Do agencies unfairly assume that households have working printers?

While chatting with government folk in Victoria yesterday, the topic of printable PDFs in websites came up. Many agencies have them - large documents designed to be read on paper, rather than screen, and designed accordingly.

It made me ask the question: How many households actually have working printers and are able (and willing) to print large documents or forms?

The folks in the meeting couldn't answer, although one admitted that he didn't actually have a printer at home (despite working in an online capacity for the government).

This has now begun to intrigue me. is there an assumption in government agencies that every household that owns a computer must own a working printer as well?

Is there any evidence to justify this?

I've done a bit of looking today for statistics that might answer this question.

What have I found? Nothing that really answered it.

We have plenty of statistics from the ABS, Finance and other agencies and corporate entities on the number of households with computers and with internet access.

However none provides information on the number of printers in a household, whether they work or whether (given the cost of ink and supplies) people are prepared to print out those large documents with beautiful glossy full-colour images.

The most recent information I could find was from an e-waste brochure from Manly council, quoting the ABS as saying that in 2011, between households and businesses, Australians had around 5 million printers.

Given there's over 1 million businesses and around 9 million households in Australia, that means that as many as 5 million households, over 50%, may not have printers and be unable to print out those lovely documents on government sites.

How realistic is that figure? When I consider my wife and I as a sample of two, it actually appears plausible (and I understand how statistically unreliable that is).  While we are both professionals and knowledge workers, using computers and the internet as our primary tools - neither of us need to print often.

In fact my wife hadn't had a printer for years before we married, she either did things online or printed individual forms at work on the unusual occasion where this was required (and it was usually a form for work anyway).

I have a working printer now as I need it for work purposes. However until February this year I had also lived for several years quite happily without a working printer.

I had, however had a non-working printer. Why non-working? Because supplies were expensive and scarse. Printer manufacturers changed their cartridges when they changed their printers - making older printers harder to buy for. Why did I keep it? Because I might need a printer (although I never did until the supplies for it became impossible to buy).

So should agencies provide big documents on their sites under the belief that people will print them out at home?

Should they expect people to fill in forms online, and then print and sign them?

Perhaps - perhaps not. However it would be nice to see agencies making this decision based on evidence, rather than based on the assumption that every household with a computer has a working printer.

UPDATE:
Trevor Clarke has just let me know that his employer, IDC, tracks the movement of printers into Australia every month and quarter and reports on the number of households with printers. He tells me via Twitter that:

"IDC research shows 76% have 1 printer, 18% have 2. Only 7% don't use. Survey of 2000 Australian households in 2012"

So there's is some evidence that most Aussie households have printers. Good to know!

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Less online hurdles = more egovernment customers

The complexity of screens and the registration and sign-in processes for some Australian egovernment (online) services disturbs me.

In the commercial world I lived by a simple rule of thumb, on average each hurdle I erected between a customer and their goal reduced the overall number of customers who reached their goal by 30%.

To visually demonstate,

Hurdles 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Customers 1,000,000 700,000 490,000 343,000 240,100 168,070 117,649 82,354 57,648 40,354 28,248

Percentage using 100% 70% 49% 34% 24% 17% 12% 8% 6% 4% 3%

This mean that if I started with one million customers and had ten hurdles, only 28,248 of them (3%) would be willing and able to jump all of them to use the service.

If I cut this to six hurdles, this would increase usage to 117,649 customers (12%) - or four times as many - a 400% increase in usage!

If I could cut it to only three hurdles, that would raise the number of customers able to use the service to 490,000 customers (49%) or another three times as many - 300% increase from the six hurdles figure or a massive 1,700% increase from ten hurdles.

In other words, removing hurdles can dramatically increase usage. While in reality it is never as linear as this, remove the right hurdles and the number of customers using an online service will soar.

