Redesigning that first encounter with online government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Scola in the Washington Post: “Teardowns,” Samuel Hulick calls them, and by that he means his step-by-step dissections of how some of world’s most popular digital services — Gmail, Evernote, Instragram — welcome new users. But the term might give an overly negative sense of what Hulick is up to. The Portland, Ore., user-experience designer highlights both the good and bad in his critiques, and his annotated slideshows, under the banner of UserOnboard, have gained a following among design aficionados.

Now Hulick is partnering with two of those fans, a pair of Code for America fellows, to encourage the public to do the same for, say, the process of applying for food stamps.  It’s called CitizenOnboard.
Using the original UserOnboard is like taking a tour through some of the digital sites you know best — but with an especially design-savvy friend by your side pointing out the kinks. “The user experience,” or UX on these sites, “is often tacked on haphazardly,” says Hulick, who launched UserOnboard in December 2013 and who is also the author of the recent book “The Elements of User Onboarding.” What’s he looking for in a good UX, he says, is something non-designers can spot, too. “If you were the Web site, what tone would you take? How would you guide people through your process?”
Hulick reviews what’s working and what’s not, and adds a bit of sass: Gmail pre-populates its inbox with a few welcome messages: “Preloading some emails is a nice way to deal with the ‘cold start’ problem,” Hulick notes. Evernote nudges new users to check out its blog and other apps: “It’s like a restaurant rolling out the dessert cart while I’m still trying to decide if I even want to eat there.” Instagram’s first backdrop is a photo of someone taking a picture: “I’m learning how to Instagram by osmosis!”….
CitizenOnboard’s pitch is to get the public to do that same work. They suggest starting with state food stamp programs. Hulick tackled his. The onboarding for Oregon’s SNAP service is 118 slides long, but that’s because there is much to address. In one step, applications must, using a drop-down menu, identify how those in their family are related to one another. “It took a while to figure out who should be the relation ‘of’ the other,” Hulick notes in his teardown. “In fact, I’m still not 100% sure I got it right.”…”

OSHA Will Put Workplace Safety Data Online as 'Nudge' to Employers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Eidelson at Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “Starting in January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will require employers to notify the government within 24 hours every time someone loses an eye, suffers an amputation, or gets admitted to the hospital with an injury sustained at work. The agency estimates that tens of thousands of injuries go unreported. “Workplace injuries and fatalities are absolutely preventable,” Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in early September. “These new requirements will help OSHA focus its resources and hold employers accountable for preventing them.”

The rule replaces regulations that require companies to report only incidents that result in three or more hospitalizations—“catastrophes,” in agency parlance. (Workplace deaths will still have to be reported within 8 hours.) OSHA head David Michaels, an assistant secretary in the Department of Labor, announced on Sept. 11 that the injury data will be made public on OSHA’s website.
The site already includes information on worker fatalities and catastrophes….
OSHA is one of several federal agencies taking the name-and-shame approach. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering a plan to begin online posting of first-person narratives culled from consumer complaints about banks, credit card companies, and payday lenders. Other agencies already put recall and complaint information online, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. OSHA’s smaller sibling agency, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, lists on its website workplace incidents like fires that could have harmed someone but didn’t.
The idea is that people increasingly accustomed to looking up product reviews on Amazon.com and restaurant reviews on Yelp might do the same when they choose an employer, car, or credit card company. “Exposing problems early can help other consumers avoid similar problems before they become victims, too,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in July. “The market could react to problems as they occur, not years later.”…”

The measurable me: the influence of self-quantification on the online user's decision-making process

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mimmi Sjöklint for the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers: “The advancement of information technology, online accessibility and wearable computing is fostering a new playground for users to engage with quantified data sets. On one hand, the online user is continuously yet passively exposed to different types of quantified data in online interfaces and mobile apps. On the other hand, the user may actively and knowingly be gathering quantified data through ubiquitous sensory devices, such as wearable technology, e.g. the Jawbone UP and Fitbit. In both instances, the user is exposed to versions of self-quantified measures, namely the aggregation and transformation of personally attributed activity into quantified data. This study approaches the adoption of wearables by looking at active and passive self-quantification online and explores how it may influence and support the user’s cognitive processes and subsequent decision-making process.”

Using Crowds for Evaluation Tasks: Validity by Numbers vs. Validity by Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Christoph Hienerth and Frederik Riar: “Developing and commercializing novel ideas is central to innovation processes. As the outcome of such ideas cannot fully be foreseen, the evaluation of them is crucial. With the rise of the internet and ICT, more and new kinds of evaluations are done by crowds. This raises the question whether individuals in crowds possess necessary capabilities to evaluate and whether their outcomes are valid. As empirical insights are not yet available, this paper deals with the examination of evaluation processes and general evaluation components, the discussion of underlying characteristics and mechanism of these components affecting evaluation outcomes (i.e. evaluation validity). We further investigate differences between firm- and crowd-based evaluation using different cases of applications, and develop a theoretical framework towards evaluation validity, i.e. validity by numbers vs. the validity by expertise. The identified factors that influence the validity of evaluations are: (1) the number of evaluation tasks, (2) complexity, (3) expertise, (4) costs, and (5) time to outcome. For each of these factors, hypotheses are developed based on theoretical arguments. We conclude with implications, proposing a model of evaluation validity.”

Values at Play in Digital Games

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum: “All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation—as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed—may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games.
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.”

