Disclaimer – I haven’t had the chance to read the full #BC10 report yet. I hope to add my own perspectives to this blog once I have. What follows is a summary of John’s presentation on the report and what he thinks it means for local authorities.

Summarising the report, John spoke about the negative headlines that we can expect to see coming out of this year’s findings, which stated:

‘Given the urgent need for councils to deliver more for less, it is really disappointing that the performance of this lowest cost service delivery channel seems to have stagnated over the last year. This should not be taken as a criticism of web managers, many of whom do an excellent job with limited resources. Rather, responsibility lies with councils’ top management, many of whom still do not recognise the key role of the website in reducing corporate costs through the efficient management of customer enquiries.’

Martin Greenwood, SOCITM Insight programme manager

Indeed, such headlines are already cropping up:

• Local government web use ‘disappointing’ (BBC News)
• Most councils not yet ready to support self service (eGov Monitor)
• Slightly Better Connected: Annual survey paints a gloomy picture (UK AuthorITy)
• Council Website not ready to ease the cuts (Local Government Chronicle)

But John was quick to reiterate the point that the criticism isn’t aimed at the hard-working web teams across the country, but rather the management figures who are holding back the development of this vital channel. The middle management strata, John suggested, is full of people who simply ‘don’t get the web’ – and no matter how dedicated your webteams are, or how much buy-in you have from the very top, this is always going to be a major problem.

Why is the web so important in local gov?

Now more than ever, the web must be seen as a vital channel for service delivery. With local authority cutbacks looking like they may be as drastic as 20% in some areas, the need for self service is critical. This is closely tied into the concept of avoidable contact – where people help themselves to information online at a far lower cost that requesting it directly from a member of staff.

And the figures are impressive. SOCITM estimate that whilst a web transaction costs an authority just 39p on average, the equivalent transaction by telephone costs £3.21 and a face to face encounter sets us back a whopping £8.23 (Source: SOCITM Insight, Dec 2009). Of course, some people will always want, or need, to use the more traditional channels, but the web is a vital addition. And currently, despite being the cheapest channel, the web continues to also be the one that delivers the highest levels of failure and dissatisfaction.

Taking actual stats from SOCITM’s Insight take-up service, John showed how, year on year, people appear to be finding less of what they want on local gov sites, with satisfaction levels also dropping. In terms of numbers, one metropolitan district had a failure rate of 36% (people who said they did not find what they wanted). This translated to 43,018 visitors, and if we assume all of these people were forced to make contact with the authority in a different way, the cost implications are huge.

How good are local gov websites?

The SOCITM process assesses whether a site is useful, usable and used. It uses a main survey of 120 questions, carried out by 12 reviewers, with 5 supplementary surveys and additional data (for example, from accessibility tests carried out with the RNIB). A total of 433 local authority websites were assessed.

The report uses a new 4-star ranking system, with 9 essential criteria:

• Information
• Links elsewhere
• Currency
• Transactions
• Use of A to Z list
• Use of search engine
• Navigation
• Use of location
• Accessibility

The report is intended to help councils understand the state of their own development, and with nearly 50% of sites getting just 2 stars, there is plenty of room for improvement. Only 12 got the full 4 stars this year.

Stuart Harrison’s mash-up of Better Connected 2010 results

Best practices

John talked us through a number of good examples of sites that had done well, and reported on feedback from the reviewers which praised sites for:

• clear, consistent navigation
• good A-Zs
• high standards of content
• a pleasurable overall experience
• useful eServices
• good locational information

John used Allerdale BC, East Sussex CC and South Tyneside MBC to highlight some of these good points – these all got 4 stars and are worth a look.

Allerdale Borough Council - getting it right, says SOCITM

Changing to a web culture

John mentioned a number of things that we need to be doing to bring about the cultural change necessary to support the web as the principal customer service channel.

Perhaps the most fundamental is to “think customer”. The web should be 100% about the user and their needs. Everything we do on the web should be for our citizens. This potentially means rethinking a lot of the content we currently offer.

