TL;DR: Organize a group of diverse Miamians who will provide actionable, real-world user feedback to improve municipal and civic technology in Miami-Dade County.
How might we help facilitate the building of local civic technology services that truly serve all of Miami-Dade County?
Multiple challenges going on here for Miami-Dade:
- A large surface area - 2,431 square miles
- A diverse residential population. 51% residents are foreign-born, the highest percentage in the country
- Low civic engagement as per a 2011 Kauffman report
- Growing tech community due to entrepreneurialism rate, but relatively nascent so concepts such as User Experience and User Research are new.
We plan to create a Civic User Testing Group conducting grassroots user testing for civic-related websites and mobile applications with citizens from Miami’s diverse communities and neighborhoods. We will start with Miami-Dade County government website, but will not limit ourselves to government-related projects.
By iterating on well-tested methodology and tools developed by 2011 Knight Foundation grant recipient Smart Chicago Collaborative, and applying common agile software development user testing practices, the Miami Civic User Testing Group will establish a new layer of community accountability in government technology development and will establish a framework to ensure that Miami-Dade County is building more usable, and more inclusive technology for all residents.
- Track how government applies the feedback we provide
- Monitor analytics and existing feedback channels for the sites and applications we test to evaluate whether results from our user-testing research affect common metrics, including traffic, bounce-rate, time-on-site, help requests, and complaints.
- Verify we have a user cross section that accurately reflects the demographics of Miami
We plan to expand upon Chicago’s CUT Group work by testing with Miami’s unique multilingual and multicultural populations:
- Test how longer-tail collaboration among CUT Group and its government partners can affect overall technology development
- Develop a long-term plan for sustainability of this partnership
- Produce a website and e-book outlining our methods and outcomes of scaling the program. Code for Miami and its community and government partners also have public web presences and communication channels where updates about the project will be posted on a regular basis.
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Month 1: Get initial training with Smart Chicago Collaborative, organizers of the 2011 Chicago CUT Group project. Work alongside Miami-Dade Communications and IT departments to determine which web properties will be tested and develop test processes.
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Month 2: Engage with community partners about participation in testing and recruiting efforts, Procure vendors for gift cards. Develop CUT Group website in English and Spanish, community outreach fliers, Localize and further develop Chicago’s internal tool to collect registration and manage testing sessions. Procure possible testing locations, including but not limited to public libraries and community centers.
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Month 3: “Boots on the ground” community engagement: traveling across Miami-Dade county to deliver messaging, including but not limited to the following: flyering campaigns at MDC and FIU campuses, analyzing signups repeating flyering campaigns at the public libraries where efforts were lagging, mass email campaigns to subscribers of magazine and art groups, and establishing community engagement stakeholders.
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Month 4: Activate community groups, marketing and outreach plan, segment test groups based on behavioral, demographic and geographic criteria. Finalize testing locations.
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Month 5: Schedule test dates/locations, begin widespread marketing and PR efforts, first CUT Group Session
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Months 6-12: Anywhere from 2 to 8 CUT Group Sessions will be held: schedule testing dates/locations, finding groups of volunteers and proctors, record findings, report findings to community holders and help iterate research processes as needed. Report process on blog. Iterate on internal testing software as needed.
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Month 13-14: Aggregate and assess findings. Prepare case studies for finding research participants. Work with MDC Communications and ITD teams to develop long-term plan for implementation of findings and best practices
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Month 15-16: Prepare and disseminate final report site and e-book.
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Months 17-18: Promote aggregate findings to other local governments, as well as members in the local tech community including both civic tech and non-civic tech.
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We will primarily use social media and our website to promote the work and findings of CUTGroup. Code for Miami has several journalists, as well as graphic designers, photographers and videographers in its membership who have agreed to help us produce meaningful multimedia communication materials throughout the project. Miami-Dade County has agreed to promote CUT Group recruitment through some of its many communications channels, which include digital, print and broadcast media.
- The Miami-Dade County Communications team has also been helpful promoting sign-up recruitment. A placement in a "What's New in the County" e-mail received more than one hundred sign ups from across the county, and a thirty second video spot that can be used on social media through their television team has been offered. [updated Aug 2016]
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That said, we will also employ “boots on the ground” techniques used by community leaders to find a cross-section of Miamians unfamiliar with social media, explain user testing concepts and communicating the importance, along with incentive programs.
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At the end of the project, we will produce a report website and an open-source e-book to share our findings, strategy and methods.
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Ernie Hsiung is cofounder and co-captain of Code for Miami. He is a front-end developer and community organizer with interests in actual and virtual communities. Originally from the Bay Area and living in Miami for the past four years, Ernie served as a 2015 Code For America fellow working with Miami-Dade County building Civic Engagement and Economic Development technology. Along with his development work, he is a well-known blogger featured in USA Today and Newsweek, the founder of 8Asians.com, an online portal for Asian Americans, and was named a “20 Under 40” business leader by the Miami Herald in 2014. He is currently a software developer at Rackspace.
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Cristina Solana is co-captain of Code for Miami. She a Miami native, and a Senior Frontend Engineer at Enspire Commerce with more than 11 years working in user experience development. She was previously Lead UX Developer at a Miami startup, Choose Digital. With a passion for civic engagement, Cristina has been an active developer and member of Code for Miami since its inception. Most recently, she developed and implemented a Twitterbot that tweets an adoptable pet every four hours for Miami-Dade County Animal Services.
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Rebekah Monson is cofounder and storyteller of Code for Miami. She is cofounder and VP of product at WhereBy.Us, a digital media startup that operates The New Tropic in Miami. She has worked for more than decade in local media, as a graphic designer, reporter, art director and editor at various newspapers and at the University of Miami. She also co-founded Hacks/Hackers Miami, and in 2014 was highlighted in the Miami New Times People issue for her efforts to make Miami a better place to live.
- Miami-Dade County did have a UX lab a couple of years back. Sarasti would know.
- The Chicago CUTGroup has implemented a model for Chicago which has had models replicated in multiple cities, including Miami-Dade County