eGovernment Challenge dwarfs all Technical Considerations

Catriona Campbell of The Usability Company and Matt Hopgood of Sapient shared a platform at the AIGA Experience Design meeting on eGovernment in London last week. Between them they revealed a many-headed, slow-working but highly committed approach in Government to meeting deadlines of 2005 for online services.

The event was introduced by Louise Ferguson, who illustrated the wide range of applications for which ICT was being used, or considered for use, in the public sector. She began to examine the possibilities for joined up government that these initiatives might bring.

Campbell took the discussion forward by looking at how usability work could support government’s particular challenges. Reflecting on take-up among service users, she pointed out research can reveal that a young unemployed man might want to be in contact with the dole office using SMS, not the phone or email.

But even where usability work was mature and had penetrated into government Web development as a tool, there was still too little analysis of the benefit, she argued. We should be getting teams to monitor before and after usability work, she suggested, and helping them to conduct this kind of work.

Lastly, she stressed that even guidance to use usability in development was not enough. 'We should insist it's in contracts,' she said. Otherwise, she warned, it could take the 10 years that accessibility took to be seriously considered in commissioning work.

Hopgood's presentation was a small window on 2 years of work with three central government departments building a content management framework. Sapient is working with the e-Delivery team in the Office of the e-Envoy. Even as he reflected on what he had learnt about working with Government, the impression was of much left unsaid about the story of the project. Nonetheless, he packed a lot in on the evening itself; if it is a subject of particular interest to you, it is worth trying to catch him presenting.

Highlights included pointing to 400 years of history in the development of government services: 'That is not to be underestimated, you have got to be mindful of that when you think about design processes.'

He noted that targets had shifted from 'all' government services online by 2005 (or 2004 by the most ambitious local authorities such as Kent County Council, who was represented at the evening), to talking of 'key' services.

Then he revealed why even this would be a tall order. 'There is no "Government" as such,' he said. 'It's autonomous departments and they don't always take notice of each other; they just share customers.'

Although departments have a clear sense of mission - something that all the speakers stressed - they do not give briefs of the kind that design agencies are used to working with. And they do not work at a speed that agencies find easy either to budget or to incorporate with other work.

Sapient were charged with building a flexible system, incorporating accessibility and usability requirements, that could underlie the pages published by each department. This would give a consistent experience of important features like search or help. Delivery, style and content could then be added to a unified interaction layer.

Hopgood described the goal as to 'cater for an undefined piece of content to be published in an unspecified manner by one or many users with differing roles'.

So a pattern book was created with templates. This, it turns out, was the simple part; selling it into the practice of the teams was more difficult. 'Because it was done before we spoke to them, they immediately assumed that it couldn't meet their needs and were reticent.' He describes its reception: they consented to take the pattern book and look at it but said they would then be back to get the stuff for their particular pages. In the event, after a few weeks with the pattern book, all was well.

Turning to look at joining-up government, he concluded that the main challenges were not the technical ones, these were dwarfed by social factors.

The discussion following the presentations was not extended, but several points were raised:
* there is compartmentalisation of people into different service needs,
* there is conflict between a user-centred and an organisation-centred approach,
* much Web service provision has not progressed beyond publishing, it has not reached a transactional stage,
* public sector IT is owned by two major companies who control the transactional side of user experience, but don’t care about users,
* in the end, it's not about how fast service users can make their requests, but how fast the provider can respond appropriately.

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