User InvolvementStatistics Iceland’s Experience

Nordic Statistical Conference 11-14 August 2010

Heiðrún SigurðardóttirÞorbjörg Magnúsdóttir

User involvement (1)

• Increased in the digital age• Professional journalists – general public• Increase user participation– Receive more feedback from users– Improve our website and services

User involvement (2)

• Ways to involve users– conducting surveys– taking interviews with users– holding meetings– observing online user behaviour– using social media to interact with users:

• commenting systems• Facebook and Twitter• Youtube and Flickr• Wiki and blogs

Involving the user 2010

• Meeting with users and user survey• Information services• Social media– Commenting system– Facebook and Twitter buttons

Social media

– Wikipedia definition of social media:Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. They support the democratization of knowledge and information and transform people from content consumers to content producers (Wikipedia, 2010).

Process (1)

• Design of the commenting system• Launched on the internal website 17 March• Launched on the external site 24 March• Facebook and Twitter buttons inserted 7 April

Process (2)

• Web page where comments appear in time order– Monitor• Edit• Delete

Answering comments

• Policy on answering comments• Should we respond?• Who should answer?• How should we answer? Do we want to

influence discussions

Findings (1)

• Not used as much as we expected• Types of comments:– Requests about the website– Requests about data– Simply comments

• Comments different from enquiries through the information services

Findings (2)

• Why people do not comment much– Not a large proportion of people who comment

online– Position of the commenting system– Public institution– Character– Age

Other media

• Comments on Statistics Iceland news in other media– Comments on the media sites:• Eyjan.is• Mbl.is

– The Comments • Not about methodology or the subject as such• Mainly discussion about political matters

Results

– Social media• Commenting system

– Not used much

• Facebook and Twitter buttons– Users are coming from facebook but not Twitter

– Information service• Direct contact with our customers• Should be more systematically analysed

– User survey and meetings with users• Can only be conducted occasionally

Next steps

• The commenting system is still on the web• We have decided to not make pages on

Facebook and Twitter• Should Statistics Iceland decide to go on a

marketing campaign the idea of making pages on other platforms will be revised

No pain no gain

• Is user involvement something we should strive for?

– Negative attitudes towards the system– Brought up many issues about user involvement

• Professionalism vs the user

Being social

• What are we going to do with user participation?

• How social do we want to be?

THANK YOU!

Any comments?