Register now for the ABS's Web Analytics in Government forum

The ABS's Customer Insights Team, in conjunction with AGIMO, is holding a Web Analytics in Government forum on Tuesday 24 November in Belconnen.

To quote the ABS,

Our aim is that the forum will allow participants to learn from others and share practical knowledge and experience in:

• pitfalls of implementing web analytics in a government environment;
• understanding online behaviour and experience of users;
• developing performance indicators for websites; and
• knowing which reporting metrics to use and when.

An outline of the programme is available online.

There are only around 50 places available at the forum, so if you're interested in attending register now.

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UK thoughts on adopting WCAG 2.0 for government websites

Jack Pickard has written an excellent post regarding How should the UK public sector adopt WCAG 2.0? which touches on many of the themes required for adoption in Australia.

If you were thinking about shifting your Australian government site to a WCAG 2.0 level of accessibility, this is welcome contribution to the discussion.

Sometimes I wonder if across government we have enough conversations on these types of topics - and my conversation I mean free and open exchanges of views and information in shared spaces, rather than formal responses to defined criteria (with no correspondence entered into).

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How would management of your website change if anyone could comment on or redesign it outside your control?

How would it change the management of your website if anyone could make an unmoderated public comment about any page at any time - totally outside your control?

How would your Minister and senior management respond if people could freely critique your content, pointing out any errors or misleading statements or airing their complaints (and compliments) publicly?

Or what if someone could redesign your website from the outside to make it better suit their needs, or to make a personal or political point - and then share this design with others?

This isn't just idle speculation - it's happening today.

Google recently launched its Sidewiki service which allows anyone at any time to make any comment on any website - visible to anyone else using Sidewiki.

This means that the public can hold a discussion on any page in any Australian government website completely outside your control.

Does that sound scary? It should if you're not aware of or able to participate in these conversations as needed.

Below is an example of Sidewiki in action - viewing comments in blogs related to the Whitehouse website.

At the same time, tools now exist that allow outsiders to redesign your website from the outside. For example the free Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox allows people to rearrange your content, or even translate the words into a different style (one recent popular script translates websites into 'pirate' speak) that becomes visible in their web browser. They can then share these rewrite scripts with others using the same tool.

Greasemonkey isn't the only tool that does this - and people are already writing scripts, such as this one to reconfigure parts of the National Archives website to display Australian government sites in a different manner.

This approach has been used to 'fix' the design of some websites which the community found hard to use - in several cases the website owner has even voluntarily made website changes based on these community suggestions.

It can also be used as a protest, adding, modifying or remove content from a website (as viewed in a user's web browser).

There's also organisations which externally redesign websites. In the US the Sunlight Foundation periodically redesigns a US Federal Government website to demonstrate how it could be done to work better. It would be simple for someone to do the same here in Australia.


In other words, while internally we control how we design and develop our websites - just as we carefully craft our media releases to say things the way we want - we can not control what people do with them once they leave our 'controlled' space.

Just as the media can pick and choose what material to use from our media release, the public has the ability to pick and choose what material they see in our website - and can comment on it outside our control.


People responsible for planning, developing and operating government websites need to be thinking about how these types of tools impact on how your official website is viewed externally.

So over to you for comments,

• What will you do if an organised group redesigns your website from the outside (either in a friendly or a malicious way)?
• How will you respond to comments that are visibly attached to your website?

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Defining success for web projects

Not all projects completely succeed. For a variety of factors some do not meet some or all of the original goals laid out for them.

There is a tendency to label these projects as failures, to totally write them off and be more cautious when initiating similar projects in the future.

In the web space, which is changing fast, many projects are firsts of their kind. This can make it harder for organisations to allocate appropriate resourcing, time or constraints, or to set appropriate success criteria. There may also be unanticipated side effects which can distract from the project's focus.

This can lead to failures in otherwise reasonable projects, failures which could be prevented through a better understanding of project needs.

When web projects are considered failures, organisations can become more cautious and less willing to attempt similar projects or place additional constraints on how projects are run. These can reduce the likelihood of subsequent successes and lead to dininishing returns and greater reluctance.

So how do we, as web professionals, help organisations engineer for greater success in web projects?

Firstly it's important to speak up during the initial planning stages. To provide honest views of what resourcing and time is required to achieve the project's goals. There's no point in beginning a project with inadequate resourcing - it doesn't serve the government, the agency or yourself.

Where time and resourcing isn't flexible, it is important to negotiate and clarify the criteria for success. Make sure all the stakeholders have a common understanding of what success looks like and how probable it is given the constraints.

It is also possible in some organisations to define certain non-critical projects as experimental, with an underlying goal of increasing knowledge within the organisation. In this case you can define success as identifying approaches that do not work. While this may sound like a cop-out, defining success as failure, remember how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb - he 'failed' many times, allowing him to learn what did not work in order to focus on an approach that would.

