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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

Availability and load balancing aside, did any other Australian citizen (who actually managed to complete the census at all) notice that the UX was quite ordinary? Reminded me of a web form circa 1990.

For instance, IIRC the census asked for my and my wife's country of birth and nationality, but later on when filling in the info for our children, it asked for the nationality of the both parents again. Simple logic checking back through the data should have shown that our (the parent's) information was already supplied, and this information for our children could be pre-filled or skipped and auto filled in the database.

Just a few small things that would have made the filling out of the forms a lot smoother, faster, and less complicated for lay people who were already nervous about doing the data entry.

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Except you may have step-children, adopted children, foster children, children in the house not part of your family (friends of your child, children of your friends), etc. Keep in mind that the census needs to include everyone who was in the house at the time it was filled out, not everyone who is part of your regular abode/family situation.

You might argue that it would work for the "most common scenario". In which case why not pre-fill all the data to the statistically most common values? (Hint: the census's purpose is to collect those statistics.)

Also, pre-filling might cause confusion as to which fields have already been filled out by the user; if a value is present, they might wrongly assume no action is required on their part.

(Having said all that, I haven't seen the online census.)

UX wise, a radio button that hides that section labelled "same as John Doe" might have given that flexibility without the pain of rewriting a dozen things again.

Sure. I did consider the scenario if the kids had a friend sleeping over that night or something, or if the respondents had adoptive or foster children etc., but I think when I traced back the line of questioning in my case there seemed to be a logical thread link there that could/should have negated asking for the same information again.

I am relying on my memory here from few months ago, so I could be wrong, but I did feel at several points during the session that quite a few questions could quite possibly be chained together in better fashion. Perhaps not so much a failing of the actual site UX designer, but the census analysts who designed the questions in the first place?

Not responsible for this census, but I've done work with it in the past. Two observations:

The questions are largely derivative and the same each year: cost to develop and test while maintaining statistical validity and capture of all possible scenarios, while still being interpreted correctly by the population, is enormous.

Secondly, the number of permutations and combinations of answers is almost universally underestimated by everyone I've ever met outside of this process. Nationality is not the same as birthplace is not the same as parent is not the same as adults in the household. The amount of diversity is staggering.

Additionally, although those two are the primary reasons for the question designs (and I assure you, people will be doing deductions and logical inferences on the back-end once the data is collected), being exhaustive at the point of data entry rather than deductive allows for further meta analysis on the data entry process and survey responding experience itself, whereas if you decide to attempt to deduce, you miss out on a dimension of typo, misskey, misinterpretation, and other analysis data that you would forgo in the former case.

Thanks for your viewpoint from the 'sausage factory', so to speak. I am beginning to understand the enormity of trying to combine ease of use, with the effort to gather statistically valid data.

It's kind of the same thing when people assume that you only need a simple data structure for representing a family tree.

I thought the presentation was very good. I was pleasantly surprised that the design was professional and modern looking.

It seemed to be a single page application because once you got started it was fast to get through the process. I suspect the SPA nature was a deliberate decision to offload workload from the servers. Imagine how much more traffic would been needed if every page/section on the form required another call to the server.

See my other comment further down, but I just thought of another issue again:

Design consideration has to be given to how/what people will be using to access said questions.

If it looks like a web form from the 1990s , ask yourself what kind of technology some Australians might be using to try to fill out their census form, and how standard we have to try to keep that interface/experience.

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