Also, service providers need to “think web”. Posting info to the website shouldn’t be an after thought, or a box-ticking exercise. It should be at the heart of everyone’s processes.

Next, we need to advocate the web to our colleagues, who in turn need to advocate it to their service users. We need to sell the benefits, and promote the channel wherever possible. An obvious example is if someone receives a phone call about something that is available on the web – use that opportunity to promote the website, so that next time the contact can be avoided and the user can benefit from all the other content on there.

The customer journey

There was time for a look at a few more good and bad examples of content, before a final consideration of the customer journey. Wycombe DC was given as a good example of delivering a strong focus on task management – enabling citizens to quickly do what they need to do online.

Salford’s postcode search was another good example of providing additional functionality, pulling in maps, democratic info, refuse collection times, local facilities such as schools and community centres, whilst also linking to key online tasks such as council tax and planning applications. Such “find my nearest…” searches are becoming increasingly useful as data can be brought in from a number of sources, and are a great way of presenting a broad range of relevant information on a local gov website.

Finally, a mention of the fact that the customer journey may go beyond our own site. What if the service is provided by a different organisation? Are we providing links to related info and other sites, to help our customers get the information they need, wherever it may be? This can have its own challenges in terms of sustainability and accuracy, but is another example of providing an excellent, and complete, customer service online.

John’s presentation came at an opportune time – we are currently working towards implementing a replacement system for our websites and taking a long, hard look at both our web content and our customer’s experience of interacting with us online. We may have only got 2 stars this year, but I look forward to seeing where we rank in BC2011.

More thoughts on the Better Connected 2010 report to follow soon. In the meantime, local gov bods can log onto Communities of Practice to follow some interesting #BC10 discussions there.

Never assume. It makes an ass of u and me.

Anon

It may be hackneyed, but it does ring true for many of the observations I’ve made around surveys. Here’s my list of the 10 most common assumptions to avoid when conducting an online survey.

1. Never assume prior knowledge

An obvious one, really, but I’ve seen surveys use acronyms and jargon that I have no clue about, and then ask for comments on them. Without explaining the terms of reference, you can’t possibly expect to get useful feedback.

2. Never assume that views are polarised

Again, hopefully an obvious one but I’m often asked to create a survey where the answers are:

• Strongly agree
• Agree
• Disagree
• Strongly disagree

This is clearly missing an option – “Don’t know” or perhaps “Neither agree nor disagree”. But those who conduct surveys often don’t want neutral results, and try to omit this middle option to force people off the fence. This will, of course, skew the results and possibly even deter people from completing the survey.

3. Never assume people will read the instructions

This one has become painfully apparent recently. You can make the instructions as clear as humanly possible, but you can’t force people to actually read them. Experience has shown that people will often skip straight to the questions, disregarding any introduction or specific instruction. That means you can’t rely on people reading about the special rules and conditions that they need to know before completing the survey, and actually you should try to design the survey in such a way that doesn’t require instructions in the first place.

4. Never assume people’s response

I’ve seen a lot of surveys which appear to infer the respondent’s opinion before even asking them. People hate leading and loaded questions, and this is especially crucial to avoid if the survey is part of an important consultative process. Keep it neutral, and consider whether the survey supports both negative and positive responses with equal weight.

Running a survey with an expectation that it will back up a previously held assumption is particularly dangerous. If the results come back differently it could seriously derail your plans. Be genuine in your use of surveys and build in the capacity to actually react to the findings. A token, meaningless survey, done just to tick boxes, will often generate more anger than running no survey at all.

5. Never assume people will finish

The completion rate of a survey varies wildly according to many factors, not least of which are the length, complexity and relevance of the questions being asked. If you have questions which you especially need answers to, consider putting them towards the start, to avoid them being missed by those who lose interest half way through. Equally, if there are questions you don’t really need to ask, consider dropping them completely.