It is also important to record all the unintended impacts of a web project. Sometimes a project can be successful in areas important to the organisation but outside its defined goals. An example of this is the post-it note, which resulted from experiments by a 3M employee, Spencer Silver, to develop a strong new adhesive. The adhesive was a failure - it was super-weak - however Silver kept the formula. Four years later another 3M employee, Arthur Fry, discovered that the adhesive could be added to the back of paper notes and stuck to things and removed without causing damage. After another six years convincing 3M of the commercial value (which he eventually did by providing prototype post-it notes to the executive assistants of senior managers) it finally was released in the market as post-it notes.

Most important of all, it's important to help organisations understand that a partial success isn't necessarily a total failure.

In most projects, even those that are regarded as catastrophic failures, there are components that succeeded. These successes can sometimes be just as important as the failures for educating future projects - there's even a saying for it, "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater".

Particularly in large web project, or where web forms part of a larger project, it is important to differentiate between the parts that failed and those that succeeded - to acknowledge the successes even where the project is rated as an overall failure.

While this approach holds for all aspects of projects it is particularly important in the web space. As the internet is reasonably new for most organisations, some people can be more sensitive towards perceived failure in the area and more willing to use it as an excuse to kill or restrict future projects.

This is simply human nature - we fear the unknown and attempt to limit its impact on us through controls or avoidance. This is mirrored in project management strategies which define and minimise the potential impact of what we don't know through risk mitigation techniques and project controls.

So if you find yourself in the midst of a project hurtling towards failure, make sure that you spend time identifying what is going right as well as what is going wrong.

If the web component (or any other component) is meeting its goals - or at least providing key insights and tools that will enable future projects - make sure these are highlighted to the organisation and that these learnings are shared outside the project team.

Even where you cannot save the project, you can at least add to corporate knowledge and prevent the organisation from mistakenly throwing out that baby with the dirty water.

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Learning to speak and listen to the language of the internet

Speaking with the locals can be one of the most rewarding - and most frustrating - experiences when traveling to foreign-language countries.

If you make an attempt at their language - no matter how feeble - they will generally respect your efforts and go out of their way to be helpful.

However if you simply try to speak with them in your own language or, worst of all, shout at them in your tongue, you may be snubbed or disrespected.

How are these examples relevant to government?

When government departments go online they often continues speaking in their native tongue - using 'govvie speak' - which often uses different words and definitions than everyday speech.

This usually isn't a deliberate attempt to obfuscate. Often departments are trying to communication well, spelling complex meanings out clearly and precisely.

Generally career public servants, public sector lawyers and specialist communicators work hard to find exactly the right words to communicate what their department wishes to say.

So where can this go wrong?

After highly skilled professionals slave over website content, which is then approved by senior public officials, there is often no step to get approval from the highest authority of all.

The 'average' punter - the person reading (and hopefully understanding) the message.

Most communicators understand that if their message isn't coded in a way their audience understands they will be ignored or viewed as less credible.

When delivering fixed length communication pieces, such as advertisements or publications, extensive audience testing is often used to ensure that the message is clear and effective.

To use govvie speak, this testing is a risk mitigation strategy to assert that the contents of a communications piece are widely understood and resonate with the target demographic, thereby achieving an effective policy or program outcome for the government, the department, and for the public purse.

Or, in plain language, testing makes ads work.

How often do we in government test every line of a website's content to make sure it is understandable to its audience in itself and within the context of the entire website?

Even when we do test, how often do we impose layers of approvals after testing?
These can turn a piece of plain language into a swamp containing patches of govvie speak quicksand, which the average punter can easily get swallowed up in.

Of course testing won't take us all the way. Generally there isn't time or resources to test every line of a website in context.

We have to rely on employing professional writers who understand our audience and speak their language. And then we need to trust them and leave their words alone.

As government engages further with the internet, moving from 'look at me' websites to listening and conversing with the public, we need to 'mitigate the risk of audience dislocation, ineffective consultations and ministerial complaints'.

In other words, to make our online discussions work and stop people getting upset when they do not understanding or trust our words it becomes even more vital that our language goes native.

In conclusion, government departments need to blog like the bloggers do and chat like the chatter do. When we listen and communicate respectfully we will earn the respect and credibility of the online world - our citizens.

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Integrating an online community engagement strategy

When I wrote my first online community engagement strategy for Telstra's Wireplay service in 1997, one of the factors I considered was how to 'complete the loop' - integrate inbound and outbound online channels to reach, engage and promote interaction across the widest possible audience.

In those days we used mass media, product sponsorship and events as the drivers to build audience reach and awareness and online forums, IRC chat, newsgroups and email to interact online and generate repeat traffic.

It was an effective combination - although limited by 2009 standards.

Today there are more online channels alternatives when building an integrated marketing or engagement strategy, however the principle remains the same,

• Use media (inc online) channels to drive initial traffic to the site
  
• Make the on site barriers to engagement and interaction as low as possible, provide rewards for activity and a variety of ways to engage/interact to suit different comfort and skills levels
  
• Promote return traffic through alerts and email news
• Build audience by providing reasons for visitors to refer your site to others
• Increase your reach by providing options to integrate your content into other sites

However I'm disappointed to see that many Australian organisations are struggling to get beyond the first, second or third steps above.

Sometimes their strategy was to spend their month on building and launching an online engagement site, then hope people like it enough to spread the word themselves - the build it and they will come approach.

