Mapping the human scale of infrastructure
Roads, schools, hospitals — these are all examples of physical infrastructure. Things that give us a sense of place, help us get around and deliver services we depend on.
Ever wonder what’s happening in your neighbourhood? To make it simple and easy for you to find out, our platform team — Ontario.ca — partnered with the Ministry of Infrastructure to create a user-friendly map of planned, existing, and completed projects, powered by a robust data set that is regularly updated.
(The data set is also available as an open data set on Ontario’s open data portal.)
In this post, I sit down with Shauna Carpenter and Adam Jacobs (both from the Ministry of Infrastructure) about understanding user needs, learning from feedback and working with digital teams to make it easier for citizens to explore the projects that impact them most.
What user need is the map serving?
MOI: The BuildON map is an interactive data visualization that communicates the scope and details of ongoing infrastructure projects to a non-technical audience.
Infrastructure is a government priority, but it’s also an abstraction; it spans road repairs, hospital builds, school improvements, the building of prisons and police stations and much more. It’s a challenge to communicate the scale of this without getting bogged down in the details, and we hope the map and associated filters and functionality achieve this.
This is a large departure for the Infrastructure Analytics/Infrastructure Policy branch, as we are usually designing maps and visualization for internal policy and planning purposes, not for consumption by the public.
Why create the map, instead of just serving the data in a raw format?
MOI: Previously there was a website that presented infrastructure projects in a text table format. However, this is not searchable in the usual intuitive way that a map is — a user cannot zoom to their area to see projects. The website map is more accessible for the general public to see what is going on in their community.
How did the partnership between the ministry and digital team work?
MOI: This project was the intersection of policy (data collection, reporting) and communications (design, public content). This required some translation and collaboration; for example, in policy we were principally concerned with the underlying data (location, budget, sector), but had never gathered a non-technical plain text description of these projects.
We had never designed a public-facing piece of content, and were therefore unaware of many of the requirements for public content: accessibility, French translation and best practices for web design. The Ontario.ca team helped us navigate a number of resources that were used in the course of enhancing the project data and getting it ready for public consumption (e.g. a style guide for writing text descriptions).
Did you experience any challenges along the way?
MOI: We ran into a few challenges at the start, but working together with everyone involved, we were able to overcome them. These included:
- Locating source data wasn’t always easy in every ministry.
- Projects were not tracked the same way across all ministries.
- In some cases, we needed to collect or find contextual data (latitude/longitude coordinates, accurate road routes) ourselves.
- Overcoming the need to meet a perfect standard from the get go and, instead, getting a beta product up and out as quickly as we could.
What about the design, how did it come about?
To be honest, we ran into some distinct design challenges when it came to presenting information on the map. The mockups below show you the evolution of our thinking when it came to how to share the information in a way that was best for users. User research helped inform the decisions we ultimately made. Some of the questions we asked:
- Should multi-part projects be represented as a single line or individual dots? This applies to projects like the UP Express and Eglinton Crosstown LRT projects that have multiple components, like a few dozen stations.
- Should we have a more abstract design (dots/lines/shapes) or use icons to convey the end use of the project (recreation, transit, hospital)?
- How do we use color? Should we match colors on the map to align with branding? (For example, should we make the Regional Express Rail green on the map to match the GO Transit branding?)
- What should the background look like? Should the map background be accurate and true-to-life, or something more stylized like a high-contrast black option?
- What filters should we include? What would a user like to see and interact with?
What were the best learnings/insights gained from the project?
MOI: The biggest thing we learned, which was also our greatest challenge (as simple as it sounds) was the definition of an infrastructure project. In our Ministry, the distinction is clear: “projects” are underway, while “assets” are completed and in-service. Projects have budgets and completion dates; assets have ages, values and conditions.
In theory, it’s clear: a thing being built is a project, then it becomes an asset once it is built. In practice though, there is a blurred line between projects and assets. For example, a school being renovated is both an asset and a project. This nuance makes it tougher to map. We’re learning lessons along the way and making sure to document it all.
What has been the feedback so far? How will you know if this has been successful?
MOI: We’ve ‘soft-launched’ the beta, and expect more public feedback to follow once more people discover and use t. We are using Google Analytics to track how people use the site and the map, and to help us make better decisions on how to present infrastructure data in the future.