6. Never assume people will identify themselves freely

I’m often asked to make questions about personal details mandatory – so that we force people to give us their contact details, for example. Of course, this is always requested with the best intentions – it enables individual comments to be followed up and concerns addressed. But it is also completely unacceptable. In almost all instances, you should be giving the user the choice of responding anonymously. In fact, data protection laws say that you shouldn’t collect anything more than you need anyway, so you’ll need a pretty good reason to ask for these details. And if you still insist on doing so, explain to people why you need the details and what you’ll do with them, linking it to your privacy policy.

7. Never assume people will take it seriously

Is your survey idiot-proof? In other words, if someone took it upon themselves to target your survey with silly or disingenuous responses, would that ruin the results?

Any survey should come with certain caveats about its accuracy and coverage, and as I’ve blogged before, the more controversial surveys are big targets for those with devious intentions. Multiple repeat submissions and false replies can seriously skew your results, and are common if people have a strong agenda relating to topic of the survey.

8. Never assume everyone can access it

Not everyone has access to the internet, so you may need to make alternatives arrangements to gather offline responses. You might want to circulate paper copies of a survey, for example. Be aware, though, that you’ll probably need to dedicate some time to entering all of those paper copies into the electronic version, to allow the responses to be fully collated.

There’s also the issue of web accessibility – how easily the online survey can be used by individuals with disabilities or impairments. There’s some quite useful research on the accessibility of survey tools, although it’s from 2008. This is a crucial subject, as failure to make a survey accessible could mean you are discriminating against individuals.

9. Never assume that the survey is the end

Some people will happily complete a survey then forget about it. Others, however, will expect to see action. They may wish to see the results, or a summary of the main findings. They may want to know what you’re doing in response. Surveys are not a standalone process – they should be part of a wider consultative or research strategy.

10. Never assume you actually need a survey

Surveys are very easy to create nowadays, with a wide variety of free and user-friendly tools available. Hopefully the above points highlight the amount of thought that should be going into each and every survey you run. And you should also always ask yourself whether you actually need to run a survey. I’ve seen real evidence of ’survey-fatigue’, where hitting people with multiple requests for feedback over a short period of time will seriously dent the response rate. Keep them simple, keep them relevant and keep them to a minimum.

The seminar was lead by John Campbell and Mark Baillie, and John began by considering the good, the bad and the ugly. Examples of good campaigns included:

• Coca-Cola’s 80s/90s “Can’t Beat the Feeling” adverts – a tune that many of us still recognise today and an excellent example of strong branding.
• The University of Birmingham’s Circle of Influence campaign to raise £60 million. Astonishingly, they’ve already reached the £50m mark, combining online strategies with a more traditional print campaign.
• Drinkaware’s drink diary, which allows you to monitor your drinking and compare with friends, adding a social element to the mix. You can even download a phone app. I couldn’t help thinking this could backfire though – imagine people using the diary to compare how much they could drink in a week and actually trying to beat each other!
• Volkswagen’s Fun Theory website, featuring various viral videos aimed at making people change their behaviour for the better:

John notes that common factors to all of these successes were creativity and innovation.

The bad and ugly examples including Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice, which asked people to give 10 of their Facebook friends the boot in exchange for a free burger. As a result, a quarter of a million friends found themselves dumped in favour of a meat sandwich. John observes that this kind of campaign, based on negativity, is a very risky strategy and the uproar that ensued was proof of this. The campaign was quickly pulled.

Perhaps an even uglier example is the infamous Toyota Yaris advert, Clean Getaway, which managed to offend scores of people with its sexist (and, some argued, potentially incestuous) content.

(Note: for more examples, see my list of Social Media lessons learned the hard way)

6 steps to success

We are then talked through 6 steps to a successful campaign:

1. Understand your audience

An essential first step: make sure you know your audience and understand how they consume media. Where are they? What do they consider effective, or cool? Mark shows us an example of some face-to-face street research they had done, enabling them to build up personas to better understand their target audience. He stresses that you can only get certain knowledge from that sort of engagement.

