Digital View — Documenting the user experience

We have seen the impact of COVID-19 on disconnecting people from each other — meaning people who were not digitally capable would also be excluded in the digital world.

So we know there’s a continuum between the digital world and the real world. And I have been really passionate about getting the voices of our communities heard.

So when Jas came along and she said like she wanted to do her research on understanding user journeys, particularly for this segment of the community that are at the biggest risk of digital exclusion, I knew it was the right opportunity.

For me, my passion lies in understanding humans in general, but also specifically to understand what makes them unique. The barriers, the pain points that they face for any specific issues.

Specifically to this research, I wanted to understand what was the current digital inclusion position or status of these communities. I wanted to understand the first 3 months when they first came to New Zealand. What was that digital inclusion state? And then I want to understand the first 3 years of their settlement journey and being able to analyse and see the progression of changes in terms of digital inclusion, if there is any.

Hisham has a network with other advisors in the country, who have links to other non-profit organisations and communities. And from there, pretty much we reached out to recruit participants. Usually the hardest part of a research project is to find the right people for the research.

The challenge was to quickly build up a team of advisors from the ministry [MEC] throughout the country and then connect them to the research question and use their excellent community relationships in bringing in research participants within the deadlines, within the timeframes that we had for the research. And it’s really worked quite well.

The nature of the problem we’re dealing with, there was probably no one solution fits all, no best practice.

It was quite ambiguous and the road was not clear. We had to really take steady steps and apply various sorts of solutions.

Doing this piece of research has changed my life for the better. It’s also an example and a reminder of why I work in public services because the goal of the research is to help surface the voice of all these often digitally excluded communities.

For me, this was a collaboration between the government and community. You know, it’s coming together and achieving something that is better for the community, which is in this case, surfacing their voice.

When you’re someone who designs algorithms, you worry about efficiency of the algorithm. You worry about it using the resources, the computational resources, the processing power and if it can run on different computers without breaking apart. And then its impact on the real world like, for example, if you’re running a classification algorithm, you’ll just measure the impact in terms of its ability to return [with] accuracy and sensitivity.

So any deviation in accuracy from 100%, that little collateral is [a] ‘cost’. You’re going to be able to say, okay, we can neglect that. However, when you look at that 1 or 2% where the algorithm misses out on for an algorithm that is for hiring or probation systems or that assigns hospital appointments, then there’s a real human cost. There are real people’s fates waiting to be judged by the algorithm.

So some of the biggest learnings is in connecting to the human consequences of the algorithm. You’ve got to maybe have human oversight. And that means you need to have a very strong understanding of the system that you’re modelling and very strong understanding of the shortcomings of that system — and how they translate in the world as a first order, second order, intended or unintended consequence.

The participants we did the research with are from 20 ethnicities and they speak in 11 different languages.

One of our principles is that we want to be inclusive in the way that we share the findings.

So to publish the report in the languages that the research participants speak is something that we want to do for inclusion.

It also shows that we have heard their voices.

We are hosting it on the Ministry for Ethnic Communities website, which they trust, and they connect with. Also, to the support organisations and NGOs working in the space of improving digital inclusion.

It’s important, also, to host the report on digital.govt.nz alongside the other digital inclusion reports, where decision makers can access the website and take the learnings, take their perspectives, and compare this finding to the other findings across the other research groups.

And so we’re doing a bridging task between the decision makers and the communities — sharing the community’s response and scaling that up to the decision makers. We see both websites as a continuum of each other when it comes to delivering on the impact of this report.

I have many hopes for digital technology, transformational technology and the impact that has on communities. Traditionally, minority communities might have been used by the big players as a product rather than an integral part of the design.

So in terms of my dreams for the community, getting their voice heard and understanding that being able to connect and access services in the digital world as well as the physical world is part of why we are here as a ministry [MEC]. And so those action plans, of course, should really accommodate achieving outcomes for the communities both in the physical world and as well as in the digital world.

In terms of what I hope this report can achieve or influence government is [that] they consider the elements that are common across humans for all of these groups, so when we shape any digital inclusion initiative, then we address specific needs for those communities.

Reading the report would help you in a way to gain empathy or to be able to see what it’s like for different groups when they face digital inclusion issues.