How Innovators and Early Adopters Fail at the Technology Adoption Lifecycle
21 June 2009
There is a very robust and lively conversation about eGovernment being held by government employees online. A lot of great ideas for improving citizen access, transparency and data distribution are being tested and implemented. Unfortunately, there’s an even larger group of government employees, officials, and managers who aren’t engaged in using the Internet to keep tabs on the newest trends.
I ran across the Technology Adoption Lifecycle the other day, and immediately started applying it to different people I know and different situations I’ve been in. The rest of this post heavily concerns the TAL, so it might be helpful to have that link open in another tab.
You’ve got the innovators, who come up with the great ideas in the first place, and then you have the early adopters, the people hop on the newest site, gadget, or trend as soon as it appears. The online conversation about eGovernment takes place almost totally between these two groups. Eventually they catch the interest of the early majority and you end up with the Feds starting to use social media to help expand their capabilities.
The problem with this paradigm is that the innovators and early adopters are too busy creating new envelopes to push and early majority folks are too busy settling in to their new digs to pay any attention to the two remaining groups: late majority adopters and laggards.
These are the CTOs, CIOs, PIOs and department heads who are still running Windows 98 at 800×600 screen resolution and using Netscape or IE6 as their browser of choice. They don’t use the Internet for anything but email (even though email has nothing to do with the Internet) and they get their technology news through print media trade publications.
The trade rags are fairly good at what they do, but it is in their nature to direct their content toward late majority adopters and laggards. You don’t read much about the possibilities of the Internet, information design, or web design in these publications. When you do read something about the Internet it is usually framed programmatically or in terms of infrastructure; how so-and-so used WiFi to make their job easier. From time to time they touch on Facebook (security risk!) or Twitter (security risk!) but the tone of the articles tends to run along the lines of “Look at this new-fangled contraption. Huh. Amazing what they can do nowadays.” Emphasis on they. There’s no encouragement, education or endorsement of what the rest of us are so gung-ho about.
The late majority adopters and laggards need to be brought into the conversation, and it is high time that the rest of us work on doing so. They aren’t going online to get their information, so we have to reach them through the channels they are used to. Working with trade publications to improve their reporting and coverage is a great way to start, since these new ideas will be presented in a familiar format. It also couldn’t hurt to send your boss, colleague, or peer links to relevant sites or articles online as a way of broadening their horizons. I’ll even start the email and let you fill in the links: “I noticed you read [Generic Government Trade Magazine], I thought you might be interested in the sites listed below, which offer a lot more content on similar topics. In particular, I found these articles to be very informative.”
Part of the reason the late majority adopters and laggards are who they are is because the rest of us aren’t talking to them. By engaging them in the work we do, it’s quite possible that we can increase the pace of the cultural change needed for truly effective egovernance.
Perils of the In-house Designer
16 June 2009
This post is my own personal opinion and is not necessarily the opinion of my employer.
While not explicitly part of my job description, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to keep fairly up to date with the State of the Art in web design. This typically entails reading a bunch of weblogs and testing out new techniques as they show up on my radar. Eventually I hope to even use a few of these in sites I design. For example, I used CSS rounded corners on this site, but you won’t see them if you’re using Internet Explorer.
And that’s exactly where the biggest peril I run into as an in-house designer rears its head. Most of our clients and managers expect websites to look the same in every browser (c.f. Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?).
The chatter about design in the freelance (or self-employed) design world (which is where just about all of the web designers who write about web design make their living) doesn’t have much sympathy for the in-house designer. There is much talk about refusing to support or debug a site in IE6 when designing, or forcing IE6 users to pass by a nag-screen, or providing a completely different stylesheet (by far the nicest route) for users of that most-wretched of browsers.
I completely agree with them in spirit. In practice, however, these methods are impracticable. The market share for IE6 is 14.5% as of May 2009, three times that of Google Chrome & IE8, and nearly 5 times that of Safari. Most of the agencies we do work for have employees who are restricted to using IE6, and blocked behind a firewall so they can only access pages on our network. I’m probably the only one at work who cares if a site looks right in Opera or Safari, but I’m definitely not the only one who feels that users of our sites should be able to do just as much in IE6, and have just as nice of a time doing it, as folks who are using Firefox or some other browser. Even if it is a pain in the ass.
So when I read about the newest hotness in HTML5, or CSS3, I long for the chance to try and implement just a few of the options provided. At the same time, I know it isn’t worth my time to try it, because I’m going to have to spend a day or more tweaking a design to look right in IE6. I could probably get twice as much work done as I do now if I constructed a site’s layout using tables, or just sliced it up in Photoshop, and no layman would notice the difference. My work would be half-quality though, not coded to standards, and a nightmare for anyone with accessibility needs.