2. Confirm your objectives

What are you trying to achieve? Is it realistic? Again, research is critical, and we are shown a number of useful tools which can help in measuring social media:

• Google Trends – shows what people are searching for – especially good for filtering info by region to get a more local flavour
• Google Alerts – email updates about Google results for keywords
• Social Mention – a social media search and analysis platform for aggregating user generated content
• Alltop – top headlines from popular topics worldwide

These sorts of tools can be especially useful for researching the competition and setting realistic targets accordingly.

3. Plan the customer journey and content

Taking what you’ve learnt from your earlier research, you should then decide the main message you want to get across, and which tools are going to be most suitable. This is the step that may sound the easiest, yet is perhaps one of the most complex, and requires a broad and deep knowledge of social media platforms in relation to marketing. We have all seen obvious examples of companies stumbling into social media without any real strategy or purpose, and they are usually found out very quickly.

As an example, John looks at why we might want to use Facebook:

• Go to the audience – we know that many people are already using Facebook, so to some extent we have a captive audience.
• Viral by nature – viral campaigns are undeniably the most successful, and see users to spread the word amongst themselves. Something recommended by a friend will surely carry more weight than a traditional piece of ‘push-marketing’.
• Understood by audiences – people are familiar with Facebook and its functionality, so you’re not asking them to learn new concepts.
• Achievable - low cost and easy to set up.
• Socially connected – if we reach one person, we may then also reach their friends too. Not to mention lateral links to other platforms.

4. Touchpoint strategy

Usually the ultimate goal of a campaign is to get people to your site. There are various ways of driving people through, from feeds and widgets to online ads and mobile integration. It’s important to have a strategy, though, of how to manage and optimise these initial points of contact, or touchpoints.

Mobile devices are arguably the perfect engagement tool:

• They are portable and convenient
• They are becoming increasingly hi-tech
• Users have a very high affinity with their devices – they love to use them
• They are always present and always on
• They are ready made for the job

Mark talks us through a number of intriguing uses of mobile devices, from the Golf GTI speedometer app, the ability to take a photo of a person and have it converted to Lego, and BMW’s Expression of Joy – augmented reality technology which sees Mark driving a virtual car around his desk. These are all excellent and entertaining apps in their own right, but ultimately exist to drive people to the end goal (be it ordering some Lego or booking a test drive).

5. Continual engagement

Launch day is, of course, not the end of the story. In fact, it’s only the beginning. Continual engagement is crucial – keeping the content fresh and keeping your audience informed. And again, making something viral is a fast-track to success. John mentions another tool, Kontagent, which analyses social networks and offers a range of viral tools.

And critically, all of this needs to come full circle and deliver a compelling website, where your users will end up. Without that, all of your efforts will be for nought. A decent main website has to be part of the strategy.

6. Measure, update, measure – and so on

Finally, you’ll need to measure your ongoing success. Update and adapt. If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to drop it and try something else. Don’t let any part of your strategy fall slack – work it all and make sure it is working for your audience.

Again, tools to help you measure your success include the excellent Google Analytics, which now offers integration with Facebook; Click Tale, which tracks user journeys and lets you watch movies of people browsing your site; and Twitalyzer.

10 commandments

John concluded with a mention of Augustine Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing:

1. Thou shalt not target customers with messages they don’t want
2. Thou shalt be truthful
3. Thou shalt respect your customers
4. Thou shalt make it easy for people to find you
5. Thou shalt be useful
6. Thou shalt make it easy for people to pass along
7. Thou shalt measure and optimize
8. Thou shalt listen to customers
9. Thou shalt remove any organizational barriers to speedy, collaborative innovation
10. Thou shalt not do brand-ing

Fou’s 10 commandments of modern marketing

Thanks again to all at Precedent for a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring morning. They run a whole programme of such seminars in various locations across the UK.

Rest in peace Jack.

One particular point that will raise eyebrows is the continued advocacy of separate sites for mobile devices. There is an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of such an approach, brought to the fore by Neilsen’s post last February comparing Mobile Web 2009 with Desktop Web 1998, and concluding that a separate site is best. Many of us were not convinced, and as Henny Swan argued at the time:

It also hints at repeating the mistakes of desktop web design circa 1998 where we thought the answer was to design for one browser, use proprietary technology, build text only websites for disabled users…the list goes on. So let’s not make that same mistake and instead fast forward to one of the principles of good web design that dug us out of the dark hole of 1998: progressive enhancement.

