Addressing Frequently Asked Questions on Gov 2.0: Will we receive feedback from a representative sample of the community via online consultation techniques?

I've decided to write a series of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) posts to address some of the 'persistent' questions related to social media and Government 2.0 I get asked.

These are questions I have been asked time and time again by various groups around Australia and overseas during presentations and meetings.

The first question I am addressing is "Will we receive feedback from a representative sample of the community via online consultation techniques?"

This question is at the heart of many doubts about online engagement, based on a belief that only certain people use the Internet, or will engage online, therefore it is risky to use the Internet to communicate with or consult communities.

The secondary doubt has to do with the fear that lobbyists or pressure groups will spam an online consultation with hundreds or thousands of near identical responses.

My answer always starts by turning the question around - using your current (offline) communication and consultation techniques, are you sure you are reaching, engaging with, and receiving feedback from, a representative group from your community?

In many cases traditional communication and consultation techniques are not longer effective at reaching a representational group.

Television is time-shifted, podcasts and MPEGs have replaced radio, newspapers are rarely read from cover to cover, many households no longer have landline phones and community meetings at set times and in set locations only attract those with the time and mobility to attend and are a magnet for lobbyist and pressure groups (with limited attendance by workers, young families, the infirm and disabled).

By default, when you engage people, those most likely to respond are the people who are engaged and outspoken - regardless of the channels you use. There is bias in all engagement towards interested, articulate extraverts over uninterested introverts, even if those uninterested introverts are your intended audience.

In short, if your current engagement or consultation techniques are not representative, and you are prepared to invest in them, why hold online to a higher standard before considering it as a viable channel?

Regarding the risk of hijacking and astroturfing of online consultations by lobbyists, pressure groups, businesses or savvy individuals, my response is also to turn the question around - isn't this already an issue offline? How do you know that lobbyists or businesses have not paid people to show up at a community consultation, or apply for focus groups, in order to tilt the outcome their way?

If anything, appropriate online consultation channels can help minimise the influence of lobbyists, both by opening up responding to a much broader range of people and by allowing technical detection of large numbers of similar responses from a single, or a few sources. Holding an online consultation alongside your offline engagement can help uncover a more balanced view from the community and highlight areas that may not be raised in offline consultation means.


This brings me to my main point when answering this question - online doesn't necessarily replace what you are already doing, it supplements and extends your existing channels.

You are better able to reach a representational spread by using more techniques rather than discounting any particular channel because it may not be representative in itself.

Spread is key. Use different techniques and mediums to target different sub-audiences, your outcomes will be far more likely to be representational.

Therefore online is an important set of channels to use. It is lower cost than face-to-face, however offers far greater reach. It delinks consultations and other engagement from geographic and time constraints and allows your audience to digest and reflect in their own time, leading to better outcomes.

For example, rather than showing up at 4:30pm for a 90 minute town hall meeting, and getting at most five minutes to present their view, people are able to read or view the material online at their leisure, come back to the parts they wish to reread and them think about their response. While responding they are able to reference other material, reread their comments and edit or extend them without immediate time limits. They are even able to reflect on the comments of others and build on or extend them to add value to new ideas. 

So don't aim to reach a representative sample of your audience through online alone, use it alongside other techniques to form a full picture. Use different channels and techniques to attract different viewpoints and modes of response and bring the different views together to form a representative picture of your audience.

However whatever you do, don't neglect online. If your audience are internet users (as 95% of Australians are) and if they are engaging through social media (as over 60% of Australians are), excluding online will seriously constrict your ability to obtain a representative sample.

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My University - a great site (except for mobile users)

I like the MyUniversity website - it's clean, useful and mostly simple.

However, when using it the other day I found one extremely major flaw. It's not mobile friendly.

I recently reported that 47% of internet connections in Australia were now via mobile devices. This was based on an ABS report from the December quarter of 2011.

In other words, if your website isn't usable on a mobile device you are potentially only servicing 53% of the market.

On that basis there's a strong requirement for all organisations, including government agencies, to develop their sites to function effectively on mobile platforms.

At this point it's worth talking about how and why I had issues.

My son is at a point where he's beginning to think about life after school and wants to know the options he has available, so I went on an exploratory trip into MyUniversity to see what was available in his areas of interest before taking him through it.

So I first went to the course search tool, to look for appropriate courses and entered in the topic he was interested in (it looks like below).

Initial course search screen in the MyUniversity website on iPad

I got to the provider search tool and tried to use it - clicking on the box only works if, on a mobile device, you click precisely on the small '0 items' text in the middle. However this wasn't the main issue (though te size of the clickable area is a secondary issue, and why are universities called 'items'?)

