Usability is the Best Policy: Public Policy and the Lived Experience of Transport Systems in London

This paper explores the relations between public policy and usability in lived experience, drawing on 3 case studies in one important area of urban policy, transport. For these studies, discourse from interviews and focus groups with a total of 120 participants, and a written corpus of over 80 documents, were collected and analyzed, together with interviews with 25 key staff and observations of user interactions both in the laboratory and in situ. The resulting rich dataset presents a new perspective on e-government systems in use. The results show that usability must be prioritised at the policy design stage; it cannot be left to implementation. Failure to do so is experienced by users in systems which fail to work together to meet their needs. Negative experiences, in turn, may lead to loss of trust and legitimacy, and detract from public value and community well-being. These findings, therefore, provide lessons from HCI insights for both public policy-makers and implementers of e-government systems. The paper concludes by suggesting some HCI methods for pre-venting usability problems in e-government systems, by involving users in design in order to understand their lived experiences around the ecology of the systems.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Philip Inglesant

M. Angela Sasse

Conference

Publication date: September 2007

Publication date (Print): September 2007

Pages: 1-10

Affiliations

[0001]Department of Computer Science

University College London

Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/HCI2007.4

SO-VID: 0e6fdf33-40bb-4c1c-94c8-5e913b405fb6

Copyright statement: © Philip Inglesant et al. Published by BCS Learning and Development Ltd. Proceedings of HCI 2007 The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference University of Lancaster, UK

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of HCI 2007 The 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference University of Lancaster, UK

Conference acronym: HCI

Conference number: 21

Conference location: Lancaster, UK

Conference date: 3 - 7 September 2007

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: British HCI Group Annual Conference

Product

Product Information: 1477-9358BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/HCI2007.4

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

Usability is the Best Policy: Public Policy and the Lived Experience of Transport Systems in London

Abstract