Having a standard in place gives web designers the benefit of something to strive for. The tug-of-war between keeping my skills bleeding-edge sharp and meeting the needs of our clients means that I will probably never meet those standards or the expectations of my fellow web designers. Sometimes it is tough to read the derision directed at designers who don’t have the choice on what or how to work on a project. For the people like me who’ve been following along, web design weblogs have convinced us that a site can have some flex across browsers. Now it is just preaching to the choir. If anyone has figured out how to convince a non-technical-oriented director of a government agency (who has a lot more important things to take care of than listening to a web designer explain why IE6 is the problem) that a site doesn’t need to look the same in all browsers, I haven’t seen it. Please advise.
Them’s the breaks in my little corner of the web world.
Ask Design State
26 May 2009
I added a new section to The Design State tonight. It’s called Ask Design State, and if you submit a question, I’ll do my best to provide you with an informative 1-minute video answer that will be posted here. If you’ve got a question that relates to anything listed on or related to the items listed on the question page, send me a note.
Waterwings: A Quick Start to Online Communities
19 May 2009
A month or so ago I spoke about creating hyperlocal community websites at the Cleveland Westside Leadership Training Collaborative. This is a three session course offered by a group of Cleveland CDCs to assist in training up-and-coming neighborhood activists/leaders. I was part of their guinea pig group the first year of the program.
I was asked to speak because in a previous life I spent four years running a hyperlocal community weblog for my Tremont neighborhood. I spent around a half hour or so giving an overview of the possibilities and answering quite a few questions about implementation. I was asked to put together a quick start guide with some links to the options I was talking about.
I’ve finally finished a first draft of the the guide, which I’ve called Waterwings: A Quick Start to Online Communities. This guide is deliberately targeted to folks who don’t have a strong technical background, and is meant more to help get them online doing anything at all than teach them how to be an award-winning A-list blogger.
It is deliberately simple and sparse. I don’t want to overwhelm these people with facts, figures and options. I’d rather help them get their feet wet online in the first place, and they can learn to do the butterfly or backstroke later.
I recognize, however, that my guide is still quite rough around the edges, and that I might be missing some good sources for these folks to utilize. I’ve deliberately left out social media sources like Twitter and Facebook, because I feel they might be initially too intimidating for users to adequately direct and form an online community. So please, if you disagree with anything in the guide, think I’ve left out something important, or have a question, comment, or point to make about it, let me know.
PART 2 – W3C eGov Note: Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web
14 May 2009
Read Part 1 of this post here.
Yesterday I made it up to the Interoperability section of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) eGovernment Interest Group Note: Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web.
I finished the document today, and instead of examining the remaining items in detail I’m going to just spin out some different summaries of what I see as the points of the thing.
The final four issues in the note; Open Government Data, Interoperability, Multi-Channel Delivery, and Identification and Authentication all deal with the technical side of eGovernment, the backend geekery that I love to jaw with the developers about for hours. These are important topics, well worth detailed consideration, but their success depends very much on maneuvering through the challenges of the cultural bureaucracy I described yesterday; the stuff that Gov 2.0 proponents end up jawing about to the decision-makers.
It seems like the W3C eGov group has a good handle on the current state of eGovernment as I understand it. The Note identifies socio-cultural and technological challenges to providing useful and cutting-edge eGovernment services and acknowledges that economic and legislative obstacles to implementing those services exist. At the same time, the note also describes the benefits that an engaged eGov action plan can have for both the efficiency of government agencies and the effectiveness of their interaction with citizens.
Basically, government entities need to simultaneously:
- Focus on providing secure, open, useful and reusable data:
- while engaging with their citizens on mutual terms; and
- welcoming citizen interest, input, and feedback; and
- Reassure senior decision makers that:
- the benefits of providing secure, open, useful, and reusable data outweigh the risks; and
- that welcoming citizen interest, input, and feedback will increase the trust and confidence that citizens have in their government.
This note isn’t meant to offer solutions or guidance for eGov proponents. It’s a State of eGovernment Address, an important calibration point for folks to use in their own quests to create their own solutions and guidelines for the future of eGovernment.
The W3C group knows just how big this eGovernment sandwich is, and has a pretty comprehensive list of all the ingredients it contains. Now all that remains is figuring out the best way eat it.
