Empowering everyone to evaluate usability can improve the digital workplace. Here is how you take the first step with userpoll.io. Bad software makes a bad digital workplace Organizations that have been around for a few years typically have a large number of legacy systems. Ages ago, when they were created, it is likely that no one cared about their usability or design. Users were used to obeying software and taking a course in order to be able to file a report. This is particularly true for the public sector where competition between vendors is low and barriers for newcomers is high. We need to fix it to make our organizations a better place to work. ...

A small hack to simplify the application for temporary parental benefit for care of children from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan). Typically this involves multiple steps in a web browser. Now, moving a doll to a square and the computer will send relevant information to kindergarten and the social insurance agency.

(Cunningly illustrated using patent application art). A small Python script monitors twitter for the phrase “I hate lego”. Upon finding a matching tweet it sends a signal to an Arduino board that turns a servo pushing a small lego figurine over the edge of a table. Live example here (at approx 7:30). A hack for the Make All event in Stockholm.

A small crab attacked my GoPro camera.

Data about public sector spending is often hard to understand and compare. Statistics about government is often presented in tables. In this hack I have used open data from Eurostat (the EU statistics agency) about government expenditure for a set of countries and rendered sets of boxes in a Minecraft world. This makes it possible to explore the data by walking (flying) around the world. Boxes for expenditure data is ordered as General public services, Defence, Public order and safety, Economic affairs, Environment protection, Housing and community amenities, Health, Recreation culture and religion, Education, Social protection. ...

The queue ticket machine in Uppsala, Sweden.

As open data is gaining momentum an increasing number of organizations are thinking about ways to make their data available for others to use. Here are some thought on how to approach design issues when making open government data available. TL;DR See if it is possible to publish your open data as file dumps instead of building advanced API:s that force entrepreneurs to integrate their apps with your infrastructure. A fictional background It was supposed to be a regular day for John at the server facility at the government weather agency. But when he came in to work that morning his colleague Mike was in a panic. -“Look! We are in the middle of a DDoS attack. The API-server is flooded and the database server is on it’s knees. The meteorologists can not work” . John started looking at server logs. Between 7 and 8 a.m. there was a sharp increase in traffic. Loads of API calls were made from a lot of different IP:s. Then, all of a sudden server load decreased and everything was back to normal. ...