Web 2.0

googlegoesgaga… Lady Gaga does it again!

In my post of Feb 9th, I compared Obama to Lady Gaga. She had 8 million followers then, a number which increased at the rate of over 20,000 every day to count 8,831,651 as I write. Lady Gaga hasn’t been sleeping on her online success and followed on the steps of Obama / Biden’s “Transition Project” (December 2008) which allowed any registered user to make or vote on questions that the Whitehouse then answered.

Since then YouTube put together the Worldview Channel and Barack Obama was back to answer questions in January 2011, followed by UK Prime Minister David Cameron, US Parliament Speaker Joe Boehner and now… Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Lady Gaga’s official YouTube channel now allows people to ask questions and vote for the most popular ones which she will answer. This Gaga project is open till the 18th March and, with this degree of openness, the star has joined a league of world leaders conquering web 2.0 tools to engage with her fans! The woman does not stop there with social media! She accepts questions also over Twitter with any tweet tagged #GoogleGoesGaga being syndicated directly to the channel and qualifying for voting. And in her own words…

Millions must be searching for “Lady Gaga” on Google as that term scores 69/100 in Query Popularity on Alexa. This especially when compared to “Barack Obama” (52/100); “Obama” (57/100); and “Whitehouse” (40/100).

The question submission and voting uses Google Moderator. It was launched in September 2008 and first used with a bang the following December in the Obama / Biden Transition Project – “Open for Questions”. Since then Change.gov, the project’s website, has now closed. Google Moderator continues to make crowd-sourcing a reality and is now a freely available API.

Cities Rating à la Web 2.0

Cities like everything, in the user-centred Web 2.0 life that you as readers of this blogpost have, deserve a rating. Easy to remember ratings, that residents, visitors and businesses that drive the economy can contribute to. Visually meaningful ratings like the page-rank on Google toolbar – just simpler!

Ratings have been around for ages and some people visiting cities check the Michelin guide for restaurants. Michelin says “Stars represent only what is on the plate. They do not take into consideration interior decoration, service quality or table settings.” And that’s exactly what a city rating should do! Forget the monuments, the stretch limos, the celebs that live in it, and anything that doesn’t do anything for you. Rate it on what it offers to make your life better at that instant. Just like thumbs-up for “like” on Facebook.

So here’s the rating key:

  • The wanna-be cities will be called WB for short.
  • The ones faring less than that will be called WC, not only just because “C” comes after “B” but also because they would share the acronymn with the bowl.
  • And then, to complete the rating key, WA cities – to mean waa’ a city!

vote now!

Start using it… comment below or on TripAdvisor and use the above measure. Just credit me, and if you make some money share it with me.

London, Paris and Rome are WA. Greetings from London!

A review of the usability of some US eGovernment websites

A few days ago, I came across the website of  NIC Inc. They call themselves “the people behind eGovernment” and so I had a look at some of the websites in their portfolio. I actually only looked at those that NIC claim have won some awards. I assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the rest would not be as good.

Below, I am listing particular features which I liked in some of the sites and I am making some notes about why. I would love to hear your thoughts.

  • Common to all the ones I liked
    I like the fact that service clusters are listed at the top part of the screen, that they stay there all the time and that the layout changes little or not at all. I like the fact that as a basic accessibility feature they all have an option for font sizes. They also all have a prominent Search-box. Finally links to the social-media are always there and prominently displayed — Oklahoma went as far as producing widgets (see below).
  • Utah http://www.utah.gov/
    I particularly like the clean look, especially the stylish icons and how they spring up on-mouse-over (even if I am not sure about the scroll thing). Same applies to the effect that the top menu bar produces on-mouse-over, opening up myriad of links related to the particular option (e.g. business). I like the layout, the design and the way you get a complete look at all that Utah offers in the 2 min it takes you to scan the homepage. I also like the search box, and how in less than ten words under the control itself, it prompts the user about how to use search — making no assumptions about how versed with search s/he is. I don’t like the fact that they used graphics for the headings but I like the way the headings are well placed for catching attention during a quick scroll.
  • South Carolina http://www.sc.gov/
    I like the fact that the most important services are immediatley available. I like the fact that there is also a link called “All online services” which takes you to a long list.
  • Oklahoma http://www.ok.gov/
    I like the scrolling overview at the very top and the fact that the top part serves as both a one-word title for the “slide” as well as a clickable-menu. It could have been better aesthetically designed but the idea is very good for a quick tour and fills the space with more useful information than a plain photo of a smiling woman or the Statue of Liberty. I particularly like their widgets. Imagine if governments could make their data available in their open gov initiatives and, also give incentives to other (non-gov) data-owners to open up theirs. Then open APIs could be used to allow people to harness data, crunch it and splash it intelligently in a widget… look at the UK government’s Apps list.