Sometimes organisations treat the delivery of a website as the end of the project - rather than the start.

And sometimes the value of word-of-mouth promotion and an outreach strategy is not recognised - some organisations still believe that the mass media is the most powerful traffic driver.

Fortunately for those of you struggling to enlighten organisations who believe any of the above, IAS B2B has published an integrated channel strategy diagram which provides an excellent illustration of how to effectively design an online community engagement approach.

I've included an image below, and you can download the integrated online strategy diagram PDF here (103kb).

At first glance the diagram can appear a little daunting - which is possibly why Marc Keating has made an accompanying video to explain it in depth.

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See you at the Managing Your Online Content conference in Sydney this week

I'll be speaking at the Managing Your Online Content conference from Ark group in Sydney this Wednesday on the topic of Aligning your web content strategy with organisational objectives.

I'll be making an effort to log the conference online, either via Twitter (#MYOCG09) or via a liveblog on this blog, if I have access to wi-fi at the venue.

If you're attending, come and say hello to me at some point.

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How can we do better? Mobile web is just like desktop web from 1998 - Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, often considered one of the world's leading thinkers on usability, has discussed the mobile web in his latest Alertbox monthly update, equalling the state of mobile websites today as similar to the state of the desktop internet in 1998.

I tend to agree that for many organisations this is the case, with Nielsen's comments all hitting close to the mark - abysmal success rates in users achieving their goals, pages requiring too long to download and featuring too much bloat, code crashes and excessive scrolling.

I've blogged previously about the need for government to begin more seriously considering and positioning for the importance of mobile sites. The growth of larger screen (and touchscreen) smartphones has finally turned mobile devices into an acceptable platform for web browsing.

A major point Nielsen raised was that many mobile sites are still being designed like desktop sites, just as in 1998 when websites were being designed like print brochures (ala brochureware).

This is a trend I've discussed previously - each new medium is first defined in terms of the paradigm of the last.

For instance, when television was introduced, programs were first structured like radio shows, and further back when movies were introduced they were structured like stage shows. The initial radio programs often consisted of an announcer reading the local newspaper on air.

It takes some time for society to begin to understand the true value of a medium and look on it as a new and distinct form, rather than as an extension of an older form.

This causes me to reflect on what the mobile medium will eventually become. Defining it in terms of a 'mobile internet' may be too limiting, too caught in the desktop internet paradigm.

Mobile devices have their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. For a government organisation - or any organisation to use these to best advantage, they must look at the specifics of the platform, not simply port their website to mobile (as they ported their publications to online).

Some of the obvious strengths of mobile include;
geo-location - it knows where you are
interaction time - people interact with mobile devices 24/7, whereas desktops require a conscious action
voice integration - voice communications can be embedded easily into the platform
photo and video capture - people can take photos and video anywhere, all the time

Some of the obvious disadvantages include;
Small screen size - makes displaying complex information more difficult
Short interactions - people make many more interactions with mobile devices, but most are only a few minutes in duration. Try concentrating on a mobile screen for an hour
reception quality - can vary enormously, making some online-only applications less usable
small keyboards - makes sustained typing more difficult
Many different platforms - there's less uniformity of screen size and internet capability (including cost of access) than on desktops, where there are a few dominant players

When developing a mobile site taking these factors into consideration will help your organisation develop more than a simple mobile port of your website, but a custom experience that helps people complete the different types of tasks they wish to complete on a mobile device.

So when you get your senior management across the line on having a mobile version of your website, ensure you also take them on the journey to understand that a simple reformat of existing content, navigation and functionality probably will not deliver the best result for your customers and stakeholders.

There's an opportunity to step beyond the desktop paradigm and deliver a mobile experience with real value. I challenge you to take it!

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Is the future portals or mash-ups?

While many governments around the world pursue the 'one portal' approach, a few commentators are arguing for a different type of model - many correct doors rather than one big door.

This means reaching out to embed government content in the websites citizens choose to visit rather than simply attempting to encourage all web users to go to a single central portal for all government-related content.

This approach is described well in the Read Write Web article, E-Government Meets Web 2.0: Goodbye Portals, Hello Web Services, which states, in reference to the online channel that,

Gartner's conclusion is that governments "should make sure that their information, services and applications are accessible through a variety of different channels, some of which are not controlled or directly owned by government."

This is similar to how government agencies already distribute physical publications beyond their own shopfronts - into libraries, doctors' surgeries, lawyers' offices and into the shopfronts of other government agencies. It also reflects how government has a presence at various community and commercial shows, festivals and other events.

In both these cases government reaches out into other organisations' venues in order to better reach citizens in the places they frequent.

I'm a proponent of this 'any door' approach being extended online. As an egovernment practitioner I do not necessarily care how people get to the information and services my agency provides online, provided that they get to them.

This means I am a supporter of central portals as an avenue outside my agency's own website to reach our customers. It also means I am a fan of greater cross-agency collaboration on information provision, where agencies with similar audiences work together to provide government information to citizens.

Most importantly it means I am a supporter of rss, mash-ups and embedded web services - any technology that allows my agency to reach beyond the confines of its own website to reach our customers in whatever websites they choose to visit - commercial, public or citizen-run.

