The above insights informed our design of the TGIST portal, which enables local government officials to upload, clean, share, and analyze cross-departmental data sets to inform decision-making.
The core of TGIST lies in its data editor and data visualizer. Through a collaborative build approach, both have been customized to plug into existing workflows and empower users to take advantage of the analytical capabilities of the tool.
Data editor
The data editor enables government officials to upload and clean datasets. The Thibi team has incorporated permission settings into the tool, allowing users to formally approve data before it is shared with other departments as well as to audit changes made to living datasets.
Data Viewer
The data viewer helps users overlay multiple data sets onto one another to visualize spatial trends in the data; for instance, one could overlay hospital data and traffic data to explore whether certain traffic junctions lead to statistically more accidents than others. Easy export functionality has been built into the data viewer to honor current paper-based processes and support users on the transition to digital.
For a demo of the portal and to learn more about the project, get in touch.
The initial research phase resulted in four guiding design principles that informed the building of TGIST. The Thibi team aims to honor these principles in every incremental iteration of the TGIST web portal.
- Break down complex tasks into easy-to-follow recipes: Guide our users through complex tasks by breaking them down into simple steps and then providing step-by-step guidance. Provide users constant feedback on their progress towards completing a particular task.
- Adapt to existing workflows so that we can improve them: Understand and respect existing modes of work. Identify discrete areas where digitizing can improve workflows and design to ‘plug in’ accordingly.
- Record user actions for accountability, but ensure important actions are reversible: Build trust in digital workflows by making changes traceable and transparent, but make sure that users always have a way of correcting mistakes. Derisk the use of TGIST by ensuring that errors can be corrected.
- Build confidence in sharing and using data: Trust in data is the bedrock of a data-driven culture. Be mindful about visibility when sharing. Invite users to play with data, but be honest about the data’s limitations.
As of Aug 2020, 50 civil servants have been on-boarded onto the use of TGIST for data sharing, visualization, and analysis. TGIST is still in its infancy as a product, and the project team will continue to follow an iterative methodology to build an incrementally better product. Every iteration is designed to be increasingly useful for stakeholders without requiring them to radically alter their workflows.