Budgetpedia
City budgets matter. For all the campaign promises of improved community housing, city council debates about poverty reduction strategies, and demonstrations about shelter closures, if the department responsible for the construction and maintenance of subsidized housing doesn’t receive the funding it needs, the end result will be the same as if there was no conversation at all. Budgetpedia is a volunteer-run open data project that visualizes budget tables released by the City of Toronto each year. They had a broad mission: to demystify the city budget. As Budgetpedia was pondering how to achieve this goal, I volunteered my research skills to connect them with the needs of their users and develop a more robust engagement model.
The Challenge
Budgetpedia had the backend capabilities to visualize data, but they were having trouble figuring out how to best deliver that data, and to whom. So far, most of their followers were data scientists who had an expert interest in analyzing and manipulating data. While data scientists and budget experts could extrapolate meaning from the visualizations, the average city resident could not. My challenge was to figure out what was needed to bridge the gap between experts and non-experts.
Who will benefit from Budgetpedia?
Establishing a user persona was challenging because Budgetpedia was trying to build enduring engagement with city budgets where none currently existed. I facilitated a modified persona workshop where we imagined Budgetpedia’s target persona based on the team's experiences in the civic activism space. We determined that the target user is:
NOT a data scientist
a civically engaged resident who is interested in city issues
Not "numbers people”
I conducted 6 semi-structured interviews designed to evaluate users’ educational needs and to uncover user scenarios and entry points for engagement. Most participants had little confidence in their ability to understand conversations around the budget since they did not identify as "numbers people" with an educational background in finance. When asked to carry out tasks on the city's budget website, many would become overwhelmed at the sight of walls of jargon-filled text, and give up. In contrast, they felt more confident in their ability to understand when information was embedded in narratives about the city.
Research into Strategy
After analyzing the data, it became clear that visualizing budget information was only one part of the puzzle. In order to translate graphs into meaningful information that residents could use to inform their civic activities and voting decisions, they would need two additional elements: an accessible educational resource and stories that tie budget figures to consequences for the city.
I translated these insights into concrete recommendations:
Engage journalists and urban policy analysts to craft narratives supported by visualized data
Create an accessible tutorial for budget basics that will provide users with the mental framework to understand narratives
Provide contextual glossary entries that clarify jargon