When engaging customers online we already have built-in hurdles people have to meet to use and interact with our egovernment services:

• Access to a computer
• An internet connection
• Comfort with using the above
• Mandatory registration processes (even for simple transactions)

However there are often additional hurdles that organisations erect such as,

• No sales pitch for services - explaining by video/animation and audio how a service works and what benefits it provides customers
• Difficult-to-find services and registration/sign-on links
• Overly complex registration/sign-on processes
• Unnecessary information collection - to the extent of asking customers information they are unlikely to have access to
• Badly written service, security and privacy information
• Poorly constructed workflows with unnecessary or out-of-order steps and no clarity on where the customer is in the process (how many steps remain)
• Error messages in bureaucratic or tech-speak that dead-end the customer (no way forward)
  
• A lack of appropriate acknowledgement when steps or transactions are correctly completed
• Forcing customers to switch channels in the middle of a process without warning or when tasks could be completed entirely online
• A requirement for complex and non-intuitive password and usernames
• Difficult password and username retrieval processes (if a service is used less than weekly, most customers will forget their password at some point)
• A lack of tutorials, contextual help or step-ups to live online interactions with customer service officers (such as Avatar-based agent interactions, or actual staff interactions via text chat, voice chat or video chat)
• Services that require the use of plug-ins, older web browsers or are not friendly towards mobile devices

There are approaches to reduce or negate many of these hurdles already implemented in the commercial sector.

Most of these can be adopted by government without compromising security or privacy and all lead to greater usage and satisfaction with online services.

Some of these 'hurdle-repellents' include:

• Upfront video demonstrating what the service does (the benefit) and how it works (ease of use)
• Larger and more prominent registration/sign-on) buttons, with less clutter on pages to distract customers
• Use of plain english in all instructions and error messages, generally in informal language
• Extra large form fields (12pt or larger) for easier reading
• Simpler workflows with less steps and clear progression bars explaining the next step
• Customer-defined usernames and passwords (or use of email address as username), with visual aids to maximise security (such as password strength indicators)
• Secret questions (some user-defined) to provide a second line of support for customers who forget their passwords
• Clear and simple 'forgotten password' processes which do not require customers to switch channels (to call)
• Contextual help integrated into every screen
• Video or text and graphics tutorials for each workflow - clearly accessible within the workflow and before a user authenticates (double as sales tools)
• Live online help, potentially with co-browsing (where the customer service officer can see what the customer is seeing)

There are other commonly used approaches to reducing the hurdles for your customers when using egovernment services. Try out some commercial sites and you'll quickly gather more ideas.

So why reduce the hurdles for customers - potentially at a cost to the government?
The benefits for the government agency include faster outcomes, lower cost transactions and greater customer satisfaction. There's a side benefit of more timely and accurate reporting as online transactions can be easier to capture and report on than those over a counter or phone.

The benefits for customers include less stress when transacting (therefore more likelihood they will keep using the same approach) and faster outcomes.

The downside? Government will need to invest more in our online infrastructure to make it easier and faster for customers.

I reckon that trade-off is well worth it.

So what is your agency doing to remove online transaction hurdles for customers?

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Selecting the right online tools for community consultation

The International Association for Public Participation has developed a Community Engagement Spectrum (PDF) to assist public servants in selecting the right approaches to use in different forms of public engagement.

The Online Community Consultation blog has built on this, with a post, Which Online Tools are Right for your Project? detailing a chart of some of the online tools that can be used for different forms of community engagement.

While the post is slanted towards the features in 'Bang the table' it's still a useful guide as to which online tools are best used for particular engagement needs.

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Is CAPTCHA still effective as a security test?

CAPTCHA is a security provision designed to confirm that an online user is actually human by asking them to complete a simple test which is difficult for computers to interpret.

Often appearing as wavy or handwritten words and numbers, CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been widely implemented as an online security confirmation system within email systems, blogs, ebusiness and egovernment sites. In fact you'll see it in use when commenting on this blog.

Example of a modern CAPTCHA image (source: Wikipedia)


However CAPTCHA is increasingly under threat due to the multiple ways of circumventing this security and organisations need to consider whether it is still worth implementing CAPTCHA or more advanced security systems.

How effective is CAPTCHA?
As was recently reported in AllSpammedUp, Spammers are once again attacking Microsoft's CAPTCHA, used in their Hotmail email system to distinguish between legitimate human customers and automated spam systems.