Henny Swan: Progressive Enhancement for mobile

Henny described how a ‘one site fits all’ approach can be achieved using media queries, and it’s certainly a far more attractive solution than designing and maintaining separate sites.

But this all relates to websites in general, rather than specifically to Intranets, and I was interested to look closer at the suggestion of a separate mobile Intranet.

Intranet on the move?

Mobile Intranets – a unique case?

Intranets serve a very specific business purpose, and for a defined set of users, so the scope for delivering a useful mobile version is arguably better than with a public site:

1. You’ll have a far clearer idea of who would want to access a mobile version, and for what purpose.
2. You’ll also have a good idea of the devices being used to access the Intranet, assuming they are company-issue.
3. Finally, the potential advantages that a tailored mobile version could deliver to staff are tangible and might justify the time and effort required to build and maintain.

Neilsen points out a couple of potential problems – one being that most staff will already be in an office (and therefore presumably have desktop access) and the other being the possible lack of technical expertise at operating handheld devices. The first point is simply part of the business case – if you have a significant amount of staff needing Intranet access out of the office, then you have a compelling business case. The second point is a training issue – and in fact many companies might equally observe that some of their staff aren’t skilled enough to operate their desktop computer properly either. If the business case exists for such usage, either from a desktop or a mobile device, then training should be in place to support that. Neilsen also observes that devices are becoming far easier to use, reducing this risk.

Neilsen also points to a move towards “anytime, anyplace” access. This is certainly true of many large companies who are promoting flexible working options, and is likely to be a crucial element of any business case for creating a mobile-friendly Intranet.

Working on the move

So let’s assume we do want a separate mobile Intranet. What will it look like?

For a start, how do we access it? Will the user be required to log-in? That would seem sensible – an Intranet is, by its very nature, not for public consumption, and the risk of the employee’s mobile device being lost or stolen means that security must be considered paramount. Measures such as automatic time-outs might also be necessary, as well as preventing log-in details from being saved by the device.

Once logged in, what would we want to see? This is where a bit of research will prove invaluable. Find out what the key tasks are and make them easy to access. Accessing staff directories seems to be an obvious one, for example, as well as receiving any urgent news or alerts. Customisation would be ideal here, allowing people to compile a list of common tasks and links.

Opening documents

My organisation’s Intranet is probably fairly typical in that it has a massive amount of information available as downloads – PDFs, Word documents, Powerpoint presentations etc. Whilst some newer generation devices can handle these quite well, it’s important to remember that they can cause issues when downloading and opening (because of large file sizes, incompatible formats etc). As with any website, any key information should always be available as a web page as well as a download, and a company moving towards a mobile-friendly Intranet must keep this in mind.

Is your Intranet awash with downloads?

Apps

Neilsen mentions one team that developed a dedicated iPhone app, rather than building a separate site, to optimise the design for mobile users. This sounds like a perfect compromise, but only if you have full control over the devices that your staff are using, and only if those devices are advanced enough to support such apps. We’re not all lucky enough to get iPhones from our employers, so this may not be realistic for many, but the use of apps is nevertheless a good example of improving usability for mobile users.

Publishing from a distance?

As a web author for my organisation, I can see tremendous benefit in being able to not only access the Intranet on the move, but also to update the pages too. Mobile access to the publishing environment could be a killer feature, either via a browser-based interface or using a dedicated app. Again, the security risks of this are obvious, so measures would need to be in place (such as multiple log-ins or gated publishing requiring third-party approval). But the potential could be huge – especially in emergencies or out of office hours.

Standalone systems

One issue that may be harder to conquer is the fact that many Intranets are also a portal to numerous standalone systems and databases. Staff directories, forums, pay systems, HR processes, online forms, room bookings etc – these are very often delivered as separate products and making them available to a mobile device could be far trickier than simply re-formatting some webpages. Any business case would need to look at the practicalities of this and decide how crucial these additional systems are to an employee on the move.

