Making E-Government User Friendly to the "Bottom Half of the Market" : How to Reach Those Who Use Government Services Most
Presentation given at Comhairle’s National Conference 2003, Information Gateway to Inclusion
Date: 17/10/2003
Venue: Limerick, Ireland
Article
Once upon a time I had a theory which, put simply, was that computer technology is complicated because you can then charge more money for it; manufacturers can only charge peanuts for a simple word processor but they can charge hundreds of Euros for a boxful of tricks. The nice thing about this theory was that it fitted neatly with my general disdain for greedy capitalists. But I have had to abandon it. The truth is that software designers make complex products because that is more interesting than making simple ones. Just as in fashion it's more interesting and exciting to design for youth, even though older people have more money for buying clothes, the IT market still bases its activities round the interests of designers rather than consumers.
Of course, simplicity of design and conservative tastes present their own particular challenges but ingenuity is much more enlivening than elegant simplicity.
Let us start with basics. It has been well known for decades that the optimum number of factors for efficient choice is seven plus or minus two. If you have fewer choices than five the categories are two big, if you have more choices than nine the decision is too big. So think of the last time you logged on to Outlook Express or a major web site; how many choices do you think you were presented with? The usual number is well over a hundred; and when you say to a designer that a system does not work very well he (it almost always is "he") offers you yet another feature. Recently I heard a representative of a highly respected IT company recount the tale of his Damascene conversion to simplicity; I am ashamed to say that my immediate response was that scientists like him should read research rather than hoping for conversions on the road to Damascus; and I reminded him of seven plus or minus two. What he was investigating on behalf of the UK Government was why about half of the population don't want to go on-line; to which the simple answer was that the systems being offered were rubbish. Governments tend to adopt a rather moral tone about people and technology which runs something like this: if they would only apply themselves, everything would be all right. But my experience over ten years in technology and 15 years before that working in health promotion in developing countries, is that the people we think of as poor and ignorant behave in precisely the same way as people who are rich and educated; they respond to incentive. So after saying a few more words about design I want to go on to talk about: incentive; fitness for purpose; privacy; technology; and, finally intelligent systems but the different strands will be woven together rather than being treated separately.
What most legislators think about when you talk about accessibility is the establishment of some rules of measurement for compliance; some of you will be familiar with the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium. You can take an automated tool like Bobby and check whether web sites comply with a set of declared standards. The problem with this approach is that technical accessibility has just about nothing to do with usability. So, as a visually impaired person, I may visit a site which has adjustable print, descriptions of pictures, and text that can be grabbed by a screen reader; but, to take the example of the BBC Web site, the most used in Europe, it will take me more than four minutes to find the links to main channels and by the time I have gone through more than a hundred links the chances are that I will be frustrated and confused. Take another example, you log onto a search engine and ask for a report and you get hundreds of options even though hardly anyone goes past the first ten. Most of them will be wholly inappropriate. Just as we get fed up listening to announcements on the telephone before we can talk to an airline or a bank, we resent the amount of our time that is wasted at the computer by the self-indulgence of others. When we log on to perform a task we don't want to be reminded of the eight dozen other options, we just want to finish what we are doing and then go back to a menu to do the next thing. My usual test of usability is whether you can operate the system effectively while driving a car or using an average sized mobile phone; if you can't, then the system is too messy. Some of you will be familiar with the Sky Television Electronic Programme Guide which offers, currently, 387 channels, with information on the next 168 hours of broadcasting. It has discovered that this complexity is acting as a disincentive to viewers, particularly elderly viewers who watch most television. Unlike the IT industry, broadcasting is market sensitive, so you can expect radical changes here.
So why isn't the computer experience like the television experience? Why did we all struggle with video cassette recorders? The answer is that we had an incentive to record television programmes, it gave us something we wanted. So what was the first thing that almost all EU Governments put on line for our benefit? Yes, income tax forms! This was a massive Freudian slip; what it says is that Governments want to use the internet for their own benefit, not ours. If you look at most public sector web sites you will see that they are organised around departmental structures, not citizens. In most cases, too, they operate inside their traditional departmental silos as if hypertext had never been invented, allowing us to navigate all over the place without disturbing anything. The simple idea of hypertext, developed just before 1700, was that a piece of information can be classified in a variety of different ways, replacing tree structures that are inflexible because they make you put each bit of information onto only one twig of one tree; so what do we have on most information systems on the computer? Yes, endless menus designed as trees as if hypertext had never been invented.
It is also notable that most public sector sites are not really interactive at all, only ask you the questions they want answered and there is no facility to ask the questions you want and direct them to a named person. Imagine what it would be like if you could log onto your town web site and send an email directly to the person responsible for the garbage not being collected! No, most of these sites are not for us, they definitely belong to them.
In summary, then, we have complex and intimidating systems designed for the benefit of officials using traditional methods of information organisation.
After simplicity we want to give people a good reason to access a Government web site; but behind this there is a serious problem. In all EU countries, including the UK and Eire, it is those who are not on line who most use Government services. In the UK the magnitude of the problem can be expressed in terms of what I call the bottom half of the market; those with lower incomes and lower educational achievement (of course the two are linked) are much less likely to be on line but they are the people who most use Government services; the old and the poor, the 'bottom' 40%, account for over 80% of public sector transactions; so the UK Government is heading towards a situation where its £12 billion investment in the Internet will not have saved it a penny on staff costs.
