Minnesota.gov Design Project

Purpose: The purpose of this exercise is to generate imagery that will help us influence the imagery used in our branding, from the logo to the types of icons or photographs, colors or shapes, to any other supporting imagery that will help support the image we wish to project.

The exercise: From our last meeting, we came up with some adjectives and general descriptions of how we think our users would like their experience to be. I have also taken that list and compared it to the document from the visioning meeting last July and have drawn up a list of ten words.

For the sake of this exercise, I’ve broken those words into two groups:

group one: easy, efficient, credible, consistent, personal
group two: simple, helpful, trustworthy, relevant, adaptable

Your task is to choose one of the groups of these words, and from that group of words create a list of visuals or images that depicts the idea of one of the terms. For example, for the word “helpful” in group two, I might use an extended hand to depict the idea of being helpful.

Using the comment space to share your results, indicate which group you you chose and which word(s) your imagery correlates with.

Thanks to everyone who could attend our meeting yesterday — I thought it was most fruitful.

Our meeting reviewed six different prospective experiences and what they might characterize their ideal use of Minnesota.gov to be like. Those users include a small business owner, a resident looking for a driver’s license, a visitor, an immigrant coming to Minnesota, a county employee, and of course ourselves. Now while this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive cross-section of all our prospective users, it is meant to help us evaluate four different audiences: residents, visitors, business/organizations, and government.

Take a moment to download the branding exercise (PDF document) and review the discussion that we had. If you would like to provide further input to the discussion, please add your comments to this blog and I’ll make sure to include them into revisions of the document.

So far, the common thread of adjectives and descriptive terms to describe the ideal user experience include:

customizable, simple, connect with other user groups by function or role, credible, trustworthy, helpful, interactive, automated, informative, searchable, and easy-to-use.

If you have questions about this branding session, please contact me.

The next meeting is slated for Tuesday, December 4 from 2:30 to 4:00. Same location.

Apologies for the excessively long title, but it captures what has been on my mind the past few days and further cultivated by a blog entry I read I read about social objects and the role they play on websites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr. Before you dismiss this as irrelevant, saying “well, those aren’t government websites and they don’t apply,” switch your paradigm just a bit.

For me, the essence of government websites (from a “Web 2.0″ frame of mind) is this: I am visiting your .gov to interact with and “do” government. Specifically, I am here to get involved in the political process, converse with my elected officials, pay my taxes, acquire licenses, and interact with the faces of government that affect my life — all in a single site without having to hunt and peck through dozens of agency websites.

With that frame of mind, .gov websites should pose themselves as a social network — but instead of the context being interacting with friends and colleagues, I am interacting with government, the people, and its processes.

Hugh MacLeod makes a few good points to consider when evaluating how to build a useful service around social objects:

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around.

2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.

3. How can people share the objects?

4. Turn invitations into gifts.

5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

View entire article

If I evaluate Minnesota.gov as I hope it will become against these five principles, it could look something like this:

1. The initial social object Minnesota.gov will be built around is e-Licensing — paying for tabs, service licenses, etc. But eventually it ought to be surrounding the idea of quickly and easily finding the products or services that help us be involved Minnesotans on all levels — citizens, visitors, organizations, agencies and government employees.
2. The verbs our users perform is a bit more complex, but summed up is this: find, purchase, renew, apply. But the emphasis I imagine would lean towards finding answers/results.
3. People can share these social objects by e-mailing to others, subscribing to contextual RSS feeds, interact and discuss, and maybe even involve text messaging.
4. Turning invitations into gifts. A few ideas: perhaps people can give “credits” to others as a gift (e.g., giving fishing licenses to family/friends for their birthday, etc.), or offer first-time users a modest discount to encourage them to use the services on Minnesota.gov.
5. Charge the publishers. That’s out of realm and involves the discussion of dispersion of fees to agencies state-wide, perhaps based on the full-time employee count within a given agency.

Use this information to get you thinking differently. We don’t want a website that is just static with information only to be consumed. Instead, you want interaction and networking to take place. Spend some time on Facebook, look at all the capabilities it offers, and then ask yourself, “how can we learn from them and apply it to Minnesota.gov?”

Answer that question with an open mind and I think we’ll be well on our way to one of the best and leading .gov websites in the United States.