After all, with research indicating that government sites only make up about two percent of online visits by Australians, if I want to magnify the effectiveness of my agency's tools and information online, I need to increase their reach.

For example (hypothetically), if my agency produced a video relevant to the customers of any organisation involved in the family law system, it would be worth our while to look at how we could reach beyond our own website traffic to the traffic of other involved websites.

Using Youtube, we could generate a video that can be embedded into any site across the family law system, thereby potentially magnifying the reach of its content.

Assuming that my agency has 10 percent of the traffic to the family law system, this could, with the agreement and support of other organisations, result in up to a 10x boost in traffic to the video - all targeted at the appropriate audience.

If we also had the video included in the australia.gov.au portal this would lift usage further, but in a less targeted way, as the portal does not specifically target the same audience as we are attempting to reach.

The approach in this scenario applies for any type of government information distribution online. It also means that government needs to think more about how it provides information online, and how easy and attractive it is for other organisations to embed the information, not just link to it.

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US satisfaction with egovernment services rising

The US government has recorded the second consecutive increase in satisfaction, to an average 73.5 percent in the latest E-Government Satisfaction Index, part of the broader American Customer Satisfaction Index (private sector website satisfaction is at 80 percent).

As reported in CRM Buyer, 25 percent of sites achieved a rating over 80 percent.

The feature constituents were least satisfied with was navigation (37 percent were satisfied), whilst 96 percent were satisfied with search functionality.

Commentators are expecting the upward trend to continue as a result of the ongoing US financial crisis.

This upward trend will likely continue, Freed [Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results] said, if for no other reason than current budgetary constraints. With the U.S. government now committed to a US$700 billion financial rescue plan, money will be tight in all other categories. "E-government can deliver a huge payback because it is so much more efficient," he observed.

Type rest of the post here

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Should the government provide online services where competitive commercial sector services exist?

In the past it has been the practice for many governments around the world to avoid playing in the centre of commercial spaces, where competitively priced services are already provided by private businesses.

Government interventions in these markets are managed through legislation and direct intervention as a last resort (in cases of market failure) - as we are seeing in the current financial crisis in some countries.

The philosophy behind this approach is often that in markets where the private sector is willing to provide goods or services, competing on price, options and customer service, it is less likely that a government can add the same level of value.

Instead government concentrates on the 'margins' - situations where people are unable to afford or access the mainstream private sector services.

This, in essence, is how the public housing and unemployment benefits systems function. In both cases there are private sector options (private rentals/home purchase and jobs), while governments provide safety nets for citizens unable to access these alternatives.

Should government follow a similar approach online?

Looking at the online world, the costs and barriers to providing information and services have declined, broadening the range of services that may be offered by private enterprise.

Reflecting this, should governments follow the same philosophy of avoiding playing in commercial spaces, again only focusing on marginalised citizens?

Or should government provide public alternatives to existing commercial services?

This is a big - and highly political - question, which can be seen by the Commonwealth government's stance on internet filtering. While there are many commercial products available (from retailers, ISPs and online) including both charged and free services, the government is pursuing an approach of providing its own products, licensed from commercial providers, to ensure availability.

Similarly, should government provide 'web infrastructure' tools such as geospatial services, when large commercial organisations are already providing these services?

Geospatial services are a case in point.
We've seen the WA and QLD governments roll out their own public geospatial services specifically for their own state use, with the Commonwealth soon to follow suite at a national level via the AGOSP program.

These services provide similar functionality to both Microsoft and Google maps, and in fact Perth's public transit authority has its timetables available in a Google maps beta (but not in the state's own geospatial service).

Equally, for search, the Commonwealth government licenses the FunnelBack search technology, designed in Australia by the CSIRO, for use in Australia.gov.au and other sites (including the CSA website) rather than implementing Google's free service, as the US government has done.

In both these cases governments have followed a competitive tendering process to select the technology that best met their documented needs. The solutions are also under the control of Australian governments, rather than being owned and operated by foreign owned companies.

However, as demonstrated by Sensis this month, as reported in the SMH's article Sensis concedes defeat to Google, sometimes where the market is going is also important.

Sensis is discontinuing its Yellow Pages search and maps technologies. It will instead rely on Google to provide both services. As Google search was reportedly used by more than 7 million Australians per month, rather than the 184,000 who used Sensis's search engine there's clear commercial reasons why Sensis would want to stop sinking funds into trying to keep up with Google and instead leverage Google's audience.

Is this a valid choice for government?
Rather than custom developing or tendering for services that copy publicly available (and generally free) online services, should government agencies 'piggyback' instead?

This is a hard question to answer. Various Australian government agencies already piggyback on publicly available services - such as MySpace, SecondLife, Youtube and Google Maps.

On average Australian government websites get 25 percent of their traffic from Google search (based on Hitwise's statistics) - far outweighing the level of traffic from the central state or Commonwealth gateways.

On this basis, Australian government is already piggybacking on publicly available commercial services - and highly effectively.

However when introducing its own internet filters, customised geospatial services or search tools, Australian government is choosing to not piggyback - taking on the burden of building usage and investing in the ongoing development of new features to remain current with the commercial market.