While 10-15% doesn't sound that significant, given that spammers are able to use automated systems to create hundreds of email addresses a minute - then use the successful ones to distribute spam email - that level of success is quite high.

Hackers are also able to use cheap eyeballs from third world countries to break CAPTCHA - with Indian crackers paid $2 for every 1,000 CAPTCHAs solved.

Other techniques also exist to break CAPTCHA, such as advertising a porn site, embedding CAPTCHA codes from legitimate sites and asking people to solve these codes in order to access the adult content for free.

Given all these different ways to defeat CAPTCHA tests, and the barriers for those with vision impairments (who often unable to complete visual tests where an audio equivalent is not provided), let alone the difficulties real humans have in interpreting CAPTCHA tests correctly, this approach to security is seriously under threat.

However effective alternatives to validating that humans are really humans are not yet available for use.

Where next for CAPTCHA?
Microsoft and other large providers of online systems remain dedicated to strengthening CAPTCHA technology, even where the line of what is actually readable by the average human begins to blur.

They have limited alternatives as to effective tests of whether a user is human or computer to help minimise the success of automated hacking attempts.

Some mechanisms already coming into use are to ask questions via CAPTCHA text which is based on trivia more difficult for a machine to guess, or to have multiple CAPTCHA images which must be reinterpreted based on additional text - also stored as a CAPTCHA image.

All of these remain vulnerable to cheaply paid third-world CAPTCHA breaking groups, albeit increase the difficulty for machines.

Where should organisations use CAPTCHA?
Given the lack of alternatives, organisations need to continue using CAPTCHA, but selectively apply other methods of detecting machine-based attacks (such as rapid or logically sequenced attempts at creating accounts or logging in).

Where possible CAPTCHA should be used only to validate the 'humanness' of a user, rather than as an outright security measure, thereby limiting system vulnerability.

Finally organisations need to use the most current versions of CAPTCHA and update regularly to reduce the risk of intrusion to only the most sophisticated hackers.

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Red tape reduction via smarter online forms

There's a lot of activity in the online forms space across Australian government at present and it is proving to be an area of real cost savings and environmental benefits for public sector organisations at all levels.

Business.gov.au has supported a centralised whole-of-government approach to business focused forms for several years now and its forms section has grown significantly, particularly in the last twelve months, as agencies have recognised the potential, geared up and invested in the area.

This has been recognised in an Australia article looking at initiatives by councils, Online forms cut council red tape.

The AGOSP (Australian Government Online Services Portal) initiative at AGIMO is also implementing a forms capacity, via business.gov.au, for citizen forms, and this offers significant benefits for any agencies looking to leap into the realm of 'smart forms' - online forms that can be prepopulated or adjust in response to customer answers and then send the data back in a secure format (as email or directly into agency systems).

If you're an Australian public sector organisation at any level who needs to collect data from customers, it's worth checking this out and viewing the presentation given by Anthony Steve of business.gov.au.

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Addressing customer service for the email channel

From my experience in government, both as a customer and as a public servant, I've discovered that when addressing emails from citizens, government agencies often treat email as surface mail rather than as a phone call.

This means that citizens who choose an electronic communications route can often expect response times measured in weeks or months, rather than in minutes or hours.

Personally I find this unacceptable.

In asking why this was the case I have been told that government cannot discriminate based on mode of contact. That we cannot respond faster to customers choosing to use email rather than surface mail - even though a wait of even a few minutes is considered unacceptable for phone calls.

I have also been told by some departments (by phone or via their websites) that they cannot respond by email at all. That to protect my privacy they must send messages via surface mail - that post is more secure, more convenient or more official - even if I am happy to accept the risks and choose to email them.

I saw a similar situation in the private sector five years ago. Companies were unsure whether to treat emails as a postal medium or a a telephonic one.

They did not have a clear understanding of how email worked technically and did not trust its reliability or security (compared to other mediums).

They did not have staff trained or processes in place to handle a high-speed written medium.

Fortunately, at least in the private sector, many organisations are now more mature in their understanding and application of email.