When I clicked on the text the list of options, as below appeared.

Clicked on '0 items' in left-hand box in the course search screen

I then selected QLD universities and a tick appeared (as below) - all good so far...

Clicked on 'QLD universities' in left-hand box

However this is where the trouble started. I selected 'Done' and the selection box disappeared.

The main window, however, still showed '0 items' (as below). But had't I just selected an item? Very confusing for users.

I checked several times by reclicking '0 items' and each time the selection box told me that yes I had chosen QLD universities.

So I decided OK, this is bad, but I will trust the system has remembered my choice despite not providing any cue to tell me this.

(BTW I had to ignore the text cue under the box 'Hold the CTRL key to select multiple items' as this doesn't apply on mobile devices)

After clicking 'Done', the left box reverts to '0 items'

So next was the task of transferring my selection to the right-hand box (an entirely meaningless step) before a search could be performed.

So I clicked on the 'Add' button.

And nothing changed....

Both the left-hand and right-hand boxes continued stating '0 items'.

I clicked it several times, just in case I had done it wrong (a usual user reaction when they receive no indication that their action has been received and acted on).

Then I did click on the (too small) '0 items' text in the right-hand box and the following selection box appeared.

So my selection DID get transferred.

Clicked on '0 item's in the right-hand box of the screen

I then selected 'QLD universities' AGAIN in this selection window. The second time I had to select it (as below).

Clicked on 'QLD universities' in the right-hand box

Then I clicked 'Done' and found myself back at the initial screen - with '0 items' in both the left-hand and right-hand boxes (as below).

'QLD universities' now appears in the right-hand area

Sigh.

So I then chanced fate and clicked search - and the course selector worked as intended - finding me QLD universities with the selected course.

However let's recap the issues:

1. Selection areas too small
2. Lack of visual cues for user actions
3. Need to repeat actions which could be performed once to achieve the same objective
4. Poor labelling of fields
5. Generally clumsy interface poorly designed for mobile use
6. No consideration of the differences in how web browsers may treat fields across versions and platforms
7. Clearly no cross-platform user testing

All-in-all, a very poor interface for mobile users.

Just in case I was unique in having this issue, I put my iPad in front of five other smart, university-educated adults and two teenagers considering university and asked them to complete a task to find a set of courses for a particular topic across universities in two states.

None of them were able to complete the task in under ten minutes using the MyUniversity interface, and only one (of the adults - the teens lost interest and went to Google) stayed with it and finally managed to get the search results they wanted - after receiving eight error messages (because they hadn't clicked in the right-hand box and selected the universities they wanted a second time).

Usability is important. A multi-million dollar project can fail if there isn't sufficient attention paid to the user interface.


Of course there may be an argument that a particular site has low usage by mobile users and therefore development dollars should be invested elsewhere. This sounds perfectly legitimate.

However this perspective raises some serious questions:

1. Are the agency's figures correct? Many mobile browsers report as standard web browsers, so it's not always clear when a web browser is in use on a mobile device.
2. Is the mobile usage low because the site's audience don't use mobile devices, or because the site is unusable on mobile platforms? Perhaps the poor mobile design is why mobile users shun it - which then reflects in low mobile statistics and an argument by the organisation to not support mobile, ad infinitum....
3. Isn't it irrelevant whether mobile usage is low? Government agencies are required to provide services accessible to all citizens, not just ones who happen to use desktop and laptop computers. Surely it's not that hard or expensive, in most cases, to ensure your interface is usable on mobile devices - millions of other website do it with little or no investment using inbuilt features in modern content management systems. An argument that you use an old CMS is not easily supportable, particularly when new systems cost very little to purchase or implement (depending on the level of customisation).
4. Even if it's too expensive or difficult to justify building an interface which is both desktop and mobile compatible in the first place, aren't there accessibility requirements which websites (particularly government sites) must meet? If a website isn't mobile compatible it may also not be accessible on a desktop computer to users with some forms of accessibility needs.

I hope that the agency responsible for My University does consider what it can do to become more mobile friendly. It's not really a hard fit, just change one step in a process and the problem would be resolved.

Then their site would be useful to 100% of Australian internet users, not to only 53% of them.

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Governments need to ensure their websites work for modern users

I went to the Australian Business Register site (www.abr.gov.au) this afternoon to set up an ABN (Australian Business Number) for a company.

This is a very common step, taken by hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians every week.

However I immediately hit a speed bump.

