Why Canada’s open data portal needed a usability upgrade

Canada’s commitment to being a leader in open government was bolstered recently when the federal government launched the makeover of its open data portal, data.gc.ca, with improved user experience in mind.

The site allows citizens, non-government organizations, researchers and others to leverage the more than 270,000 datasets the government has made publicly available – everything from air and water quality to border wait times, permanent residency applications, crime statistics and vehicle recalls to name a few.

When Treasury President Tony Clement announced the formal relaunch of the site in June, he said the government plans to increase the number of data sets by many thousands, but that there are constraints they must consider when doing so.

“We have to abide by the legislation, we have to protect national security and we have to protect people’s privacy,” he said. “Absent those constraints, there are many thousands of datasets that can be posted.”

Before the site’s makeover, however, the portal had been criticized for its not-so-friendly user interface as well as for the poor quality of search results.

“The previous layout was difficult to negotiate,” says David Eaves, a public policy commentator, who also sat on the open government advisory panel and hosted focus groups to generate feedback on and recommendations for the site.  According to the report Eaves produced as the result of the focus groups, the single greatest complaint about the federal open data portal was search quality.

“Participants talked of searching for datasets they knew existed, but could not find them without typing an exact phrase or knowing a key term,” stated the report.

Another aspect of the site that lacked muscle, according to Eaves, was in its approach to community, or creating a space where users can easily share their experiences and exchange ideas about data use. He says the new portal is slightly improved in this area, but that building community is an ongoing struggle in the Web world.

“They have tried to do that with the developer area of the new site, but it’s not easy,” says Eaves. “You have to work hard to cultivate community and I don’t know that they’re doing that yet.”

Feedback from the various constituents of users will be critical to the long-term success of the open data portal, says Eaves.

“The web site is important but what matters is the support and community building,” he says. Are they talking to users? Are users showing up to the site? It would be interesting to know how quickly do they respond to the “request a dataset.” What are the response times when they receive a request?”

Robert Giggey, Open Source Lead for the City of Ottawa, agrees that engaging with users is the best avenue to building better usability into an open data site.

“We should have a sense of who’s asking for data; who’s engaging with us, what they’re looking for and how they want to access it. You can get that from accepting comments, feedback and suggestions.”

Giggey says many governments get hung up on policy or technical issues when they embark on an open data strategy, but his advice is to move forward iteratively.

“Adopt an agile development strategy; get a simple table up. If you have a calendar on your site, you should have a downloadable file next to it. If you have pool location, put a link up that has the locations.”