Kristina Williams
"Designing with Empathy"
"Designing with Empathy"
The first exemplar that I thought of was the Indiana Department of Education's InView. InView is the database website that makes all school data public facing. This means that any member of the public automatically has access to this data. One benefit of sharing this data is the increase in transparency about the schools.
Each school in Indiana has it's own profile. This profile will include information on the population, student performance, educator performance, finances, and environment.
The environment section provided important insights. The first is that the data is presented in context. The example on the left shows this school's student behavior. You can see that 7.1% of it's population has been given an in school suspension and that the state average is 4.8%.
By providing the viewer context, it is easier for them to evaluate what the data means.
The other important insight from this page was to make sure the meaning of your numbers is presented clearly. There is no indication on this page if the 7.1% refers to "of the population" or "in relation to the population". This ambiguity leads to questions about how this number is calculated and what it could really means. In contrast, below this they do a really good job of making the meaning of the number understood. They have the school as having 208 safety and disciplinary incidents. There is no ambiguity about this number and it's meaning. I may have follow up questions which would result in me pressing the "View Details" button.
The second exemplar that I am looking at is the City of Evansville website. This website doesn't seem to have any space dedicated to the transparency of data; however, I found the website well designed in terms of showing transparency about a number of different aspects of the city. The website's goal is to help people with different roles navigate the city easy and effectively.
I choose to look a Evansville because it is also a city that houses a university and is located in Southern Indiana. As such, there are similar cultural elements to this city.
The biggest insight I gained from the Evansville website was the increased experience of transparency through the ease of navigation. Each section of their menu was clearly worded and easy to understand what was going to be in the drop down menu.
Furthermore, I liked that they included different drop down menus for residents and visitors. I noticed that some items were in multiple drop down menus because they applied to multiple sections. This helped increase the experience of transparency for me because it increase the ease of access.
The third exemplar that I looked at was the city of Fishers, Indiana. They have a web page specifically for increasing transparency for their constituents. They state on the site:
"Transparency is important to the City of Fishers. Below you will find resources to access information from the City on a variety of topics. If you cannot find what you are looking for here, please call City Hall at 317-595-3111 between 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. and someone will assist you."
The page itself looks well organized but overwhelming. It is laid out in columns with headers denoting different public sectors. Each section has links to various topics of interest within their domain. Some have paragraphs describing the public sectors importance or role within the government.
There are a number of insights to be gained by this example. The first is visual consistency. Upon first looking at this, I expected that each blue header was a different public sector that I needed to understand. It isn't until writing this that I understood that they are only providing information on two sectors. The headers being the same size, color, and weight added to this confusion.
The second insight that I gain is that this formatting gives the experience of frustration. If I want to find information, I have to click through several different links without knowing if that' what I'm looking for and a lot of these links are PDF files. This causes frustration and a drop in perceived transparency in my experience because it feels like they are hiding information by overloading me with provided information.
My takeaways for this help remind me that one way to increase transparency is to increase the perception of transparency. Simply providing all the data does not make it transparent to the public. Instead increasing the ease for the public to find the data they are interested in and a way to understand that data help make the public feel the government is being transparent with them.