The site's online ABN registration process threw up an error message (image below) stating:

Browser not supported

The Australian Business Register currently supports the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
• Netscape 6.0 and above

You should update your browser version before you continue using the Australian Business Register. If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.

Refer to Technical Information for details on how to configure for your browser for the Australian Business Register.

This was confusing and offputting as I was using Firefox 11.0 - one of the most modern web browsers available.

Fortunately I had Internet Explorer 9 on my system and gave this a try - no error screen appeared.

Now if you read far enough into the error message it does state that 'If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.' - however I was in a hurry at the time and, like many users, didn't read the error message all the way through.

The error message visible at the Australian Business Register site,
together with the 'About' information window for the web browser in use

Regardless of whether this translates into a user error, I believe that there is an obligation on government agencies to ensure their websites are accessible and usable in modern web browsers without unnecessary and confusing error screens.

Essentially, when I have Firefox 11.0, I don't expect to receive an error stating I need 'Internet Explorer 5.0 and above' or 'Netscape 6.0 and above' - as my web browser is "above" both and, in fact neither of those web browsers have been current for more than 10 years!

For such an important and common business process as registering an ABN the responsible agency needs to take a little more care in its online delivery of services.

Otherwise their online services will damage trust and respect in the government's ability to deliver and cause customers to migrate to what are slower and (for agencies) higher cost channels.

I'll bring this issue to the attention of the responsible agency, the Australian Tax Office, and check back in six months to see if anything has changed.

For all other government agencies out there, please check that your public online systems aren't needlessly damaging your credibility in this way. Please make sure your websites work for modern users!

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Online Community Management survey launches for Australia and New Zealand

Quiip and Delib Australia have launched the first online community management survey for Australia and New Zealand.

The survey aims to help local organisations and individuals better understand the skills required to work in these professions, help uncover role challenges, training and support needs and the actual work and salaries that online community management and social media management professionals can expect.

The results of the survey will be presented at Swarm later this year and then released online as a free report.

The survey was inspired by The Community Roundtable's 2012 State of Community Management report, which drew from a largely US audience and asked a limited set of questions.

Tha Australian and New Zealand Community Management survey will be open for responses until 19 May.

For more information visit Quiip's site at http://quiip.com.au/online-community-management-2012-survey.

To complete the survey go to www.citizenspace.com/app/delib-au/cmsurvey or click on the button above.

Note: I'm involved in the design and management and will be involved in the analysis and reporting for this survey. The goal is to provide information that organisations can use to design community management and social media management roles and to help identify the training and support individuals working in these professions require to be most effective.

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Remove PDFs from your site to save money and increase traffic by 160x - the experience of the Vic Department of Primary Industries

While there may now be accessibility techniques for PDFs, this doesn't mean that the format is necessarily the most appropriate for displaying information on the web and attracting usage, as the Victorian Department of Primary Industries discovered when they removed all PDFs from their website and converted them to web pages.


As reported in thw case study, Unlock valuable content trapped in PDFs from BriarBird (as brought to my attention by Gian Wild's blog), the Department of Primary Industries Systems and Technical Manager Mark Bryant found that, 

“As we converted more and more PDFs to HTML/web format, the stats just kept going up and up until we reached around 1.6 million extra page views per year – it was fantastic.”

Mark also said in the case study that,

“Our users were telling us they wanted to do things in a different way, and when we converted a few PDFs to web pages we found the web pages outperformed PDF by as much as 160 to one.

“Initially we tried to create a web page to match each PDF, but in the end we introduced a blanket rule – no PDFs as it was far too difficult to manage both formats,” Mark said.

“There was some resistance, but the business case is pretty simple when you can show that a web page is being read around 160 times more often than a PDF.

“If you are spending money preparing content for the web, then that money is essentially being wasted if that content is locked up in a format people are unwilling to use.”

Over the last ten years I've also consistently noticed a ratio of 100:1 or more for views to webpages vs PDFs in the websites I've managed.

While PDFs often suit content creators (who are used to MS Word), they are rarely the best format for online content recipients - your audience.

If your organisation is focused on having the customer at the centre it is worth reviewing your content creation and distribution approach to ensure it aligns with customer needs.

For example, where a printable version is required, it is possible to achieve this with a print template for web pages using style sheets (CSS) rather than with a PDF. In effect when people click 'print' the web page is automatically reformated for A4 printing. This makes updating much faster and easier as you only have to maintain one version of the content.

So why not save PDFs for when they are most needed and wanted and ensure that the majority of your content is 'native' using web pages. Your audiences will love you for it.

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