Adaptability

One of the most convincing arguments against designing mobile-specific sites is that devices are constantly updating and advancing, and that there are very few universal standards to design to. Even if you know what devices your staff are using today, it could be that they are upgraded far sooner than your website will be. Any attempt to design a mobile-specific site would need to have sufficient adaptability to ensure that the next corporate upgrade of devices does not leave you with a useless mobile site. I’ve seen huge problems with companies designing Intranets to suit their dominant corporate browser version (for example, IE6) which then holds back any attempt to refresh that browser later on, in the fear that their sites will break (which, in the case of IE6-friendly sites, will almost certainly be the case).

Mobiles - evolving fast (image by True Blue Titan*)

Conclusion

For the reasons explored above, it’s more likely that a mobile Intranet will be a stripped-down version of its desktop self for reasons of practicality, rather than usability, although there is an argument for offering a tailored design to streamline the most common tasks undertaken by staff on the move. This is unlikely to be successful without significant investment of time and expertise, however, so a strong business case is crucial to put focus on what is to be achieved.

Failing that, designing your Intranet with mobile-specific styles, or at least adhering to common best practice and web standards, will help to ensure that anyone logging on whilst away from the desk will still get to what they want.

* Phone Evolution image is a derivative of a photograph by True Blue Titan, used under the Creative Commons licence

A big year for Twitter

BBC News has a nice summary of the year on Twitter, looking at the news stories which were big on the micro-blogging platform. Twitter proved its worth by being at the heart of key events such as the Iranian election, allowing citizens to report from the scenes of protest even after other channels of communication had been cut.

Social Networking in general had a good year, with an ever-increasing expectation that companies should be using such platforms to talk to their customers. CNET has a brief look at the highs and lows for various Social Networks, focusing on how current front-runners Twitter and Facebook are evolving to stay ahead of the game.

Meanwhile, Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove has a look at Google’s 2009, reflecting on the search giant’s big releases and major accomplishments. It was undoubtedly a big year for the company, with the likes of Google Wave attempting to revolutionise the way we communicate and collaborate.

Back at the BBC, the technology team talk about the technology they loved in 2009, discussing many things you’ll have heard as well as a few you may not.

For those getting tired of reading, the Guardian’s Tech Weekly Team have a 40 minute podcast reviewing the year in tech, whilst Web Axe looks back at some of its best web accessibility podcasts from 2009.

The "Apple Glove"

Finally, the Register has a collection of quotes from the year as well as some of the best (of the worst) patent claims, including IBM’s bizarre noise-maker and Apple’s attempt to reinvent the glove.

Happy New Year!

Browser sizes as an overlay

What this shows is that, for example:

• only 1% of users have to scroll to see all of the main banner on my site
• 80% can see the Latest News box in its entirety, without scrolling
• Half of users have to scroll to read the Good Causes section

That’s all very interesting, and Google cites a good example where a call to action on a page (in their case, a “download” button) was below the fold for 10% of users. However, the logic gets a little fuzzier when they state:

Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn’t see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it.

Introducing Google Browser Size – Google Code Blog

Spot the error – the assumption that users will not notice things below the fold.

Thinking beyond the fold

This assumption doesn’t ring true with my experience of user testing, where people will almost always scroll if it is clear that more information exists below the fold. And I’m not alone in observing this. A recent article over at cxpartners talks about the myth of the page fold, describing how user testing revealed that users don’t actually mind scrolling:

People tell us that they don’t mind scrolling and the behaviour we see in user testing backs that up. We see that people are more than comfortable scrolling long, long pages to find what they are looking for. A quick snoop around the web will show you successful brands that are not worrying about the fold either.

The Myth of the page fold – cxpartners.co.uk

This is a really good example of how user testing can be used to prove (or disprove) dominant assumptions about user behaviour.

