Comments on: Know Where You Live

By: And the Mashie Goes To…[drum roll] | Government 2.0 Taskforce

And the Mashie Goes To…[drum roll] | Government 2.0 Taskforce — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:51:42 +0000

[...] Know Where You Live which bills itself as a prototype of a mashup of a range of open access government data based on postcodes so that you can truly know where you live. The judges loved the very citizen-centric “common questions” user experience of this app and the groovy, and again, selective repackaging of what could otherwise be considered (we’ll be honest here) slightly boring data. The integration of publicly-held historical photographs and rental price data was a nice touch as was the use of Google’s satellite images in the header. Judges were disappointed that some of the data for states other than NSW wasn’t available for inclusion. The focus on compliance only with the most modern standards compliant browsers was not seen as detrimental to this mashup. [...]

By: Di E

Di E — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:28:33 +0000

I’m having trouble running this with Chrome.

By: h

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:01:32 +0000

Engaging content and slick design. For mashups to really grab the attention of people in govt and the general public, we need more like this.

By: Peter Mcphee

Peter Mcphee — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:15:09 +0000

Practical, but too many like it.

By: Eric Auld

Eric Auld — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:21:12 +0000

Gavin – Thanks for the support and everything you say is true. Our main goal of Know Where You Live is to “make boring ‘datasets’ interesting to general punters”, which meant make it visual and easy to use.
This also meant that we focused on later browsers that have all the visual impact and for other browsers to visually degrade.
For the best experience, use browsers with webkit ie. Safari or Chrome.

Eddie – It should work fine with Chrome and have a slight visual degrade with Firefox (we didn’t get any crashes with our testing). We know IE is not the best experience, but that should improve when we have time to iron out the bugs. After all this is still just a prototype.
But please get in touch with us through the site and tell us how it is crashing for you. Without feedback we can’t fix it.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:43:17 +0000

I saw this presented at govhack in Canberra – I thought it was great then, and I love now.

I’m using firefox on a mac, and it works 100%.

The visual design is the strong point of this app. I think the developers made the right decision to ignore IE and to go for a design that works well and looks great in standards compliant browsers.

IE has been the bane of web developers for years – if I could ignore it I would. Within this competition, I think its totally appropriate to show ‘what should be’ rather than fit the lowest common denominator. Anyone viewing these entries should be familiar with the shortcomings of IE, and prepared to use an alternate browser.

My comments on the design here aren’t meant to take away from the visual presentation of the data. The integration of the various datasources seems well done – and does provide a good snapshot of a suburbs stats. The integration of the google satellite map, and the archive image add excellent contextual interest to the page. These are really important elements that make boring ‘datasets’ interesting to general punters.

All the entries here should aim to look as good as this.

By: Eddie

Eddie — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:14:35 +0000

What’s with the overkill on the visuals?

This is a perfect example of how websites or web applications should not be built.

Design Breaks in all IE versions.
crashes in chrome and firefox.

By: Eric Auld

Eric Auld — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:18:41 +0000

Hey Adam – The coverage has actually increased to all of NSW (the front page needs a text change) and down to actual postcode level rather than just LGA.

By: Adam Kennedy

Adam Kennedy — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:08:16 +0000

When looked at with the right browser (“right” being Safari, IE is groing to break a lot) this is by far the prettiest and most seredipitous entry in the competition.

It is mainly let down by low geographic coverage and browser compatibility though.

But regardless of these faults, I love it because it has set the bar for all supposedly “good looking” websites to meet, and it helped ram through to me that I am REALLY not a designer and I really should either not try, or make sure we recruit a proper designer to any competition team.