I look forward to your comments!

About facebook and open government

When back in November, I blogged about the Lisbon Treaty possibly instigating a paradigm shift in public consultation, I was wondering if the European Commission would ever be forced (as in: would not have any other option!) to consider Facebook. I could see how difficult it would be if there was no means of authenticating Facebook users as being EU citizens, or if one could not prevent one citizen creating a hundred profiles!

Nothing has changed to bring a Facebook-login closer to personal authentication. But, just days ago Facebook and AOL agreed that Facebook  users could now chat with their friends right through AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). This is an achievement from Facebook’s perspective under many counts. Not least, is the one that was pointed out by Mike Melanson in his post on ReadWriteWeb:

   “The partnership reinforces the idea that our Facebook profile is at the center of our online existence. Whether or not someone is signed into AOL is no longer what’s at stake here, it’s whether or not the user is logged into Facebook.”

In January, Mike had revealed how statistics released by widget-maker Gigya showed that 65% of its traffic came from Facebook.

A look at data published by Experian shows that, for the week ending 20th February,  6.98% of visits were to Google and that this was followed closely by 6.77% of visits going to Facebook. This of course excludes the number of people that have Google as their homepage and the ones that go to Google to type “facebook” and click on the first link! The Experian data dashboard also shows that over 49% of social network hits were to Facebook. Google must have been aware of this when, on the same day as the Facebook/AOL deal they launched Buzz. I remain unimpressed by this last addition to Google’s portfolio and so I am not going to waste your time by linking to it. :)

   Fact 1:  Facebook Connect is free and easy to implement, allows any website to link to 350 million facebookers and is steadily being implemented by all those who would like to stay alive.
   Fact 2: Facebook Connect is part of the Open ID project. Simply put, OpenID allows you to use an existing login account from any participating partner to sign in to multiple websites [read more]

If Facebook Connect is becoming so important, when will it go the next level and start offering to authenticate the identity of its users? How would this affect open government initiatives?

Following the launch of the OpenGov initiative in the US, ten industry leaders (including Google) had come forward to take part in a pilot that would allow the American public to participate in Government through Web 2.0. Why is Facebook not one of them?

Open Government… open innovation?

Andrea DiMaio’s latest blogpost is critical about how much the various federal agencies in the US are being succesful in adopting the spirit of the Open Government Directive.  Different authors have given different interpretations to the motivations behind “openness” in governance, but the US directive captures it all and builds upon the three fundamental pillars of transparency, participation and collaboration.

The application of the concept of open innovation is to be applauded. Companies like Google do not only create products for use on the Web, but also live by the Enterprise 2.0 culture. Google Labs showcases a part of the company’s research portfolio while it is still at prototype stage. The company uses this method to attract feedback that would help improve the product’s usability. The open approach has also been taken by the European Commission in its Living Labs project. The idea behind the labs network is to develop a ‘beta-culture’ which engages users’ creativity through their participation in the R&D and Innovation life-cycle. The concept of open innovation offers benefits to all actors in the system, allowing users to feel empowered to influence product development and companies/institutions a larger and live test-base for validating and integrating innovation.

Back to Washington’s Open Government Directive…

Each federal agency had until the 6th February to implement an online Open Government page and many have done so using a free public dialog tool developed by the GSA. The tool allows users to submit ideas and others to deliberate on whether or not they agree — thus raising the “popularity”  of the submission. OpenGov Tracker was launched just a few weeks ago. It allows the public to be informed from one dashboard about the interest being generated in the Open Government concept.