Treat email as a phone call, not as a letter

My solution to ensuring emailing customers get the right level of respect and service in both public and private organisations has remained the same - treat emails as phone calls.

Email is perceived by the community as a nearly instant form of communication, like the telephone or face-to-face.

None of us would let a phone ring for a month before answering it, so why subject customers choosing email to this?

Address security and privacy concerns in a positive manner

Email is often treated with suspicion by organisations, due to perceived security issues in how it is transmitted from place to place and the concern that it is easy to intercept.

However people have adopted email regardless of perceived risks due to its benefits - high speed and low cost with a fast response time. Today, throughout western countries, people send many times more emails, often of a personal nature, than they make phone calls.

Given that government organisations have a greater obligation to protect citizen information than do our customers themselves, how can this be addressed?

I have a three point plan I have successfully used in organisations (including my current agency) to begin to address these concerns.

Three steps to better customer service (by email)

1. Formally assess the risks of email alongside telephony and surface mail

Many organisations have a defacto email security policy, one that has grown from personal opinions, interpretations and often from misunderstandings about the medium rather than through an objective and formal risk assessment process.

This is easy to address - get the legal, technical and customer service people together in a room and assess the risks of each form of customer contact.

It is particularly important to assess relative risk, for example:

• Are the security risks of email greater than for mail, fax, telephony or face-to-face?
• Is postal mail guaranteed to be delivered?
• Is it easier to steal letters from a mailbox than emails from a computer?
• If people choose VOIP telephony, is this treated as email for security purposes?
• Can different levels of privacy be enforced for different mediums/security levels?

Consider different scenarios, for example:

• Are privacy considerations different when the customer initiates (email) communication (with personal information).
• Can customers explicitly provide permission to receive responses (by email) for a set period (even if done by phone or signed fax/letter), accepting responsibility for security?

Consider organisational capability, for example:

• Are staff adequately trained to respond to emails?
  Just because people are good on the phone doesn't mean they are good at writing emails! An appropriate etiquette level may have to be taught.
• Is the organisation appropriately resourced to address emails in a timely fashion?
  International benchmarks indicate that optimally emails should be addressed in less than four hours, with two days the maximum timeframe people are prepared to wait for adequate service. Can your organisation achieve this - and if not, what mitigations does it put in place to communicate this to customers (who will email anyway!)

Assess customer expectations, for example:

• What do customers expect in terms of privacy in email and other mediums?
• Do they expect the same detail level in responses?
• How fast a response do they expect?
• Do they expect organisations to answer as much as they can can and then refer the customer to another channel?

Out of this it becomes possible to correctly understand the medium's characteristics, the real risks, what customers expect and then determine the mitigations which diminish, remove or defer any critical risks.

 

2. Change internal policies that do not reflect law

Often side-effect from not having conducted a formal risk assessment, internal email policies may not always reflect the current laws of the land (policy is often stricter).

Once a formal risk assessment has been conducted, you should review and rewrite internal policies on customer communications to reflect the risk assessment outcomes.

These policies should include details on when and how a customer can choose to accept the risks and take ownership of the security of the process.

If you find that there are no written policies, write them down and communicate them widely. They should include the background and 'myth-busters' as well as the code of (email) conduct.

 

3. Review laws to meet community expectations

Sometimes it's the actual laws themselves which are out-of-step with community sentiment and concerns.

Laws are living things, frequently being amended and adjusted to address new situations and changes in social norms.

Privacy and security laws  are no different to other laws in this and require regular review to match citizen expectations - there is no 'right' level of privacy, it is dictated by public opinion.

As such, if your customer sentiment reflects a different view and acceptance of (email) security than do Australia's laws, feed this information back into the policy process.

Change is possible, and it will allow your organisation to provide better customer service as a result.

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Online government forms don't have to be boring

I'm one of those quirky people who finds forms intensely interesting.

I've had a great deal of past involvement with market reseach and online transaction sites which has emphasised to me how important effective and usable form design is in order to ensure that forms achieve the goals set.