PART 1 – W3C eGov Note: Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web
13 May 2009
Today the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) eGovernment Interest Group published a Note which is the culmination of their first year of analysis on the history, current state, and hopeful future of eGovernment. Entitled Improving Access to Government through Better Use of the Web, the document serves as a great first step toward codifying the ways which eGovernment should be utilized to serve a variety of roles and interests. Much of the document provides an overview of the materials and assumptions used to develop the analysis and direction of the Interest Group; I’m just going to pull out a few of the ‘graphs that caught my eye and comment on them. This is the first of two posts on this note, as I’m only halfway through it.
“While increasingly cognizant of the opportunities afforded by social media, typically governments are still operating a broadcasting paradigm. Web sites are a vehicle for mass communication and for the delivery of transactional services. In this environment statistics showing the scale of usage are celebrated as indicators of success in themselves. The structure of a government Web estate is often organizationally driven. This is problematic as the structures of government continually change, resulting in significant disruption to the presentation of government on the Web. Government departments can be surprisingly transient entities. Transposed to namespaces and URIs this is quick sand [sic] on which to build an essential information infrastructure using the Web.
…
Firmly in the provide mode many governments have devised a channels strategy for their Web estate. This has been developed primarily from a communications perspective. What is more generally absent is a data strategy from a Web engineering perspective. It is rare in government to think about Web site development as the engineering of basic information infrastructure.
…
The reality is that not many officials responsible for commissioning or managing government Web sites are familiar with the basic principles of the Web‚ for example Architecture of the World Wide Web [WEBARCH]. Unfortunately, lacking a government context and being aimed at a more expert audience, the W3C guidelines and specifications are almost impenetrable to many Web decision makers in government.”
Trends and Modalities of the Web and the Information Consumer
This essentially boils down to the idea that most government entities are stuck talking at their constituents instead of to or with them. It’s like watching the evening news, citizens have to take whatever is given to them, and don’t have easy means of responding or interacting, other than passively. It’s a Web 1.0 mindset, but one that government entities are very comfortable with; it provides total message control and requires the least amount of overhead both in terms of the work required to post and thought required for how useful the content will be. That sounds pretty harsh, but I’m building a picture here. (I think it is the same one that the Interest Group is building as well.) Consider that
“David Weinberger, one of the co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto [CLUETRAIN], observes that, “there is an inverse relationship between control and trust”. If true that has profound implications for government. Governments may seek to trade a loss of control through greater transparency and openness in return for an anticipated increase in public trust.”
and that
“Public servants need to be given access to the Web sites that citizens are using in order for them to be able to engage. The “lock-down” culture that exists in many government IT departments often restricts access to the more interactive Web sites for security reasons. This badly hampers the effective engagement with online communities by public servants. Many governments are blocking employee access to Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, and others where conversations occur, interaction is embraced, individuals align around similar goals, issues, and interests, and participatory and engaged communities are formed. Security issues, employee rights and misdeeds, and lack of familiarity with the tools are impacts that governments must content [sic] with, however, in taking time to do so limits the amount of participation, feedback, and interaction from constituents.”
(emphasis mine) – Access of Public Servants to Web Sites that Citizens Are Using
and it becomes obvious that
“There needs to be training and support for public servants in the use of appropriate tools and techniques to use the Web to engage, particularly for the development of public policy. Engaging with online communities over the development of public policy will involve significant culture change in government. To achieve it will require clear leadership at senior levels. As the use of the Web for engagement is so new in government there are few people with both the practical knowledge and the seniority and experience to provide this leadership.”
(emphasis mine) – Training, Support and Cultural Change
The emerging picture is described quite tactfully, but the easiest way to explain it is by being quite blunt. Many senior decision-makers at government entities are any number of the following:
- Ignorant of the opportunities that the Internet has to offer them in terms of engaging their citizens;
- Aware of the opportunities, but afraid or ignorant on how to implement them;
- Unwilling or afraid to release control over their message in order to provide additional services outside of the “broadcast paradigm”; and
- Unable to implement or utilize these options due to budgetary, personnel or various other economic or bureaucratic reasons.
This is a great justification for continuing the W3C eGovernment Interest Group. As I saw on a Twitter feed today, someone needs to be able to “translate tech to wonk.” That’s definitely something that this Interest Group can do, by
- Providing guidance for senior officials – walking them down the path to more effective use of their web presence;
- Defining best practices and standards for the implementation of current and developing web technologies; and
- Offering direction toward other possibilities that will encourage further innovation in eGovernment practices.
One last quote for today:
“When government information is made available through portals, e.g. the so called one-stop shops, the government intends to build the consumer’s view in order to provide the information in the most usable way. Even when the PSI is provided by means of an API, the methods to access it are often restricting the view that a given consumer can have or need of that information.
Providing Open Government Data allows the consumer to use the information in the most appropriate way to achieve the intended goal.”