Just how well has the 'nudge unit' done?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Broadcast at BBC News: “Nudging – concept of changing people’s behaviour without recourse to the law but to psychology – has been one of the big policy ideas of the last few years
The coalition government set up a “nudge unit”, officially called the Behavioural Insights Team, in 2010. But just how successful has it been?
David Halpern, who heads the unit, told the Today programme’s Evan Davis that it has enjoyed a wide range of successes. He said that by adding the line “‘most people pay their tax on time’ to a letter you get a significant increase in the number of people who pay their tax on time and you get a reduction in complaints.
“It turns out it’s a nicer way, to encourage people than to threaten them.”
But Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told the programme that he did not “object against nudging per se but against the philosophy underlying it, namely that basically that people are born more or less stupid.”
There is, he said, a real alternative to nudging, that of educating people to become “risk-savvy citizens: to invest in to making people competent”.
 

In Tests, Scientists Try to Change Behaviors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wall Street Journal: “Behavioral scientists look for environmental ‘nudges’ to influence how people act. Pelle Guldborg Hansen, a behavioral scientist, is trying to figure out how to board passengers on a plane with less fuss.
The goal is to make plane-boarding more efficient by coaxing passengers to want to be more orderly, not by telling them they must. It is one of many projects in which Dr. Hansen seeks to encourage people, when faced with options, to make better choices. Among these: prompting people to properly dispose of cigarette butts outside of bars and clubs and inducing hospital workers to use hand sanitizers.
Dr. Hansen, 37 years old, is director of the Initiative for Science, Society & Policy, a collaboration of the University of Southern Denmark and Roskilde University. The concept behind his work is known commonly as a nudge, dubbed such because of the popular 2008 book of the same name by U.S. academics Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that examined how people make decisions.
At the Copenhagen airport, Dr. Hansen recently deployed a team of three young researchers to mill about a gate in terminal B. The trio was dressed casually in jeans and wore backpacks. They blended in with the passengers, except for the badges they wore displaying airport credentials, and the clipboards and pens they carried to record how the boarding process unfolds.
Thirty-five minutes before a flight departed, the team got into position. Andreas Rathmann Jensen stood in one corner, then moved to another, so he could survey the entire gate area. He mapped where people were sitting and where they placed their bags. This behavior can vary depending, for example, if people are flying alone, with a partner or in a group.
Johannes Schuldt-Jensen circulated among the rows and counted how many bags were blocking seats and how many seats were empty as boarding time approached. He wore headphones, though he wasn’t listening to music, because people seem less suspicious of behavior when a person has headphones on, he says. Another researcher, Kasper Hulgaard, counted how many people were standing versus sitting.
The researchers are mapping out gate-seating patterns for a total of about 500 flights. Some early observations: The more people who are standing, the more chaotic boarding tends to be. Copenhagen airport seating areas are designed for groups, even though most travelers come solo or in pairs. Solo flyers like to sit in a corner and put their bag on an adjacent seat. Pairs of travelers tend to perch anywhere as long as they can sit side-by-side….”

The Innovators

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kirkus Review of “The innovators. How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson: “Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground,” Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs, 2011, etc.) writes in this sweeping, thrilling tale of three radical innovations that gave rise to the digital age. First was the evolution of the computer, which Isaacson traces from its 19th-century beginnings in Ada Lovelace’s “poetical” mathematics and Charles Babbage’s dream of an “Analytical Engine” to the creation of silicon chips with circuits printed on them. The second was “the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.” In the rarefied neighborhood dubbed Silicon Valley, new businesses aimed for a cooperative, nonauthoritarian model that nurtured cross-fertilization of ideas. The third innovation was the creation of demand for personal devices: the pocket radio; the calculator, marketing brainchild of Texas Instruments; video games; and finally, the holy grail of inventions: the personal computer. Throughout his action-packed story, Isaacson reiterates one theme: Innovation results from both “creative inventors” and “an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.” Who invented the microchip? Or the Internet? Mostly, Isaacson writes, these emerged from “a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas….Innovation is not a loner’s endeavor.” Isaacson offers vivid portraits—many based on firsthand interviews—of mathematicians, scientists, technicians and hackers (a term that used to mean anyone who fooled around with computers), including the elegant, “intellectually intimidating,” Hungarian-born John von Neumann; impatient, egotistical William Shockley; Grace Hopper, who joined the Army to pursue a career in mathematics; “laconic yet oddly charming” J.C.R. Licklider, one father of the Internet; Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and scores of others.
Isaacson weaves prodigious research and deftly crafted anecdotes into a vigorous, gripping narrative about the visionaries whose imaginations and zeal continue to transform our lives.”

Neuroeconomics, Judgment, and Decision Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New edited book by Evan A. Wilhelms, and Valerie F. Reyna: “This volume explores how and why people make judgments and decisions that have economic consequences, and what the implications are for human well-being. It provides an integrated review of the latest research from many different disciplines, including social, cognitive, and developmental psychology; neuroscience and neurobiology; and economics and business.

The book has six areas of focus: historical foundations; cognitive consistency and inconsistency; heuristics and biases; neuroeconomics and neurobiology; developmental and individual differences; and improving decisions. Throughout, the contributors draw out implications from traditional behavioral research as well as evidence from neuroscience. In recent years, neuroscientific methods have matured, beyond being simply correlational and descriptive, into theoretical prediction and explanation, and this has opened up many new areas of discovery about economic behavior that are reviewed in the book. In the final part, there are applications of the research to cognitive development, individual differences, and the improving of decisions.
The book takes a broad perspective and is written in an accessible way so as to reach a wide audience of advanced students and researchers interested in behavioral economics and related areas. This includes neuroscientists, neuropsychologists, clinicians, psychologists (developmental, social, and cognitive), economists and other social scientists; legal scholars and criminologists; professionals in public health and medicine; educators; evidence-based practitioners; and policy-makers.”