This is a rule I’ve been using for a while now. Great for making web apps “good”, but can be used in other places too (product design, customer service, copywriting, advertising). Being “good” is a route to “win”.

80% practicality (“job done”); 10% glamour; 10% character.

So how does it work?

“Job done” practicality is the price of entry for your app (or product etc). You need to to give the user what they want, helping them achieve their goal easily and with minimal fuss. If you can’t deliver on this, the app or product will probably fail. It won’t be good, it won’t sell, it won’t gain users. You need to at least do what it says on the tin. That can be a lot of work, as rule of thumb, probably 80% of your effort.

Being ruthless about delivering practically is a great tactic for many reasons, including:

• can reduce your overall costs (by removing un-needed stuff that you have to make and support)
• benefits users (by decreasing the friction of using your app or product)

Practicality also has a couple of serious limitations:

• doesn’t distinguish you much from your competitors. Being better at “job done” might keep your existing customers, but it probably won’t create passionate advocacy and recommendation. Passionate advocacy and recommendation is great, it’s a route to “win”.
• practicality alone tends to lack warmth, soul, personality….the stuff that makes us human

Glamour make people feel smart, make things shiny, make people go ‘ooh’.

Emphasising glamour might sound shallow, but – take a peek – we can take glamour to mean beauty, elegance, chic, style; charisma, charm, magnetism, desirability (worth). The word ‘sprezzatura‘ might be better, but I’d be forgetting how to spell it

In a web app, glamour comes from the appearance of effortlessness. This could be things like outstanding graphic design or providing interactions that feel just great. Using javascript drag-and-drop to make a list much easier to use is glamour. Slideshows and lightboxes can be glamour. One way to increase glamour is by showcasing the user’s stuff and keeping your app out of the way – perfectly crafted background can enhance the glamour of a foreground subject.

Be ruthless with glamour. The goal is to flatter the user, not the designer. Make the user feel smart, make them feel they’ve made great choices. Glamour done wrong = tawdry, cheap, nasty, irritating, and might give you a rash.

Character is who we are. Who we are is a factor in having users come back to us, and in creating passionate advocacy and recommendation. Be ruthless with character – you’ll be judged by it. Be ruthless, but be generous. Character comes out in tone of voice, customer service, and (worthwhile) quirks. I could write more on this, but I couldn’t think of anything useful and I’m running out of time. You probably get it, ‘cos you’re smart people

– postscript —

This rule *is not* an 80-20 law, although it might look like one » Learn why.

This rule *is* effectively a variation of “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”

There’s a number of ways government could work as a platform:
- Data: opening up data, to enable geek communities to mash-up and re-use government data – creating new applications for it.

- Policy: opening up the policy-making process to allow citizens to more openly participate and share ideas.

- Function: opening up various aspects of functionality of government, to enable citizens to contribute to the running of various services.

And the exciting thing is that UK government is doing just this – although I’m not sure it knows it’s doing this in such a relatively joined up way.  Here’s the progress so far:

- Data: earlier in the year, the Cabinet Office created www.Data.gov.uk, as a space to share government data through and create innovative apps on top of.

- Policy: the Coalition government have kicked things off with a number of different policy crowd-sourcing initiatives – opening up the policy-making process at the earliest stages.  The first of these initiatives was Nick Clegg’s Your Freedom crowd-sourcing website (which used our Dialogue App).

- Function: David Cameron’s pronouncements of “we’re all in this together” and more specifically his Big Society concept hits the nail on the head re: handing certain basic functions of government back to the people – including opening up the schools system to allow parents to run schools.

This handing over of “function” to citizens is perhaps the most radical manifestation of government as a platform, letting citizens not only innovate with data and ideas, but turning those ideas into practice.

It’s sparking real debate at the moment, and we’re pleased to say we’ve been able to open up even more information about the site through a custom Twitter feed we’ve implemented.

So now, not only can you take an RSS feed of the content people are submitting to the site, you can also see how many registered users, ideas, comments, ratings and tags the site has, updated on a regular basis.

At the time of writing we’re just coming up towards 18,000 registered users and have hit over 15,000 ideas submitted.

Keep an eye on the Spending Challenge Twitter feed for updates!