And there’s a wider issue here – that of separating content from presentation. We shouldn’t be wasting our time worrying about the minutiae of how web pages look, especially given that the rise of mobile browsing makes this pretty hard to do anyway. When you add user preferences such as increased text size, this becomes even harder, if not impossible, to truly account for.

With that said, I really like Google Browser Size, and think that what it does do well is remind us that there are so many variations out there that we simply can’t account for them all. By all means use it to identify a few quick wins (for example, an important call to action should be at the top anyway), but don’t get too hung up on making your site fit every shape and size of browser.

Horizontal scroll

It’s probably worth pointing out that when we say that users don’t mind scrolling, we usually just mean vertical scrolling (up and down). Horizontal scrolling is a different matter entirely, and in my experience users hate to have to scroll horizontally. There are some nice examples of how you might get away with it if part of the design (see Design Meltdown’s gallery of horizontal scrollers), but unintentional horizontal scrolling can drive users away in no time at all. Avoid inflicting this upon your users by designing to the lowest common width of your intended users, or (far better) implement a fluid-width design.

HUWY

Earlier today I went along to the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh to attend the launch of a new project aimed at getting young people talking about policies and laws which affect the Internet, to channel their ideas to the policy makers.

According to the delegate pack, the HUWY (Hub Websites for Youth Participation) project believes that young people are valuable expert stakeholders in current Internet governance issues like:

• cyberbullying
• child abuse and child safety
• freedom of speech and censorship
• privacy and phishing, security, identity, hacking, e-commerce
• file-sharing and copyright

The project has partners from the UK, Germany, Estonia and the Republic of Ireland, as is sponsored by the European Commission. At this morning’s launch event we heard from some of the partners about the work they are already involved in, including online networks of over 100,000 young media makers in Germany (Jugendpresse Deutschland), platforms to allow young people to have frank discussions about everyday issues (Youth Net), and sites supporting citizenship and digital engagement (Young Scot).

We also saw videos and messages from key officials who were unable to attend the event. Hille Hinsberg (from the Estonian State Chancellory) spoke about the need for bigger take up of engagement opportunities in policy making, saying that all too often it takes a scandal before we are moved to discuss such issues. She praised the value that HUWY will bring to our efforts to listen to young people, finding out what they want to discuss, what their concerns are and, critically, what their solutions are.

In another video, German MEP Matthias Groote spoke about the importance of involving young people, and that the Internet is an essential tool in allowing them to participate actively and creatively. He described the huge potential which we “absolutely have to use”.

Sadly I couldn’t stay for the afternoon, which featured workshops on how young people use the Internet and how we translate engagement into change. Nevertheless, I’m excited about what the project will teach us about engaging with young people and using online platforms to review policies and effect political change.

More information

• An introduction to the HUWY project
• HUWY blog post about the launch event
• To get involved in the UK project, contact Feargal O’Kane at Queen’s University Management School, Belfast.
• For more info about the international project, contact Ella Taylor-Smith at the International Teledemocracy Centre, Edinburgh Napier University

I hope to have a closer look at these features in the near future, especially as I’m currently involved in putting sign language videos onto YouTube. For now, though, have a look at the video below for more info.

PS thanks to Phil Teare for the original heads-up about this over at Accessify Forum.

Screenshot of a BSL video

Some of you will know about my project to get British Sign Language content on our corporate website. For the background to this, see the original business case and my experiences in the studio filming the videos.

Last week I got the BSL videos from our audio/visual unit, with all the audio editing complete, bringing us a step closer to getting them online. All I needed to do was add the captions and run them past our BSL expert one more time, to make sure nothing had been lost in translation.

With impeccable timing, Henny Swan blogged about captioning earlier today so I’d encourage people to read her post too as I’ll be referring to her findings here as well.

Online captioning tools

Due to my employer’s IT policy, which means I can’t install software onto my work PC, I’m going to have to settle for online captioning tools. This limited me somewhat, but I was hopeful that I could find something suitable.

YouTube itself recommends CaptionTube, but I’d also heard good things about YouTubeCC, so I decided to give that a go first.