We have already talked about the technology problems with computer based systems but I believe that the other crucial factor in the equation is privacy; the two biggest sets of transactions with Government concern personal finance and health, areas where people are particularly concerned with privacy. You won't find a teenager popping into the public library to use its public terminal to search for information on sexually transmitted diseases; and you won't find a householder checking benefits data when there is the possibility that her partner will walk in; remember, men are secret spenders and women are secret savers. And behind all this there are myths about the insecurity of the internet; yes, of course it is not 100% secure but it's more secure than giving a waiter your credit card for processing out of your eye line.
Now, having gone through all the bad news half way through my talk, I want to turn this on its head and explain how we can all improve.
The first questions are: what's it for? Why am I putting anything on line and what do I want people to get out of it? If you are, for example, putting a health appointments system on-line, knowing that the majority of users will be over 60, then the default print size will be much larger than the standard 10-point; in turn this will mean a simple screen array; in turn this will mean sticking to the essentials. In a country with identity cards this might mean keying in your ID number; in a country like the UK this should mean keying in your name and post code; no need for address, age, etc; the system can find all that stuff. You shouldn't, either, have to type anything about why you want the appointment; You go to the family doctor without giving a reason in advance; and if you are going to a Consultant then she knows what she specialises in. In the world of paper you had to fill forms because they lived in different boxes in different places; but now the same data can be anywhere, so we need a radical re-assessment of form filling.
Secondly, we have to be sure that the user will benefit from going on line; there has to be incentive. If it really saves the Government money then the citizen should be rewarded for taking the trouble to log on. We should also ensure that the information is organised around citizen need and not provider structure. If benefits payments are associated with sickness you don't want to log onto two different web sites, one for benefits and one for health, with different architectures and rules. And you don't want to spend time working out where your problem fits into somebody else's structure. On this point, have you noticed how few Government sites have a facility for you to type key words?
Thirdly, and this is absolutely central, are there social factors which will inhibit citizen use? I think this is quite as important as the intrinsic problems with the technology. My conclusion, my solution, is to begin immediately to design information systems around a device that all people can easily carry which is based more on the telephone keypad than a qwerty keyboard. Such a device would be both flexible and private; and if a few people don't want to buy such a thing then the state should buy one for them. This could cut out a huge amount of mess because money could be securely transferred into a device with a personalised SIM card that could only be activated with a combination of your finger print and iris.
Fourthly, we need to understand what computers are really good at. Their great attribute is that they can process masses of information almost instantly; so if you tell them something once you don't need to tell them again. Even better, the newest information systems analyse what you tell them and draw some conclusions. So, if you almost always log onto the same dozen or so web sites your computer will soon get used to that and present you with a menu of your favourites, or default presentation, that you can over rule if you want. Another example is the connection of where you live with what you want. If you log on to a bus timetable for Limerick you might be asking a question about how you get between two distant points but the likelihood is that one of the points is where you are sitting; so timetables can and should be oriented towards the site of the user. Supermarkets have developed massive systems for logging all your shopping preferences so that if you are a gin drinker they don't promote brandy to you but take you to gin special offers, or more likely, deluxe gins; so why can't public information systems do the same? If you are seventy and need health information the chances are it won't be concerning pregnancy testing. If you are under 20 and checking out leisure options, the chances are you won't want to join the local bowls club. Now of course you may want any sort of information but the use of intelligent systems to sort out probability can be very encouraging. You feel quickly that the system is there for you rather than the other way round. Of course we are very confused about what we want in this area because we say we want joined up Government but we are frightened of 'big brother'; strangely, we are prepared to give all sorts of health and financial information to unaccountable multinational companies but not to elected Governments.
My final major point brings us back to simplicity. Computers were developed by the military and were handed on to academics; and they haven't really improved since. New battlefield, hand held computer systems have been designed on the seven plus or minus two rule, only telling the soldier what he needs to know at a given time. What counts for the soldier counts for the shopper and the citizen. What keeps those in the bottom half of the market is not poverty or ignorance; underlying these is a lack of self esteem and self confidence. The last thing they need is to be intimidated by an unfriendly information system. With the telephone and the television they are in control; they can perform complex tasks like driving vehicles; they can work out fiendishly complex maths problems on sports statistics; they know every nuance of the off-side rule; they can assess character to a nicety; but they see no reason to interact with something that they rightly suspect has nothing for them. They are not the problem; we are the problem.
The scientist I mentioned earlier talked about his lifelong commitment to user centred design but his designs had never been tested on users. We say that we give people what we think they want; but when we say "think" we mean "guess". It may be necessary for the commercial sector to release untested software to retain competitive edge but that should not be a public sector consideration. If we really want to serve the 'bottom half' of the market that is where we must do our systems testing. The trouble is, we are so used to our computers that we don't know how stupid they are; after all, what other machine is switched off by pressing the "start" button? We would never put up with that kind of nonsense on our televisions and telephones. It isn't the customers who are the problem, it's us.