In my current role I've guided my team into supporting a number of research projects and we're currently reviewing and redeveloping our website and intranet forms capacity - touching on every other area of the business.

So I was very interested to watch Jessica Ender's presentation at the Web Standards Group (WSG) in Canberra last week.

Jessica, who owns Formulate Information Design, a specialist form development consultancy in Canberra, gave a very professional and passionate talk focusing on the four layers of a form and the appropriate process to use when developing a form.

She brought it together with the four Cs of good form design, clear, concise, clever and contextual.

While much of this was not new to me, Jessica's talk placed it into a new context and I'll be revisiting our approach to the redevelopment of our forms based on her insights.

What type of methodology do you use for developing forms?

Are your online forms effective?

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What should egovernment focus on?

There's a great article up on BuzzMachine titled Google as the new press room.

It makes the point that newspapers are in the content business, not the printing and distribution or website business.

As such they should focus on what they do well (create excellent content) and outsource the non-core activities.

The specific example is to have Google, or someone like AP, provide the technology platform and allow newspapers to focus on providing content.

This philosophy applies for government as well.

In the public sector we seem to invest a great deal of money into creating new websites in order to deliver content to different stakeholder groups - I'm guilty of this approach as well.

However what does government really do well, and what do we do badly?

Firstly I'd go out on a limb and say that we do websites really badly. Most Australian government websites function differently, using different content management platforms, different technology platforms and different workflows.

The quality, structure and depth of content varies widely, as does design and the use of different enabling technologies such as Flash, AJAX and Livecycle, blogs, wikis, forums and RSS.

Realistically, across government, we could have a single web content management platform, with appropriate enabling technologies usable by any agency - including a consistent search tool and reporting system (imagine being able to see how all government websites were performing side by side!)

A central design team could provide web quality assurance - enabling agencies control over their distinctive look, but preserving a common high level of usability and accessibility.

A centralised editorial team could provide oversight for information quality and depth, allowing departments to focus on being content matter experts.

A central transactions and forms/workflows team could oversee the development of agency forms - ensuring they use consistent terminology, provide contextual support and make it as easy as possible for citizens to interact with the government.

This would allow government departments to focus on what they do best - provide specific customer services, be content matter and policy experts.

Sounds like a pipe dream?

I'm seeing the fringes of this starting now. The central DHS Letters and Forms Secretariat, AGOSP with it's single sign-on, Smartforms and geolocational services, AGIMO's existing GovDex wiki and Funnel Back search solutions.

These are all pieces in the overall puzzle.

The challenge moving forward is to overcome departmental silos, satisfy the interest groups and provide a robust centralised framework with sufficient funding and support to bring it all together.

It's a vision with enormous benefits for citizens and for governments. It just requires people in government to share the big vision and drive it forward.

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Is government on the internet or part of the internet?

I've been reviewing a very interesting presentation from Paul Ramsay, one of my blog's Canadian readers.

Titled RoboCop, Public Service in the Internet Age, it asks whether government is simply on the internet, or is part of the internet.

It frames this question based on whether government is simply using the intranet to replicate the services it provides via other channels, or using the new medium to go further.

This is a topic I resonate with. For many years I've been telling people that what we see on the internet today is similar to what we first saw in films - stage shows re-enacted on a flat screen.

It took many years for movie makers to learn how to use the medium to go beyond what was possible on a stage, and the types of movies we see today bear little resemblance to our first stumbling efforts in the medium.

The internet is the same. It's not just digital paper, online radio or short videos - it's a mass medium that takes all these elements, twists them 180 degrees and adds on seamless global surfing, collaboration, citizen empowerment and much more.

From what we've managed to do so far at my agency we're simply on the internet - providing electronic versions of print concepts - 'fact sheets', 'newsletters', 'forms', 'media releases' and 'data tables'.

I am hopeful and working hard to ensure that in the next few years we'll break through the perceptual barriers to build understanding across the department of what is really possible with the online channel and how we can support our customers and staff in entirely new ways.

New medium = new rules
New medium = new opportunities
New medium = new challenges

How do you see the internet changing your organisation?

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