YouTubeCC

YouTube CC

To start, make sure your video is uploaded and processed on Youtube. Next, go to YouTubeCC and enter the URL of the video that you wish to caption. This will bring up the video on the left with a box for the captions on the right.

The idea is that you play and pause the video, tapping in the captions as you go and adding them to the box on the right. YouTubeCC automatically adds the start times, according to where you’ve paused the video.

The first issue I encountered was that there seemed to be no way to preview the captions on the video itself, as you enter them. This makes it impossible to judge whether you have given each caption enough time on-screen, or whether you need to split them up.

Bigger problems were to come, though, upon completing my first video. Clicking the Export to YouTube button brought up the following error message:

Warning:
Some of the captions/timecodes are bogus and will not be added to the export.
Do you want to export anyhoo?

I have no idea why the captions or timecodes should be ‘bogus’, and could see no obvious error, so I went ahead and exported anyway, which enabled me to save the captions as a .sub file (YouTube requires either sub or srt file formats).

Adding captions using YouTube CC

Finally, heading back to YouTube and clicking on the Captions buttons under the video, on the My Videos page, it was a simple case of uploading the .sub file. The results weren’t bad – no sign of the bogus captions or timecodes – but as per my first concern, the timing was not perfect and some captions were far too brief. Also, captions remained visible until the next one came along, which in some cases was not ideal. I realised that you have to insert blank captions to achieve breaks between captions, which seemed a little convoluted.

Overall, then, I found YouTubeCC not bad but lacking features necessary to get really tight captions. Perhaps I wasn’t using it properly – I’d welcome suggestions or advice!

CaptionTube

Caption Tube beta

Next I thought I’d go back to YouTube’s original suggestion, CaptionTube. Henny has already done a great job of reviewing the pros and cons of this one, but I thought I’d add a bit more about some of the things I liked and disliked.

I really liked the timeline at the bottom. Anyone familiar with editing software such as Final Cut Pro will be very comfortable with this kind of interface. Unfortunately, it appeared to lack some of the functionality you might hope for, such as the ability to drag, drop or resize segments.

Caption Tube's timeline

Another feature I liked was the ability to set the duration of a caption. A fairly essential feature, I’d say, but having seen the difficulty of doing this in YouTubeCC I appreciate its existence here.

A definite down side was the need to swap between two pages to edit the captions then preview them. This slowed the process considerably, and although the Preview option is very welcome, I can’t help thinking it could have been integrated more usefully into the main view.

Caption Tube requires you to go to another page each time you want to preview your captions

A final plus, though, is that Caption Tube connects directly to your Google/YouTube account so there’s no need for a separate login.

Overstream

Overstream

Next up, then, is Henny’s preferred option – Overstream. Unlike the previous two, this one requires that you create an account. There’s no obvious privacy policy which is not great, and the password length can only be 10 characters long, far shorter than my usual hyper-secure passwords! Nevertheless, I duly sign up.

The first problem I encounter is the Overstream doesn’t appear to be able to access videos that are not yet public on YouTube. I guess this makes sense, although it wasn’t a problem for the previous two sites. Even using YouTube’s Limited Access URL option doesn’t seem to work. I don’t really want the video to be public yet, but to use this service I don’t have much choice (and can always hide the video again after adding the captions), so I temporarily make the video public.

Overstream has a handy demo video showing you the main controls so after watching this I plunge right in.

A screenshot of Overstream's interface

It’s immediately obvious that many of the issues I had with the previous two services have been addressed here. You can see the captions immediately appear on the video, each caption is given a default length which you can easily adjust, and you can drag and drop each individual caption on a global timeline.

Once finished, you can save the captions, or ‘overstream’, for editing at a later date, and can then export as a .srt file.

Uploading the .srt to YouTube worked a treat, and the timing was much better than before.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Overstream appears to offer by far the best online tool for captioning that I’ve used so far. The other options are ok, but far more basic and not without their faults.

I can’t show the results just yet as I promised to let our BSL signer have a look first, before it went public. I’ll be sure to update my blog as soon as the completed videos are online.