Usability Week NYC

View from Sofitel NYC
Welcome to NYC, where the buildings are made out of liquid metal.

At LaGuardia about to fly home from a day-long session on university websites from the Neilsen Norman Group in NYC. I have to say, there is no happier line in any airport anywhere than the one of folks getting ready to head to Portland, Maine.

The conference was excellent. There is just no substitute for being in a room full of other people who are facing the same technical, political and design challenges you are. Great thoughts from people at Rutgers, Duke, Penn State, and as far afield as universities in Australia and Qatar.

I have pages of notes that I’m looking forward to processing next week, and a healthy list of next steps for our team at Bates. But here’s a quick summary of takeaways before they call our flight for boarding:

  • Carousels/sliders on websites basically never add value to your users, who very rarely click on them.
  • Site audits are terribly hard and terrifically important.
  • Basically every higher ed site uses the word “alumni” to refer to fundraising — but most users (particularly prospective students and parents) look there for information on what alumni are up to, job prospects, etc.
  • Photo of a slide from NNGUW presentation
    Bates’ website got a shout out in the presentation.

    The hamburger menu icon that is so prevalent on mobile is not yet widely accepted on desktop. Solve this by adding the word “menu” beside it.

  • Virtual campus tours are virtually useless.
  • Higher Ed websites have an inexcusably low success rate among teenage users — 56%. This is below eCommerce (89%), news (80%), and even government (63%). Having worked so long on a government website, I have a personal appreciation for exactly how bad that is.

So, lots to do. And lots of opportunity to better serve our audiences! Onwards and upwards.

Does Paul LePage even *want* to be governor?

UPDATE: Apparently the governor has been asking himself this very same question:

“I’m considering running for Mike Michaud’s seat if you want to know the truth because it can’t be any worse in Washington than it is here,” LePage said. “Everything’s on the table. Retirement, Social Security, running for Congress, maybe going back to Marden’s to stock shelves, who knows. I don’t take myself as seriously as all you do.”

Original post:

Maine’s obstreperous governor Paul LePage is running for reelection. I’m not totally sure why, and in his more honest moments of solitude I suspect he wonders that same thing himself.

The governor’s calamitous press event yesterday attracted national attention when he called a Democratic legislator from Aroostook County “the first to give it to the people of Maine, without providing Vaseline.” This hilarious anal rape joke failed to resonate with the national audience, most of whom are not twelve-year olds.

Amazingly, this was only part of a muddy stream of offensive and ill-considered language, which included direct insults against those who work in forestry — an industry that employs about 20,000 Mainers (PDF), according to the North East State Foresters Association. Here’s the quote:

People like Troy Jackson, they ought to go back into the woods and cut trees and let someone with a brain come down here and do some good work.

Taken as a whole, the disjointed, rage-filled press event was somewhat unintelligible. But I think the overarching message was clear: Paul LePage is deeply unhappy in his job.

So why is he running for reelection?

Is it the power? This is a man who was forced to remove a flat screen TV from the lobby outside his office, and who is poised to have his budget veto overridden by the legislature. Doesn’t seem he’s exactly ruling with an iron fist these days.

To the outside observer, it certainly doesn’t look like his heart is in it. Just look at his poor campaign website. It’s the internet equivalent of a puppy left out in the rain.

Usability Testing for .Govs: It’s the Law

The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov site is a data dumping ground — a technical problem to be solved, rather than a crucial hub in an ongoing process of conversing and information-sharing with the public — is dying off. Thankfully.

I think one of the most interesting recent developments is the usability testing that my agency, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), performed on SaferProducts.gov. GAO evaluates the performance of federal programs for the US Congress, which recently passed a law requiring we conduct

an assessment of the extent of use of the database by consumers, including whether the database is accessed by a broad range of the public and whether consumers find the database to be useful.

“Whether consumers find the database to be useful.” Essentially, Congress mandated that we test the usability of the website — the first time, as far as I am aware, that a website usability assessment has been written into federal law. I hope, and firmly believe, that it will not be the last.

SaferProducts.gov was set up by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (and also required by law) to provide a place where consumers can submit reports of faulty products and companies can respond. Recalls are listed there as well. For our tests, which we held at GSA’s First Friday’s location, we brought in three consumers for one hour each and walked through the site’s top tasks — reporting an issue, researching a product, identifying a recall, etc. I facilitated the tests, which were subsequently replicated with small groups of users in several other locations around the country.