I'm not about to venture an opinion on whether or not governments should follow this route, these decisions may be made for reasons of national security, flexibility or specific public needs.

However the options should be carefully considered by the initiators of these projects.

The decision to 'go it alone' needs to take into account the competitive landscape.

What alternative services are available for citizens - which do online audiences already prefer and why?
Why should citizens choose the government alternative and will the government's service deliver the outcomes citizens desire?
Is the government prepared to invest in continuous development? Or will the service fall behind commercial alternatives?

Without a full consideration of these factors, like Sensis's failed mapping and search service, these government offerings may not, in the longer-term, deliver the benefits desired.

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Why do concerns about Flash persist?

For the last ten years I've been making use of Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) within websites to provide rich content features and applications unattainable with HTML.

Unfortunately I still get asked the same questions about Flash, regarding accessibility, file size and how many users have the technology.

I'd like to put these to bed.

Flash is an accessible format (meets the W3C's requirements in the WCAG), usage is extremely high (over 95%) and file size for downloading is no longer an issue (Flash files are often smaller than equivalents, due to compression and effective streaming).

I've provided more detail in my full post below.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s there were valid concerns over how many people could access Flash files and whether their size would cause issues for dial-up users.

There were also accessibility concerns, which more often reflected the level of production values for Flash in Australia, rather than actual issues with the platform.

I've noticed that there are still many Flash 'doubters' about raising the same concerns as were raised ten years ago.

• How many people have Flash on their computers?
• Are the files too large for dial-up users?
• Is it accessible?

Fortunately there are some easy ways to put these concerns to rest.

Penetration rate - how many people have Flash?
Adobe representatives I have heard speaking at events regularly state that Flash penetration is greater than 97% in the western world - including countries such as Australia.

Ironically PDF penetration (also an Adobe created format) is slightly lower than this - so on that basis it would be better to provide content in Flash format rather than PDF.

Taking Adobe's self-promotion with a grain of salt, it is easy for organisations to check Flash penetration for their own website audience using their web reporting tools. Where their reporting doesn't provide this statistic, free web reporting tools such as Google Analytics do and can be easily and rapidly added to a site (via a small code block).

For example, for my agency's website, for the last month, Google Analytics tells me that 98.27% of website visitors had Flash installed (and 95% of visitors had Flash 9.0+ or later). This is even higher than that claimed by Adobe, and makes me very comfortable in advocating Flash use within it.

File size versus connection speed
It's also possible via web reporting to track the connection speed of website visitors. This will verify what percentage use broadband versus dial-up, and indicates what percentage are more capable of receiving larger files (250kb+).

This can be useful when validating the use of Flash, which appears to be larger than HTML pages (though often is smaller). However be careful when simply relying on a high broadband penetration rate to validate the use of Flash.

Often Flash is faster than HTML for delivering similar dynamic content. This is because of two reasons, 

• to achieve the same outcome with DHTML (Dynamic HTML) requires much larger files and,
  
• because Flash is a compressed format designed to stream information over time - therefore the user doesn't have to wait for the entire file to download before they can view it (as they must with MS Word files).
  

Due to straming even large Flash files do not take long to start running on the user's system, meaning that the raw file size is less important.

A recent experience we've had in our agency was in considering file sizes for internal elearning modules. In comparing the same module as a Flash file and as a DHTML (Dynamic HTML) file our experience was that the DHTML file was up to 10x as large in size - making Flash a far better option for sites with lower bandwidths.

There are also techniques to reduce the impact on users with slow internet connections, such as detecting the connection speed and running video at lower resolution or asking dial-up users to choose whether they want to wait for a Flash version or see a basic text page.

Flash accessibility
The simple answer for accessibility is that Flash is fully compliant with the W3C and US Government's Section 508 accessibility requirements. The Flash format is accessible.

However when developing in Flash, as when developing in HTML or PDF, the accessibility of the final product depends on the skill and experience of the developers.

Provided that it is clear in the business specification that the product must comply with appropriate accessibility requirements, and that the business can provide necessary alt text, transcripts, metadata, navigation alternatives, subtitles and details for a HTML equivalent - as would be required to make a DVD accessible - the Flash application will meet accessibility standards.

However if the business stakeholders and developers do not quality check the work - whether Flash, HTML, or PDF - it can fail accessibility requirements.

So in short, don't point a finger at Flash technology for accessibility issues, look to the business owner and developers.

In summary
There are still many negative myths around about Adobe's Flash technology - I'm not sure why.

However they are largely mistaken. 

Flash is an extremely useful and versatile technology, with extremely high penetration and a very small footprint.

It is also fully accessible - provided your developers know how to use it effectively.

So if your agency is considering developing a multimedia application, a video (for online use) or another interactive tool, Flash is a format you should not discount quickly.

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Google improves Analytics

Google has released into beta a set of major improvements to Google Analytics that will make it an even more robust web metrics tool.

Including advanced data segmentation, data visualisation using 'motion charts', improved adsense integration, a more advanced administration console and an API for enterprise integration, this is the largest upgrade of Google Analytics for some time - however it could be some time before the features become available to all accounts.



I use Google Analytics to track traffic for this blog and as a secondary reporting system for our agency's websites.