What Are the Main Benefits of Publishing Open Government Data?: Multiple views, not just one
This is exactly what Jeff Veen talks about when he encourages folks to not tell users a story with your site or application, but instead allow visitors to use your site or application to tell their own story. I talked a bit about this in my post about Jeff Veen & Hay Net. User-empathy is definitely something that many government websites could use a bit more of.
More on all of this once I’ve had a chance to read the rest of the note. You can read Part 2 here.
National Design Policy Council Video Submission
4 April 2009
I just completed my submission for the National Design Policy Council’s video campaign. I figured that it would be helpful to explain the importance of design to non-designers through the use of practical examples. Here are the questions I answered:
- What role does design play in US economic competitiveness?
- What role does design play in the US democratic governance?
- In what specific ways, would a national design policy further enable design to play those roles?
- What would you pledge to do to help design play that role?
Here’s the video:
I created a separate page for this little project so that when this post rolls off the front page, the information will still be easy to find.
Writing for Government Websites
28 March 2009
If you want to know how folks read webpages, Jakob Nielsen will tell you right away: They don’t. The average user skims and scans the pages they visit in order to determine whether the page content is relevant to their interests. The point: cut to the chase. No one wants to read mission statements, statements from the director, or anything that doesn’t help direct them to the content they are looking for.
If you’re in Washington DC the week of April 5th – 10th, you can take Jakob Nielsen’s class on writing for the web.
They’ll also be in London, San Francisco and Sydney this year, but if you can’t make it to any of these conferences, you can always read through the section on his website devoted to Writing for the Web.
I tried to make this post short, so you wouldn’t skim it. Did you?
CNN Money on Recovery.gov
21 March 2009
I was interviewed by Steve Hargreaves at CNN Money for an article about the federal government’s stimulus tracking site Recovery.gov. Entitled Recovery.gov’s citizen accounting effort, the article examines the efficacy of the site in terms of its goal of being an unprecedented example of government transparency.
The government’s http://www.Recovery.gov/ is supposed to be the place where everyday citizens can go and see exactly who’s getting the $787 billion in taxpayer funds designed to boost the economy.
“This is your money,” reads a statement on the Web site’s homepage. “You have a right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.”
Yet the first thing one sees on the homepage is a big pie chart saying 60% of the money is going to states and 40% to local governments, hardly the detailed breakdown the government has promised.
Recovery.gov’s citizen accounting effort, Steve Hargreaves, 19 March 2009.
The general consensus seems to be that the site could be much better, but it’s a step in the right direction. Only time will tell. Some of the things I’d like to see on Recovery.gov include:
- Front page notifications of updated content, not just news items which mainly seem to be PR blurbs;
- Get rid of the annoying pop-ups that appear when you click on an external link. This is the web equivalent of Microsoft Vista’s abominable User Account Control, a “feature” deliberately designed to annoy users. When you close the pop-up you aren’t taken to the external link. Apparently what you have to do is click on the link inside of the pop-up to actually leave the site. If I click on a link, I want to be taken to the referenced file, not receive a confusing pop-up that makes me click on the link within the window to get where I was trying to go in the first place. Designing for the lowest common denominator is a sure way to destroy the user experience;
- Granular RSS feeds for each specific category of reporting. Wordpress does this natively, and it very useful for sites with broad topical range where only certain types of information are going to be of interest for folks; and
- Make finding information more intuitive. I thought clicking on the Accountability and Transparency link made sense for finding the information I was looking for, instead it just goes to a page of memorandum boilerplate. You end up having to click through all over the place, and sometimes leave the site altogether for a State’s stimulus site to find any meaty information.
WIRED: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House?
16 March 2009
In case you missed it the first time around, like I did, WIRED has a good article about the challenges facing the Obama Administration’s attempt to drag federal government use of the Internet into the present.
A key ‘graph about the systemic challenge of this endeavor:
For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.
Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.
The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? – Evan Ratliff – 19 January 2009
The article was put together before Obama’s swearing-in, so it is interesting to see how things have played out in the few months since then. For the most part, everything seems to be consistent. The new design of whitehouse.gov and new sites like recovery.gov remain consistent with change.gov and the Obama campaign website. At the same time they suffer from the same content issues that I noted in my review of change.gov, namely, lack of real content, and ease of access to that content.
That’s a big caveat, but these new sites are still light-years better than the other 24-thousand federal government sites. Since we’re so comfortable with the rapid pace of the Internet communication, it is easy for web geeks like me to expect instantaneous improvement, but patience is definitely necessary with our expectations of turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sam 2.0.
