone (and remember on which screen or folder the icon for the app is kept) which you can [...]

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Service menu ordering on council websites

simon gray — 2023-06-21, 18:37:15 - 1583 words

A friend this morning directed me to a link to a certain council website, which she was fairly sure had been completely redesigned recently (at the time of writing the Internet Archive WayBack Machine seems to be down, so I can't check). She'd sent it to me because she was aghast at something she saw on it, but what I saw below what she was aghast about was even more terrible to behold...

A service menu on the website home page thus:

What is this random order this list of links has been presented in?

If you know me well, you know the extent to which this sort of thing rattles my cage. In order to get myself even more rattled, I went to three other council website with a similar home page service menu User Experience strategy:

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Generic personas for Local Government

simon gray — 2023-06-09, 12:24:54 - 1693 words

Way back in 2016 I made the content strategy I'd written for the previous version of our website publicly available and edited it to make it generic rather than specific.

Time passes and I've decided to update some parts of that document and completely rewrite other parts from scratch; the finished version is still a while off as of right now, but I thought in the meantime I'd share a sneak preview of the updated Personas section.

#LocalGovWeb #LocalGovDigital #Manifesto

The Personas 

In common with standard practice in the communications, marketing, and brand management industries, content is best designed having in mind a number of fictional individuals and families which are intended to represent the breadth of potential users of the website. The purpose of these profiles is to enable web editors and content authors to have in their minds a picture of actual people with real and definable needs who will be users of the web content to focus on, rather than thinking in terms of a generic amorphous mass of ‘just anybody’. The profiles also are there to remind us of the wide diversity of citizens we provide services to and who wish to transact with us, [...]

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The Rise and Rise of ChatGPT

simon gray — 2023-04-28, 08:03:30 - 448 words

As an AI language model, I’m seeing that ChatGPT has now gone from the fun toy folks have been playing with to a tool that people are using to write full text prose passing it off as if they wrote it themselves, and I’m noticing an increased amount of people on LinkedIn reposting inspiring thought-leadership and game-changing marketing copy there. There is no doubt that the power of ChatGPT will stay with us for many years to come.

The thing is, if you’ve played with ChatGPT enough and have an analytical eye for content, you can see it a mile off; whence whenever I’ve seen what I’ve suspected as ChatGPT content I’ve checked it in ChatGPT Zero — https://gptzero.me/ — and indeed sure enough, it’s confirmed my suspicion.

I’m a full supporter of using technology to help the creative process; I’ve been using computers in my own creative work since 1985. As previously mentioned, I used ChatGPT myself to help me write a song, and I’ve been having lots of fun using Stable Diffusion, Dall•E, and Midjourney to generate images, some of which I might print on mugs to try to sell. 

But I’d like to emphasise a massive note of caution to [...]

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10 Principles for Good LocalGovDigital Design

simon gray — 2023-04-11, 04:41:27 - 4620 words

If you have a liking for Apple products, then indirectly you have a liking for the design principles of Dieter Rams, whose work as Chief Designer at Braun has been credited as a major influence on Jony Ive, the former Chief Design Officer at Apple whose design ethos can be seen coursing through the veins of every Apple product since 1997. Dieter Rams himself coined his 10 Principles for Good Design as a handy distillation of his whole ethos. 

Good design: 

• is innovative – The possibilities for progression are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for original designs. But imaginative design always develops in tandem with improving technology, and can never be an end in itself. 

• makes a product useful – A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic criteria. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could detract from it. 

• is aesthetic – The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful. 

• makes a product understandable – [...]

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