Social design

All important components of a Local Authority’s web presence should be designed to be used and engaged with socially.

Social design means designing things inherently to be shared, commented on, republished, reorganised, co-created and re-purposed. Furthermore, social design should force a ‘bottom up’ navigation structure, as well as a move away from the page as the primary unit of the web. In other words, instead of determining in advance where content is located, pieces of content should be designed to be appropriately social in themselves, according to predefined standards and metadata associations, and then made available in flexible, personalised ways. This allows people to discover the content via navigation, searching, relevance, serendipity and sharing.

Psychology

When digital communications is seen as a technology issue, psychological dimensions are often overlooked to the detriment of adoption and effectiveness.

There are psychological concepts that relate to design and consumption of digital technology that have an enormous influence on the outcomes of online (and offline) interactions, and their adoption. These concepts include such ideas as cognitive load, incentives, last mile problems, authenticity, recognition, conversion, etc. Providing Local Authority staff with a toolset of language and knowledge of such concepts will help to produce better designs, better solutions, better interventions and better outcomes.

Budget

The strategy must present a path of cumulative growth & development in order to spread available budget over the longer term

While much of this strategy is predicated on efficiency gains in the medium and long term, there are nonetheless costs involved which must be weighed and justified. However, this strategy indicates a direction rather than an end point. We believe the direction outlined is an inevitable response to changes that are going on in the world, and identifies opportunities for improvement rather than explicit requirements. The question therefore becomes one not of absolute budget, but of the design of an architecture (both technical and institutional) that enables cumulative development and thus determines how quickly steps can be taken along the path.