I originally found this through an entry on The Brand Builder blog, and is an exercise that we’ll be going through as well as we build out our brand as a state and a .gov entity.

Announcing World Usability Day 2007 Events at the University of Minnesota

The Usability Services team at the University of Minnesota will be hosting a free program of events on World Usability Day 2007, which is Thursday November 8th, to promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design. World Usability Day was started in 2005 by the Usability Professionals Association and involves 36 hours of usability-related activities around the world in 35 countries.

On November 8th, you are invited to a “World Usability Day” program jointly sponsored by the Office of Information Technology and the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota. There will be speakers on usability and accessibility in human/computer interfaces in Room 402 Walter Library (see schedule below). In addition, the Usability Services team will give usability lab tours and eye-tracker demos in Room B26 Walter Library, from 11:00 - noon, and from 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. All events are free and open to faculty, staff, students, and other visitors. No registration is required and anyone may attend.

For more information and directions to the World Usability Day events: http://1help.umn.edu/usability/wud.html

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS ON NOVEMBER 8th

11:00 a.m. - 12:00 noon Room B26 Walter Library
Open House at the Usability Lab
Usability lab staff will be available to do demos and answer questions

12:00 - 1:30 p.m. Room 402 Walter Library
Presentation: “Intro to Usability — How to Get Started”
by Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch (Associate Professor, Writing Studies) and
David Rosen (Usability Consultant, Office of Information Technology)

1:30 - 1:45 p.m. Break and networking in the 4th floor atrium, Walter Library

1:45 - 3:15 p.m. Room 402 Walter Library
Presentation: “Accessibility News: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG) 2.0 and a Web Accessibility Self-Audit Tool”
by Josh Carroll (Usability Consultant, Office of Information Technology),
Phil Kragnes (Assistive Technology Specialist, Office of Information Technology),
Kim Doberstein (Web Designer, Office of Information Technology), and
Nicole Tollefson (Web Designer, Office of Information Technology)

3:15 - 3:30 p.m. Break and networking in the 4th floor atrium, Walter Library

3:30 - 5:00 p.m. Room B26 Walter
Open House at the Usability Lab
Usability lab staff will be available to do demos and answer questions

Linda passed on a good read this afternoon to me from govtech.com, bringing content to the forefront of the conversation — content as being the source and end-all reason people will visit your website and return to it again and again.

Columnist Reid Goldsborough makes a few good points,

The appearance of your Web site is still important, helping to establish professionalism and credibility. But the information and other substantive material you provide — the “content” — matter most…

…People reading Web sites, for the most part, seek substance over style, usefulness over flash. They want to get want they want quickly.

View the article

He’s correct and it’s extremely important to keep the value of your website as a focal point in building a successful website. That said (and here’s the big “but”), good design is a VERY powerful tool to facilitate the quick and easy delivery of that content. You can have a text-only site loaded with tons of valuable content, but if your information architecture, navigation and layout design are poorly assembled, it’s no more helpful than a gorgeous website with only a few bits of information.

I encourage you to hold everything into balance — you’ll find various audiences saying “do this” or “don’t do that” or “this is the way to do things” — find the fulcrum that holds these various schools of thought in check.

Fantastic design is more than just creating nice graphics and a sophisticated layout — it’s about creating a presentation that works and facilitates your goals. Our goal: to get people to the information they need (and quickly) and to easily interact with state government on multiple levels.

This morning, Laura passed on two links to me that are a worthy read, articles that she made reference to at our meeting. I think we can certainly glean some insight from what others have already done — and done well.

It’s hard for politicians and others not to see a website as some sort of traditional publicity tool. But if you want to impress citizens, don’t show them your face. Instead, show them how to quickly and easily do what they came to do…

A website can be a wonderful way to promote a geographical area both to potential tourists, investors and the local citizens themselves. Designed and managed like the Salford website, it says: This is your website. It’s for you. What can we do to help you?

View the rest of the article at gerrymcgovern.com

The second article that Laura passed on to me has two snippets of information that are important — one about not being everything to everyone, but also not dumping ALL of our information out there because a few lawyers say we have to. OET used to be guilty of this, with an extremely excessive amount of information out on the web before we redesigned and relaunched in 2006. Through the work of our assistant commissioner (at that time) and our web advisory group, we were able to significantly reduce the amount of needless information on our public-facing website. [For clarification, that information that we “disposed” of ought to appear on an extranet, which we do not have at this time for CMS/platform reasons.]

