Helping Boston serve its residents

To comply with a non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted all the confidential information from this project. The details mentioned in this post are my own and do not reflect the views of any company.

 

The City of Boston’s public relations team shares information regarding events, services, and alerts through various digital and traditional media. However, officials noticed that the information gathered by some of the citizens was inaccurate, outdated, and inadequate. Thus, officials from the city shared the following problem statement.

Problem statement

How do Bostonians gather information from the city? 

What are the traits that deem information as the official word of the city?

Approach

Method

  • NCredible framework, a research approach developed by Twig+Fish, was used to design this study since multiple attributes of Bostonians had to be considered.
  • It is based on a 2×2 matrix created from research goals:
      • Y axis – why do we want to learn?
        To incorporate insights to existing knowledge or introspect and reveal a new direction.
      • X axis – what would the output provide?
        Inspire new ideas or inform evidence for tactical decision-making.
  • Based on these axes, any research study can fall into four quadrants: Discovery, Exploratory, Definition, Validation

Clarifying the intent

  • To prioritize the learning objectives, associates from the city of Boston digital team were asked to provide questions related to what they want to learn from this study.
  • These questions were placed in the grid. All of the questions were related to learning from people and most of them help to incorporate insights into existing knowledge.

Selecting the sample size, and context

  • Questions in the exploratory quadrant require a fair representation of people in the city who are more likely to gather information regarding the city.
  • Attribute spectrums based on behaviors, abilities, demographics, and psychographics were used.
  • Since real-life situations require users to gather information ubiquitously and independent of contexts, this study was conducted out-of-context.

Determining the dynamic, and method

  • As the city includes multicultural groups, the dynamic of the community had to be preserved.
  • A group dynamic of people in the same community helped participants articulate their opinions comfortably because all the group members speak the same language.
  • As there are 10 major languages spoken in the city, the research team included a researcher interacting with a group, a translator, a note taker, and stakeholders as observers.
  • Multiple variations in the demographic sampling criteria were considered within each cultural group for a session by including up to 8 participants.

Analyzing the insights

  • Participants were asked to complete a homework assignment before attending the session to help them transition their thoughts into the actual study.
  • Referring to the homework, participants began the sessions with instances where they had to gather information.
  • The participants were then asked to recollect a scenario where they gathered information from the city.
  • The session concluded with participants comparing the two situations to uncover barriers.

Results

Personas

A glimpse of analysis and themes

What gives people confidence in information?
  • Explorers feel confident when the source of information looks professional and has detailed information with some statistics to supplement it.

  • Traditionalists feel confident based on past experiences using the same source of information.
How do people seek information from their city?

Explorers

  • collect information by browsing websites, speaking to locals, visiting the library, collecting pamphlets distributed in the apartment complex, and searching a keyword on Google.
  • validate information through human interaction. The primary goal is to just make sure they have not missed out on any details.

Traditionalists

  • collect information by speaking to close associates who have had the need to search for similar information.
  • validate information through a website. The primary goal is to check if the information is not outdated.
What barriers do people experience when finding information?
  • Both Explorers and Traditionalists expressed difficulty in locating a source provided by the city within the first few results of a Google keyword search.
  • Explorers face challenges finding people who have experienced situations related to a topic of interest.
  • Traditionalists face challenges in finding honest reviews in websites.

Next steps

From the research, it was evident that people rely on the internet to either gather information or to validate the gathered information. Thus, changing the information on the website to reflect the findings has a high impact.  The digital team was provided suggestions to the following design questions:

  1. How can the process of gathering information from the City of Boston website be made memorable, pleasurable, and professional?
  2. How can information on the website be made more succinct for just an overview? and provide in-depth analysis based on interest?
  3. How can the City of Boston integrate traits that define the “official word” into their website?