Visual Government

ARLINGTON, MA (U.S.) – January 17, 2014 – Online Budget Visualization Tool, Designed by Involution Studios with Town of Arlington, MA Offers Financial Transparency to Taxpayers

Arlington Visual Budget has been selected to receive the Massachusetts Municipal Association Innovation Award at the MMA Annual Meeting on January 25th in Boston.

Sponsored each year by the Massachusetts Municipal Association, the Kenneth E. Pickard Municipal Innovation Award recognizes unique and creative projects and programs that increase the effectiveness of local government. Judged by former municipal officials, consultants, and professors, an innovation must address a problem that is common to municipalities across the Commonwealth in an original, cost-effective, and efficient way. Winning innovations must improve a municipal service, administration, or performance, while adaptability to other communities is also a consideration. This award lets municipalities recognize successfully established innovative programs or projects and to share these new, unique, and effective solutions with other cities and towns.

Last fall, Involution Studios of Arlington, MA, along with the Town of Arlington and Finance Committee members Annie Lacourt and Alan Jones, conceptualized a web application that provides an easier way to communicate complex municipal financial information. Involution donated all development services for this project, the first known municipal budget visual representation of its kind.

The initiative exemplifies the nation’s commitment to the international Open Government Partnership (OGP), a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance. President Obama has challenged agencies to “harness new technologies” and “solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public” and emphasizes a “bottom-up” philosophy that taps citizen expertise to make government smarter and more responsive to private sector demands.

AVB provides the next generation of accessibility in financial information that enables citizens to see, engage, and discuss.

The Visual Budget system converts the town’s revenues and expenditures to simple graphics and charts that describe Arlington’s finances. It also provides definitions for complex budgeting terminology, and includes a tool where residents can input their yearly property tax bill and find out exactly how the town spends their tax dollars. Taxpayers can learn about town revenues, expenses, and funds displayed in both graphical and tabular formats. What’s more, the system enables users to provide feedback and ideas, an essential component of empowering citizens with both information and a greater voice in decision-making.

Town Management Analyst Michael Bouton said he was happy to work with Involution’s creative team on the project. “It was a blank canvas,” Bouton said. “We came in with an idea and the conceptualization of it was them.” Involution designers Roger Zhu and Ivan Dilernia donated their time, and the company has made the code for the project available online for other town governments to use. An Arlington resident, Involution’s Creative Director Juhan Sonin was excited about the collaboration, saying “It’s a part of our civic responsibility as designers to get involved in the design of policy.”

Read what the Sunlight Foundation says about how the Arlington Visual Budget will be used in 2014.

As part of the Town’s continuing effort to improve transparency, Arlington is announcing the launch of Arlington Visual Budget (AVB). AVB is a new online tool intended to provide the public with a visual representation of the Town’s financial history and outlook, as well as illustrate key trends. AVB allows users to dive into the budget like never before using graphics to more easily understand how tax dollars are spent.

“Increasing transparency and accessibility to financial information has long been a goal for the Town,” said Town Manager Adam Chapdelaine. “We hope this new feature will encourage users to learn more about Town finances and be more engaged in the annual budget discourse.”

Last year the Town conducted a public survey on how it communicates financial information. Residents overwhelmingly desired more concise, online information. In response, the Town and members of the Finance Committee worked with Involution Studios of Arlington, MA to conceptualize a web application that creates an easier way to communicate complex municipal financial information. Involution donated all development services of this project to the Town, the first known municipal budget visual representation of its kind.

AVB allows users to dive into the budget like never before using graphics to more easily understand how tax dollars are spent.

“We were intrigued by the challenge of this project and, being from Arlington, very excited to work with the Town,” said Involution Studios Creative Director, Juhan Sonin, who is also personally a long-time Arlington resident. “We’re pleased with the results so far and look forward to how residents use the feature.”

AVB not only gives residents a fresh way to consider Arlington’s budget, but it provides definitions and explanations for some of the more complex municipal budgetary concepts such as “Override Stabilization Fund” and “MWRA Debt Shift.” Arlington Visual Budget will continue to develop over time and the Town welcomes feedback from users. To view the AVB and provide feedback please visit arlingtonvisualbudget.org and for more Town financial information visit arlingtonma.gov/budget.

Each and every spring, the Finance Committee of Arlington sends the town’s upcoming budget to a representative Town Meeting where the budget is debated, amended and eventually approved. This April, the Town worked with Involution to create a new tool — Arlington Visual Budget — to represent and make sense of the valuable, complicated financial data.

In the beginning of March 2013, Andrew Flanagan, Mike Bouton, Annie LaCourt and Alan Jones of Arlington’s Town staff engaged with us (Roger Zhu and Ivan Di Lernia) to imagine and develop a new way to represent their financial data. It was exciting because we hadn’t worked in this area before. It was a blank canvas. In our first meeting we met with the team from Arlington and they explained that all the financial data is currently open to public, but even citizens well-versed in finance could not interpret the data through texts and tables alone. They needed a product that was able to tell the town’s financial story in a way that hadn’t been attempted before—by deciphering the town’s balance sheet in a visual, interactive way.

With that goal in mind, we began to sketch, prototype, and experiment with designs that would understand the layers and hierarchy of the data. One early design featured a zoomable partition layout. The design made the budget highly interactive and clearly articulated the hierarchy of each layer of data. We loved it!

But when we entered the data and populated the visualization we realized our approach wasn’t working as we had imagined. The data hierarchy and interaction worked as we’d intended, but because some of the numbers were very big and the others too small, the details of the data were handicapped by our design. We realized we’d put too much emphasis on the user. We needed to pay more attention to the content of the budget and center our visualization around the data itself.

On our first attempt, we found that users couldn’t properly see data that was more than two layers deep.

Luckily, with the data in the system we could begin experimenting again. We tried Sanky charts and bubble charts in order to find a design that worked with the data and was also easy to understand. We reached out to our friend Katy Harris at Fathom who gave us some much-needed critiques.

After several iterations we landed on tree maps, a visualization technique invented by Professor Ben Shneiderman. We found this design was easy for most users to understand. They could zoom into the deeper layers to see small data and zoom out to see the financial plan as a whole. The design represented both big and small numbers in our data set, no matter which layers we were on, so users could see accurate data down to it’s finest detail.

We showed our prototype to the town of Arlington’s team and watched as they interacted with their familiar data in a completely new way. They were surprised and delighted with how the data looked. It now told the story of their town. They were engaging with the numbers not as financial planners, they were playing with the budget like everyday citizens.

We learned a great deal from the back-and-forth process of this project. As designers and engineers, we had been taught to approach a problem from a human perspective, but in this project we also needed to focus our design around the data, to treat the numbers like “users”, and evolve designs around it.

Arlington will launch the Visual Budget during a town hall on September 21, 2013. We hope the Arlington Visual Budget will help make the citizens of Arlington more informed and engaged about the financial health of their town.

– Ivan & Roger