As ever, if you’d like to start your own online dialogue, then you can with your own free Dialogue App.

It was really interesting to sit in and get a bit of a view from the ground, but also especially to hear from Jos Creese, SOCITM president, who very clearly and quickly articulated a compelling vision for the central role of ICT in the transformational/cultural change in local service delivery being demanded by the new government.  It’s worth seeking out some of his chat if you can (I can’t immediately track down anything from Friday).

I think the final set of project suggestions put forward by the group are still being written but I thought I’d briefly share three of my ideas to encourage innovation – which, perhaps unsurprisingly, met with a mixed reception!  These were more about trying to get people thinking in a different way, though, which I think is always a useful thing to do, even if it’s just so that you can dismiss the approach from a position of information rather than prejudice…

1. Contribute to an open source project
   There’s so much that could be gained by doing this that it seems probably the easiest of easy wins to me.  Council staff would increase their understanding of open source software, and probably their trust of it; they would learn a lot about remote working, different development approaches, collaborative problem-solving, rapid iterations etc etc – and all this whilst building something that could be of tangible benefit to their organisation.  Think a useful facility in a CMS would be the ability to identify files that need to be tagged for compliance with a government risk management scheme?  Why not build it yourself?
   (By the way, the biggest objection to this seemed to be ‘but people will be cross that we’re not in the council building doing our busywork’.  If that’s the case, I couldn’t help but wonder, how are you able to happily take a day out for an event in Exeter?)
2. Develop a Spotify-style/apps approach and bundle up your service in easy, bitesize chunks (maybe sell it, too?)
   This idea seemed to be seen as one or several leaps of logic too far, but at the same time I think it’s quite likely to actually come about, possibly even as policy.  Have a look, for example, at some of the TSB funding streams, or the Big Society Network‘s talk of a ‘big society store’.Anyway, in short, I’d love to see what local government could come up with in terms of simple apps to enable their community to do things – taking common points of interaction with the council, or useful data that is available, and packaging it up in a simple, useful, accessible tool.  I don’t know, it could be providing alerts on planning applications in a given postcode to landlords, or an organagram builder for community groups to self-organise and register their membership.
   
   I think there’s lots about this that is going to be seen as desirable in the near future: the ‘hyperlocal’ approach, putting speed and simplicity first, getting discrete things done rather than trying to build an uber-system.  I also think it’d be a great exercise in training council staff about user-centric design.  Also, a lot of this is just common sense with the web as it is now (for example, I did find myself cringing at one point when we saw a presentation of a workflow module for a £300k contact management system for reporting of local problems – you just think ‘this isn’t necessary or easy.  Just use MySociety’s FixMyStreet already’).
3. Invert your firewall
   OK, so this one is a little flippant, but I’d certainly be interested to see what would happen if you shut down access to all the enormous internal management systems and opened up Facebook, Twitter and YouTube instead.  Might we find that social media can be a more human and quicker way to run large parts of customer contact?  Might spending a little more time in places where residents actually converse, rather than staring at workflows and system messages, have an influence on the way staff talk to people?  I don’t know but, like I say, trying and finding out is better than assuming.

So it’s nice to be able to talk about one project we’re doing at the moment that’s going really well. It’s an e-participatory budgeting pilot with the Bristol Partnership, which we’ve covered here before for those new to it, and it’s going great guns.

In essence, the Partnership had been, and indeed still is, running public meetings to decide what some of the neighbourhood budgets should be spent on across the city. However, they wanted to take that opportunity online, with a view to engaging the participation of more people, and ideally from a younger demographic too.

Results as of ‘half time’ for the project a few weeks ago show that both of these things have been more than achieved. 130 people had registered on the site by that point, and 30 ideas had been submitted, a participation rate that, whilst small in terms of the internet, is substantially larger than participation in offline public meetings held to date. Both figures have grown since this data was published too.

Interestingly, and perhaps as we might have expected, the site hasn’t seen a massive flood from the ‘young people’ (under 18) demographic, as the idea that ‘the internet = young people’ is as much of a myth as it’s always been. That said, the bell curve for age demographics has moved down about 20 years in age compared with attendees at meetings, showing the project has indeed worked to get ‘younger people’ involved.

