Designing Knowledge4Policy
“It’s not that pretty” we hear every other day. Possibly. But what’s important: building something beautiful, or something usable?
Like all EU Commission websites published on its “EUROPA” server, the Knowledge4Policy (K4P) platform, which came out of Beta recently, uses the EC’s new design guidelines, developed by its Communications department.
not something that all have welcomed with open arms
This is not something that all the Knowledge Services migrating to K4P have welcomed with open arms. Many of them have operated their own sites, with their own homecooked design (not to mention information architecture and content strategy), for years. Quite apart from the fact that they are understandably attached to their own design, they’d point out that they understand their audiences better than some distant, centralised design team.
So who’s right?
Evidence counts
The Commission’s design guidelines — known as EUROPA Component Library (ECL) — have three major advantages.
The ECL is the result of extensive audience research and usability testing, framed by the ‘Task Completion’ digital customer experience model. The result is a web design focused purely on helping users achieve goals.
Luckily for us, this is probably the right approach for Knowledge4Policy. We are not trying to ‘communicate Europe’ vaguely to non-specialised audiences: our key users are either scientists wishing to make their work relevant to policymakers, or policymakers looking for scientific evidence to inform their work. Both audiences probably know why they’re on our site.
as a platform for evidence-based policymaking, surely it makes sense for our design and user experience to be based on evidence?
Moreover, as a platform for evidence-based policymaking, surely it makes sense for our design and user experience to be based on evidence?
Finally, the French have a wonderful phrase: “Il a le mérite d’exister” — roughly translated as “well, at least it exists”. For the first time since I started building websites in 1995, I don’t have to argue over which shade of blue or green is more attractive, or which font to use, or whatever other subjective thing people like endlessly arguing about. At a stroke, the ECL removed a massive source of headaches from the site-building process, allowing us to focus on structure, features and content.
And yet…
And yet… I have to confess that I have some sympathy for the view that websites built using the ECL are not attractive. They maximise clarity, but they sure are cold!
Does it matter?
I used to think that it didn’t because the Commission should inform, rather than communicate, on its activities. There’s a crucial difference: informing citizens should be neutral, while communicating blends into marketing, and can even look like political propaganda, which I abhor. The ECL is great for informing, so our working assumption is that it’s ideal for K4P.
policymakers may require more than ‘just the facts’
The K4P audience research, however, indicates that policymaking audiences may require more than ‘just the facts’ and a highly usable website. This was confirmed by many of the EC scientists we’re working with, all with long experience in communicating scientific evidence to policymakers, as well as many of the policy assistants in their focus group: policymakers engage more with content making an emotional connection.
And those audiences are increasingly our focus. While K4P’s Beta phase was all about migrating existing ‘knowledge services’ into the platform, in 2019 we’ll turn our attention to the upper ‘Policy Layer’ of the linked knowledge pyramid (left), designed and written for policymakers and their advisors.
So we can expect to hear “It’s not that pretty” again and again as we explore new content types and features for the Policy Layer. After all, as one of our publishers recently asked on our internal collaboration platform, “can’t we have something beautiful which also provides excellent user experience?”.
This is a question which cannot be answered: while user experience can be measured objectively, beauty is entirely subjective.
while user experience can be measured objectively, beauty is entirely subjective
All we can measure is user experience. If the ECL helps policymakers better understand scientific evidence relevant to policy, then it works. If not, then it doesn’t. We’ll find out soon enough.
But one thing is for sure: if we do need to build on and expand the ECL to help get science across to policymakers, any change we make will be based on evidence. Not on someone’s subjective views on beauty.
So if you have some evidence, please share it below.
Join in
Transparency is one of our bywords, so we’ll publish as much as possible here. Follow us to stay informed, and contribute by either Responding to this post, submitting your own or by Tweeting to @EUScienceHub.
Postscript: just as I was finished this post and congratulating myself on its (relative) brevity, I came across Why Do All Websites Look the Same? by Boris Müller. But it’s his followup — a Response to the (often well-made) criticisms that he ignored Usability as he confused Art with Design — that I’ll quote:
History has shown that we need both — creativity and usability — to make real progress in the world of design and technology… right now, designers tend to limit their creativity so that the design works for the template… Instead, designers and developers should ask themselves how they can create templates that meet the demands of the design.
Both posts recommended, as is the post which gave me this post’s main image.