A notable quote from the second article:

These government websites — and there are a great many of them — only pretend to be for a wider audience. In reality, what they have is only really of interest to a very small group of people. However, they make half-attempts to reach a much larger group. In doing so, they fail to serve the audiences they need to serve, and they fail to serve the wider audiences they claim to serve.

View the rest of the article at gerrymcgovern.com

For the most part, he is right… but only to a certain degree. Allow me to use Mass.gov as an example. Immediately they have broken their audience up into four groups: residents, businesses, visitors, and government. Because I think visually (and I’m sure a number of you do as well), think of the website as being a tree and these four audiences having many branches and extensions. Those extensions invariably lead to a variety of audiences — and despite Gerry McGovern’s passion for focusing on a smaller audience, I am not as convinced one can narrow it down so easily as a council website in the U.K.

Click on the photo for a diagram of what I am trying to explain. You have four main audiences, and of those four audiences your market breaks down into diverse segments. Now I’ve only illustrated a tiny fragment of the “tree” analogy, but it doesn’t take much imagination to envision how that plays out into the architecture and demands of a .gov entity. This is one area where I feel Mass.gov is at least doing things better than others. Drill through their residents, business, visitors, and government sections and you’ll see one way of dealing with approaching a diverse audience — starting at the high level, and then leading you in further where more detail is required.

If we take his comments about focusing into proper context, he was speaking specifically about their education department and reviewing their plans to cater to teachers, parents, and students. I don’t know the specifics surrounding their decision to abandon catering to students (apart from their web stats), but before one abandons an audience or market segment, you have to do two things:

• Evaluate what legitimate and valuable information you have, and
• weigh that information against what that the public demands or needs

I think those two points are the starting point to building a successful government website that the public will genuinely want to consume and interact with.

Your thoughts?

Here’s one for the road.

On thinkvitamin.com, there was a feature article about thinking of social networks not as products, but as living entities — or more accurately, a pool of living entities.

Ryan Norbauer writes,

I learned from this experiment early on a lesson that would repeat itself for the next two years: a social network isn’t a product as such. Rather, the product that a social network provides is access to a large pool of other people. Every social network, whether it be a subscription-based dating site or an advertising-funded general community, must grapple with this ineluctable fact. It’s what makes the rules for social networks different from utility applications like Basecamp and BlinkSale.

View article

I share this because it may come up in discussion: Minnesota.gov as a relative social network of sorts. In a way, we will be building a social network, but one that interacts with various facets of state government. If we keep people in the forefront of our conversations beyond just creating a fancy product, we may achieve success.

Something to think about this afternoon: a state portal as a common meeting ground to interact with state government and other citizens on many different levels.

It’s clear that we’re all on the same page — advocating for the end-user’s experience to be a fruitful and enjoyable one. Who says that interacting with state government has to be dull, bureaucratic, and filled with hoops to jump through to accomplish a simple task? Not me anyway.

Author Jesse James Garrett has created an insightful document entitled “The Elements of User Experience.” It captures (at a reasonably high level) the components that form the user’s interaction with a website or web application.

Download the PDF here (17 Kb)

It covers some basic terminology that will become a steady part of our vocabulary over the next several months, including terms like visual design, interface design, information design, and a number of other terms. Please familiarize yourself with them, as they will prove to be useful in our discussions.

If you’re interested, he also has a book that talks about the elements of user experience. It’s something you might consider adding to your list of must-reads.

Thank you everyone for attending the first meeting. I was excited to see a full turnout and some genuine enthusiasm for the project. I look forward to the progress that we will make with the meetings that will follow. If you have any comments, suggestions, or ideas for further meetings, please feel free to post them here or e-mail them to me.

I’ll keep this post short and sweet. Here are the two documents that are of most interest:

• dot_gov_state_review.pdf (2.7 MB) revised since last distributed, including fixed spelling errors, form field issues, and link issues from Adobe InDesign.
• presentation_20071023.ppt (4.8 MB) powerpoint presentation from our meeting, which includes some notes in the PP note feature.

If you would like to download just the rough time line for our project, you can download the .png graphic by clicking the thumbnail on the right. Just a reminder: the time line is based upon the assumption that the e-licensing project launches July 1, 2008. At this point, the date is not official and may be pushed out even further.