Location was another thing that the site asked respondents to state, and this has shown a happy clustering of respondents from around the three wards in which the pilot funding will be spent. So people are engaging in their local area, but others are having their say too, just as intended, especially given one of the pilot wards covers the city centre, used by pretty much all Bristolians from time to time.

One final point to note, which may be of especial interest to local authorities moving to a more customer focused approach at the moment. A sizable proportion of the ideas submitted turned out not to need funding after all, and could be got on with more quickly. These ranged from ideas actually being issues that were able to be passed directly on to council officers for action, to users being able to help each other. In one instance, one user suggested it would be good to fund having bus timetables on your mobile phone, and another replied saying that they’d already worked out how to do it, and gave instructions on how to do so!

The council has thus benefitted both from opening another channel for listening to customer feedback and encouraging the wisdom of crowds, in addition to the intended benefits provided by the pilot project itself.

So, the project’s working, the client’s happy, and if you fancy having your say as someone who has ideas for improvements in Bristol, then head over to www.itsmybristol.org and sign up!

Same probably goes for blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube comments, and other things that mostly use text like chat apps and forums.

The project was based on the Dialogue App platform (albeit a pretty souped-up and customised version), and we’re immensely proud to see the work recognised.  Massive props should go to our friends at NAPA who oversaw and ran the entire project, and to DHS for stepping out and using this open, online approach.

A bit more info about the Intergovernment Solutions Awards:

The 2010 theme for the annual Management of Change conference is 30 Years of Collaboration. We have expanded that concept for the ISA competition to incorporate the three priority areas addressed in the President’s Open Government Initiative – transparency, participation, and collaboration.

A panel of judges, including senior executives from government and industry, reviewed all nominations and selected the  finalists based on the following criteria.

1. Operational Eligibility

2. Executive Summary and Project Description

3. Intergovernmental and Collaborative

4. Transforming the Business and Improving the Operations of Government

5. Advancing Open Government

Win!

[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]

The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is pointless Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.

His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ’6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the spread of engagement and ideas within networks.

At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?

Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it allows the dialogue to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘What Would Google Do?’ our last Delib Book Club mail-out which
examines what government, institutions and companies can learn from a company that truly understands the nature of the internet.

So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.

Incidentally if ’666′ is the number of the beast, does that mean ’668′ is the neighbour of the beast?

I always appreciate this kind of opportunity to discuss interesting problems with bright people – and I especially enjoyed listening to people grappling with issues of the policy-making process from all kinds of different perspectives.  We had a great mix of civil servants, consultants, charity staff and suppliers, throwing around everything from the fundamental tenets of representative democracy to the details of digitally implementing scalable, structured policy deliberation.

We’ll be writing up some full summary materials, setting out 10 principles for digital deliberative democracy and walking through the situation-specific conversations that were had on the day, but for now here’s some photos of the teams in action.  Look at their massive brains!

Council Leader Barbara Janke at the launch of www.itsmybristol.org on Friday

Here’s a fun little project we’ve been doing for Bristol City Council over the last few months. Participatory Budgeting, especially doing it online, is a hot topic at the moment, with lots of conferences, discussion papers and ponderings going on.

True to the sort of form that’s seen them become the UK leader for online participation work though, Bristol have just gone and got on with it.

They’ve set aside £15,000 for the wards of Clifton, Clifton East and Cabot to be allocated for spending via an online discussion. For those that don’t know Bristol, Cabot is basically the city centre, and the two bits of Clifton are up on the hill by the Suspension Bridge and thereabouts. If you want to check out where they are, there’s a handy ward finder here.

To carry out the project, the council’s using our Dialogue App, which will enable people to suggest ideas for what the money should be spent on, and allow others to vote for the ideas they support. Whilst the final decision on spending can’t legally rest with ‘the internet’, the council has committed to stick by the decisions made by participants, so long as they are legal. Vox Populi, Vox Dei then.Top stuff.

One interesting thing about this pilot too, is that the authority is reasonably relaxed about who participates in it. Given that Cabot in particular, being the city centre, is a ward thats used by far more people than live in it, the council just wants to know where people are from when responding, rather than trying to enforce a rule that only residents of those wards can take part, which would in practice be pretty unenforceable anyway.

So, check out the site at www.itsmybristol.org, and read more about it here.