In general I've found Analytics reports on around 65-75% of the traffic captured in our agency's web logs, but provides easier and more accurate geographical segmentation of traffic as well as better conversion tracking than can be achieved without extensive customisation of our weblog reports.

I also use Analytics to provide 'backstop' reporting to identify issues with our primary reporting (such as logs being corrupted or not transferred to the reporting system). This is very handy for providing evidence that it is a technical issue, rather than a decline in traffic, responsible for sudden changes in visits reported by a web log system.

If you've never investigated Google Analytics I'd recommend considering it in a secondary role to your main agency web reporting system.

For content external to agency hosted sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, WordPress, Yahoo Groups or Blogger hosted sites, Google Analytics could be considered as an option for a primary reporting system.

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Twitter catching on in the public sector

While in Australia Malcolm Turnbull is the latest Australian parliamentarian to join Twitter (at http://twitter.com/TurnbullMalcolm), in the US the public sector is now applying the tool for everything from crime updates and traffic alerts to the daily schedules of US governors.

The US public sector is beginning to discover that Twitter and other microblogging services are useful tools in supporting crisis management and in distributing small chunks of information rapidly to diverse stakeholders in a targetted way.

As reported in the Govtech article, Twitter is a Continuity of Operations Tool, State Agency Discovers, the Washington State Department of Transport (WSDOT) is now using Twitter to aid the organisation to manage the impacts of major weather events.

"In an emergency, people will come to our Web site, [www.wsdot.wa.gov] en masse to the point that it overwhelms our servers -- we've had that happen during snowstorms and other major weather events," Brown said [WSDOT spokesman Lloyd Brown]. Because the Web site is a popular source of traffic updates, sometimes it can't handle a sudden spike in page hits, he said.

"One of the things that we're considering if we get into an emergency situation like that, we can update Twitter and our blog with our handheld BlackBerry or iPhone or whatever we have. It's a continuity of operations opportunity for us," Brown said.

The potential for this use of Twitter arose from a recent series of major traffic incidents which left the department's website reeling under the traffic. The webmaster began tweeting updates on the situation and the number of people listening in grew rapidly.

Given that WSDOT, like a number of other public agencies in the US, is already an active user of diverse online channels (with its site containing Youtube video, a blog, rss feeds and an internet radio station), adding Twitter to the lineup isn't a big step outside their comfort zone.

To view how WSDOT is using Twitter, visit their channel at http://twitter.com/wsdot.

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Putting Australian government web traffic in perspective

In August I analysed traffic to our agency's website in July 2008 using Hitwise's data measurement service, comparing our share of web traffic against the total to Federal government websites, other government websites and the top websites visited by Australians.

The results provided me with a view of how important government websites are in peoples' online lives - not very. Less than 2.5% of website visits were to government sites.

It also helped me form some ideas as to how Australian government departments can make their online channels more effective means of engaging citizens.

Reviewing Hitwise's reports from July 2008, tracking around 2.95 million Australians' visits to over 647,000 websites (using ISP logs), the total government sector (6,634 sites) accounted for only 2.26 percent of all tracked website visits by Australians.

Of these,

• Federal government's 2,094 sites accounted for 57.61% of all Government traffic and 1.3% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• State government's 2,183 sites accounted for 30.82% of all Government traffic and 0.70% of visits to all websites,
  
• Local government's 1,596 sites accounted for 6.51% of all Government traffic and 0.15% of visits to all tracked websites,
  
• The other 761 sites (often foreign government agencies) accounted for 11.4% of all Government traffic.

In comparison, Google.com.au and Google.com  together  accounted for 9.64% of Australian visits to all tracked websites, four times as much as the total government sector (Google.com.au, the number one site visited by Australians, accounted for 7.85% and Google.com for 1.79% of visits).

Facebook, the fourth most visited website, received 2.36% of total tracked visits - slightly more than the entire Australian government.

MySpace, the seventh ranked site, received 1.78% of total visits - almost 50% more than Federal government sites.

Only one government website regularly reaches Hitwise's Top Twenty list of Australian sites, the Bureau of Meteorology (coming in at 16th position with 0.51% of traffic in September 2008). In fact, this site alone accounts for almost a quarter of the visits to the total government sector.

To put these figures into perspective, I roughly estimated from my Agency's actual web traffic that each Australian web user in July 2008 made 270 visits to Hitwise tracked websites (note that at an average visit duration of 10 minutes, this is significantly less that the figure reported by Netratings in March 2008 (PDF) - of 13.7 hours/week online).

Of these estimated 270 visits,

• 26.6 visits were to Google,
  
• 6.3 visits were to Facebook
  
• 4.8 visits were to Myspace
  
• 3.5 visits were to Federal government sites,
  
• 2.4 visits were to State government sites,
  
• 0.4 visits were to Local government sites.

Even if you discount my estimate and take another measure of the average number of website visits per Australian each month, the proportion based on Hitwise's tracked websites remains the same.

What does this mean for government?
Even a few visits per month by Australia's estimated 11 million plus regular internet users users adds up to a significant online audience for government in Australia.

However my conclusion is that Australian government departments should not rely on reaching our citizen audiences simply via our official websites.