Veteran Affairs and NASA rank at the top by attracting 124 and 121 ideas, from 79 and 71 authors, respectively. They are followed closely by EPA which clocked 96 ideas from 76 authors. My first observation is the relatively low takeup of this system (compare with Facebook).

Andrea DiMaio made another interesting observation: a particular user has submitted the same idea of webcasting all meetings to a large number of federal agencies’ ideas collection system. This same idea ranked as the most popular idea in 20 of the 21 IdeaScales that DiMaio surveyed. The data collection using GSA’s IdeaScales is based on the usage of this electronic tool which, as already highlighted above, is far from representative of the population of the United States. But bearing this constraint in mind, DiMaio’s observations remain very valid and as he rightly points out:

   “open government enthusiasts will learn from this first experience and realize that they need a tighter connection between the idea collection process and the nature and mission of individual agencies”

While Governments are relatively late-comers into the arena of open innovation, it is encouraging to note how its adoption is felt to be directly associated with the process of democratisation.

The Evolution of “Usability” in a more UX-aware environment

The term “usability” is defined in the international standard ISO 9241-11 “Guidance on Usability”:

   The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a context of use.

ISO 9241 is a standard with 28 parts, and talks about the ergonomics of computer-related products. The concepts behind usability as a quality aspect in software are further entrenched in ISO/IEC 9126 standard on “Software Engineering – Product Quality”. ISO 13407 is a development-oriented standard on “Human-centred design processes for interactive systems” and seeks to provide guidance on human-centred design activities throughout the life cycle of computer-based interactive systems. The principles are thus well understood and have been researched profusely within the area of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

Web 2.0 has however added a new dimension to usability. Users no longer fit a “specified” profile (as thought out in the definition quoted from ISO 9241-11 mentioned above) which may be used to form a clear design approach. Instead, Digital Natives want to interact with Web systems in a way that they can personalise their experience – products need to evolve and adapt to the individual user’s specific requirements. Myhill (2004) borrows the term ‘Desire Line’ from the area of urban planning to describe this concept as follows:

   A desire line normally refers to a worn path showing where people naturally walk. Desire lines are an ultimate expression of human desire or natural purpose. An optimal way to design pathways in accordance with natural human behaviour, is not to design them at all. Simply plant grass seed and let the erosion inform you about where the paths need to be. Stories abound of university campuses being constructed without any pathways to them. Planners responsible earn great respect for their cunning in allowing the desire lines to form before finalizing the construction of the paved pathways.

Bevan and Curson’s (1998) tutorial on Planning and Implementing User Centred Design makes reference to Bevan’s (1996) Usability Context Analysis methodology for “gathering and documenting information about the characteristics of the intended users, tasks and environments.” This is based on the recommendations of the aforementioned ISO 13407. While this remains recommended even in the development of Web 2.0 systems, the concept of “desire lines” and thus the ability for Web systems to adapt to the user’s needs through usage itself, becomes ever more relevant. Myhill (2004) cites Belam, Martin (2003) who describe a usability aspect of the BBCi Web Site where the “web user interface and the information structure, such as their subject index” are adapted “based on what people are typing into the Search facility” which are, in turn, checked for “desire lines” on an hourly basis. The concept of tailoring the site to ‘hits’ has now evolved to tailoring the site to the individual ‘user’. This ‘intelligence’ is in fact now considered standard – Google uses it to tailor ads, Amazon uses it to recommend other purchases you can make, etc…

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned Roto (2007) as I believe it is one of the key works of the UX Manifesto.  Roto, from Nokia Research Centre, notes – and I agree – that it is important to note the subjectivity introduced by “experience” since this makes each user a different stakeholder to product design and each experience a personal perception. Usability, as may be confirmed by the definition in ISO 9241-11, is what Roto calls “a product attribute”. A User Experience (UX) starts with the expectations raised by peers, is formed during the interaction with the product and continues to be affected beyond the interaction stage by all that we all that I hear about it or its manufacturer. In this sense, Usability is only a subset of UX.