The testing yielded a variety of valuable insights into the site’s usability strengths and challenges. Among other things, the final GAO report noted that

consumers generally could perform basic searches and follow instructions to report an unsafe product, and although none were aware of the site before the tests, most said they would use the site again. However, some of the search functions posed challenges. In addition, some consumers expressed concern about registering with the site and said this might prevent them from completing a report. Other consumers were not clear about the site’s purpose, thinking it would focus on safe rather than unsafe products.

Hopefully the feedback contained in this report will prove valuable to CPSC as they continue to improve the usability of SaferProducts.gov for consumers.

I mentioned that I believe this will not be the last time a requirement for website usability testing is written into law. As .gov sites increasingly become the singular, critical point of connection between agencies and citizens looking for information about the programs their tax dollars fund, understanding the extent to which those sites allow users to have successful experiences and interactions will be fundamental. GAO may well need to have a full usability lab within five years. Other agencies will in turn emphasize testing early on to ensure they’re up to spec before an audit.

All good things! The era of .gov usability is just dawning.

Worst Designs Ever?

What makes a particular design successful can be hard to define. Elegance and intuition can take a variety of forms, and all kinds of different interfaces can get the job done well.  Plus, what works for one person may be totally inaccessible to another, which is why the process of iterative design and testing is so important and such a fun challenge.

On the other hand, what makes a particular design bad is usually painfully apparent. For instance:

This and an unfortunately large, often hilarious collection of other examples can be seen in this collection of user-submitted “Worst Pieces of Design Ever.”

One Idea for Better Gov

Our last crowdsourced endeavor was a real success — with dozens of people contributing over 80 examples of points of interaction between citizens and government — so why not push our luck and try another?

With the election behind us, it’s time to focus on how government functions, and how that functioning can be improved so that it works even better on behalf of the taxpayers it’s here to serve.

That’s why I’m asking anyone and everyone to answer a one-question survey, asking a very basic, straightforward question:

If you could change one thing about how your government operates, what would it be?

The idea is to solicit specific, concrete priorities for things citizens would most like to see their government change, improve, or tackle. Things like “change how contracts are awarded,” “reform campaign finance laws,” and “shorter lines at the DMV” are just a few ideas. Submissions can focus on local, state, or federal government.

If I did my html properly, you should be able to submit your idea right here:
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Where Exactly Do Citizens and Government Interact?

The more I’ve thought about Citizen Experience — with its goal of reconsidering and improving the experience citizens have when they interact with government — the more I find myself coming back to the same thought: we really need a list of all those points of interaction.

This would include everywhere that public institutions and public citizens connect, both on the web and off. Voting, getting a passport, renewing a license, paying taxes…it’s potentially a huge list, and maybe impossible to compile in full. But even trying, jotting down as many points of interaction as we can think of, seems like it would be valuable — a solid jumping off point for thinking about tangible improvements we can make to real processes.

That’s why I’m asking for the Gov 2.0 community’s help in getting started compiling this list. I set up a Google Doc where you can enter your ideas (embedded below). Please consider weighing in. It should only take a minute! As you think about what to add, here are a few preliminary guidelines to help steer the process:

  • Let’s look for examples from all levels of U.S. government — local, state, and federal.
  • We want to focus on interactions. So, “federal highways” may not be an ideal example of an interaction point; “paying tolls” probably is.
  • Outsourced government services (public functions handled by contractors) are on the table; government funding of private operations (grants, etc.) is outside the scope at this point.

I may well be opening a Pandora’s Box here. There will undoubtedly be a lot of grey areas, and plenty of tough questions we can try to answer as we go (please feel free to leave them in the comments section here). I just figure we have to start somewhere.

Thanks in advance for your help!

(You can contribute to this list here)

Citizen Experience

For the last year or so, my efforts at work have been focused primarily on trying to improve the user experience for visitors to GAO.gov. We’ve undertaken a usability testing process and incorporated new, sound analytics into our decisionmaking. On every web project, we are in the room to ask what each new proposed element could mean for users — a perspective that was simply not part of the conversation before. I’m really enjoying it.

As a field, user experience is not new. But, at least within the federal government here in the U.S., this line of thinking is borderline revolutionary. It is catching on, and with it comes an evolving conception of what government websites and applications are actually supposed to be — that is, less a dumping ground for information about procedures and policies that satisfies a burdensome statutory requirement to provide information to the public, and more a place where actual users should be able to complete actual tasks without pulling out all (or even any!) of their actual hair.

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