We need to reach out and engage our customers via the websites they choose to use.

These non-Government websites account for over 97.5% of regular internet usage by Australian (per Hitwise's July 2008 figures).

If Australian government wants to effectively communicate with citizens online, our departments need to invest in understanding where our audiences spend their time, reaching beyond our official sites to engage them in the online communities they choose to frequent.

How do we engage citizens on their own turf?
There are many different ways that private organisations reach out to user communities, and government can learn and use many of these approaches, such as

• using search advertising to promote Australian government services prominently across top search engines and community sites,
• providing web feeds (RSS, Atomic, etc) that other sites can merge into their own information channels,
• providing data feeds that can be mashed up into widely used sites and new functions (as the Bureau of Meteorology does so well),
• creating, and promoting, useful portlets and widgets on popular platforms (Google Gears, Facebook, Blogger, Ning) that can be added to  individual and group social sites,
• white-labelling services that can be embedded in other sites (Slideshare, Youtube),
• reaching out and participating sensitively in forums, blogs and wikis relevant to our communities,
• engaging online advocates and supporting them as we do media representatives (as US consumer goods firms engage 'Mummy Bloggers' and US political parties engage political bloggers),
• creating and supporting themed community spaces for citizens (as Huggies has done in Australia for mothers).

Note
Hitwise checked the numbers drawn from their web reporting service (thank you Alex and Rebecca). The idea for this post, the conclusions drawn and any calculation errors are mine alone.

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Are IT departments and web professionals their own worse enemies?

Forbes magazine has asked whether IT departments are their own worst enemies, in an article, The un-marketing of IT, citing examples such as,

• Promoting e-mail use but limiting inbox storage and file attachment sizes.
  
• Touting the Internet as a data goldmine, then blocking people from visiting so-called non-business sites.
  
• Providing people with a PC as a tool to make their job easier, then locking it down to stop them adding programs or even choosing their own wallpaper.
  
• Warning people of the dire consequences of not using an application properly, threatening them with legal action every time they use the application or start their PC.
  

I've seen IT teams engage in this type of behaviour time and time again over my career and the usual outcome is to reduce the business's trust and respect for IT practitioners - not because these actions are necessarily wrong, but simply because they are not explained well to business users.

As the article suggests, if IT teams committed to explaining clearly to users why these types of actions were necessary and provided alternate ways to meet business needs it would be easier to build bridges in other areas.

Extending this to web design and development, I've experienced many websites where unusual navigation or rigid processes are used to move users through a web service to their desired outcome.

These situations meet business requirements and allow the user to achieve their outcome, but are often painful and offputting journeys, which do not lead to repeat usage or goodwill.

Often the user feels like they have survived an obstacle course rather than had a pleasant walk in the sun.

When developing websites (or applications) it is as important to consider the journey - the user experience - as it is to consider the destination.

Simply adding contextual support, removing unnecessary steps and modelling navigation on well-understood models can do wonders to smooth the user's journey and vastly improve the user experience.

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The success of Future Melbourne - an online wiki-led consultation program

I've been looking at the success of the Future Melbourne program, a wiki and blog based approach to shaping the future urban landscape of Australia's second largest city.

The program allowed citizens to directly collaborate, edit and comment on the plans for the future development of the city. It attracted more than 30,000 visits by nearly 7,000 individuals and over 200 edits to the plans, ranging from spelling and grammatical corrections through to lengthy well-considered contributions (and not one instance of spam, off-topic or offensive content).

Reading through an offline presentation on Future Melbourne, the program involved several stages,

• Specification and construction of the environment in collaboration with Collabforge using a free wiki tool (Twiki),
• training of the Future Melbourne team, who moderated the wiki throughout the consultation process,
• a preliminary closed wiki round (13 – 25 March 2008) to test the technology with stakeholders,
• an open wiki round (17 May – 14 June 2008) allowing anyone to read or modify the Future Melbourne plan.

As part of the process appropriate Conditions of Registration, Privacy Policy & Discussion Rules were developed to cover the legal requirements of the program.

Participation Policies & Guidelines and a Netiquette guide were developed to help participants understand the framework for engagement.

The wiki was monitored on a day-by-day basis to ensure appropriate conduct was upheld and changes were tracked via the wiki system.

Some of the learnings of the program included:

• Make it as easy as possible - even pressing 'Edit' can be a daunting proposition
• Requires leadership and support - organisations cannot simply provide a structure, they must actively provide internal support and 'figureheads' to guide the community.
• Change management is important - the shift to an always-on direct online consultation approach requires changes in mindset to support the speed and tone of organisational involvement in the medium.
• Acknowledge and manage the potential risk - be aware of the potential risks (offensive material, spam, negative comments, etc), put in place appropriate policies and guidelines to enforce standards and monitor the system.
• Keep expert advice on hand - don't rely on past experience from other consultation mediums.
• Stay in touch with the outside world - maintain a watch on other online engagement and comments on the consultation in other online sites, try to keep the community informed and engaged throughout the process.

This is a wonderful example of a successful online consultation process in Australia.

I hope other public sector organisations are considering similar routes to engage their customers and community.

Anyone who is going down this route, I'd appreciate if you dropped me a line.

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What do job seekers think about your department?

Just as organisations can use social network sites to judge the relative merits of potential staff (per my post Locating and learning about future public employees), websites are allowing people to judge the relative merits of potential employers.

How does your department rate?

There's no doubt that people research potential employers online, and in a 'seller's market' for skilled labour it's critical for employers to put their best foot forward.

There are some fantastic job seeker/careers sections in organisational websites - with IBM, Microsoft and Intel having always stood out for me as offering exceptionally good information for job seekers - not surprising given the calibre of the people they wish to attract.

My agency is progressively improving its job section for a similar reason. There's a limited pool of talented people and we need to present them with good reasons as to why they should choose us over other organisations - whether public or private.

What should be in a jobs section
Some of the features I consider important in a jobs section include;

Procedural information

• Complete job information - everything a job seeker needs to apply online
• Support tools to make it easier to apply for jobs - particularly for those who are not good at expressing themselves on paper (but shine in interviews) or are unfamiliar with the documentation required by your organisation (such as public sector selection criteria)
• Explanation of the process and timeframes for recruitment (so they don't take another job when they've heard nothing for four weeks) - even better is to provide a 'package delivery' model whereby they can log in to see where their job application is up to in your process at any time (like Fed Express and DHL)

Organisational selling

• Information helping employees to understand your organisation's purpose and goals
• Details on why your organisation is a good place to work (pay is rarely the top reason!)
  
• Social aspects of your organisation - how do the strangers you employ become part of your organisational family
• Developmental opportunities, training and challenges
• Community initiatives - how does your organisation participate with the broader community and 'give back' effort, time and support

Locational information

• Information (profiles) on your locations (what it's like to work in particular offices)
• Support for people who may be relocating (particularly for Canberra or country town locations)
  

Career profiling

• Profiles of different career tracks and jobs in your organisation, based on people doing those roles and why they like them
• Career selector tools which support people in finding the jobs in your organisation which best match their disposition and skills (such as at DEEWR's Jobjuice site) 

Beyond your own website
It's also important to consider factors beyond your own website.

Job seekers are influenced by their peers, by news and community sites, social networking sites, online encyclopedias, by recruitment websites and by specialist employer rating sites such as Glassdoor (discussed in the Sydney Morning Herald article, In good company).

Personally I keep a eye out on highly influential sites for Australians, such as LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Facebook, as well as the job sites and popular forums discussing child support topics.

I also monitor where people go when entering and exiting our websites, which provides an indication of other sites which may influence job seeker preferences.

What does your organisation do online to help attract the best applicants?

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A glimpse at the future of the semantic web

Fresh+New, a blog written by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum, has brought to my attention Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity, a very interested look at the possible web of the future, using semantic browsers to provide a more connected experience.


More details are in Seb's post, More powerful browsers - Mozilla Labs Ubiquity, or on Aza's blog.

Below is the video introducing Ubiquity.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

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Australian Human Rights Commission prepared to name and shame government publishers failing online accessibility

On Friday the Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, at the Australian Human Rights Commission released a media statement, Climate change secretariat excludes people with disabilities, indicating the Commmision was prepared to 'out' government publishers who did not meet Australia's mandatory accessibility requirements for online material.

“I recently said that, if things did not start to improve, the Australian Human Rights Commission would have to start naming government publishers that are not taking the effort to make their documents sufficiently accessible for people with disability,” said Commissioner Innes.

In recent weeks there have been several accessibility-related media stories in Australia which have helped emphasise the importance of accessibility, not simply as a tickbox for web design, but as a baseline requirement for government material - published online or in other forms.

In this particular case the Human Rights Commission was targeting a specific document released originally only in PDF format. All that was being requested was that it be also published in another format as well (such as HTML) to improve accessibility.

"The Garnaut Review Supplementary Draft Report, Targets and trajectories, was released a week ago, but many people with disabilities still can't access it because it is still only available in pdf format", said Commissioner Innes. "These sort of documents should be published in RTF or HTML as well as pdf so that they can be read by all Australians."

For the record, I had a quick look at the Garnet Climate Change Review website and most of their documents are available in HTML as well as PDF.

It is possible to make modern PDF documents accessible, using the accessibility features in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7 or later. This requires an understanding of the tool and some time for larger documents - a straight PDF conversion of such documents from another format (such as Microsoft Word) generally doesn't meet Australia's legislated accessibility requirements.

Why is achieving accessibility so hard?

Given that PDFs can be made accessible, why does accessibility seem so elusive?

In my experience, across both private and public sector, I've found that generally that the webmasters, content publishers, designers and developers have a clear understanding of their obligations under Australia's mandatory accessibility requirements. They also generally understand and have access to the processes required to achieve it - although sometimes funding and timeframes are very tight.

Outside the web area it is often a different story. Generally most people across the rest of the organisation are less aware of the requirements. This can include document authors, communicators and senior executives.

There's no blame attached to this - accessibility isn't a large part of their jobs. These staff rely on the organisation's web specialists and graphic designers to tell them what they must do and assist them in meeting the requirements.

In fact this media release is a good tool to use in this education process.

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