Your government’s site sucks, but it doesn’t have to
By: Ux Alpaca
Tags: Digital, UX, Government, Product Design, User Experience

Can’t this government site just get a redesign? There are enough fresh-out-of-school designers who most certainly can design it better than whatever it is now. What are designers at <your government name> even doing? Wh...

No. Designers are not the the root of the problem here. We can redesign it, we can do it better. The problem is that, for government, making services work well is not important enough. Not unimportant altogether, just not important enough, because if your customers have no choice but to use your service, you cannot lose them. If there is no direct competition or financial loss from your customers being dissatisfied, they will not be a true priority.

If your customers have no choice but to use your service, you cannot lose them. If there is no direct competition or financial loss from your customers being dissatisfied, they will not be a true priority.

You don’t only see this happening in government, but in the business world as well — impossible to use internal tools, insane process flows to get refunds from your employer, hour-long conversations with IT support to get your password reset. The time wasted on this is paid either by the clients of the company, or this waste of time is just an overhead of the company that is so invisible that nobody thinks of fixing it.

Part of the problem is that for the teams which are actually making these services the ‘government higher up' is the real customer, and the citizens are actually the 'product' being processed/paid out/registered.

But there are exceptions

The government user-friendliness does not have to be abysmal either: look at Estonia and the UK government services. Australia, Peru, Mexico are also getting on that path. Some large corporates (they are surprisingly similar to governments sometimes) too invest heavily in the usability of their internal tools, in order to simplify and streamline their processes. They do see how they can cut the overhead and increase the efficiency of their employees — which is basically the financial gain of it.

The pre-condition for the change is that it becomes a priority from top-down. I see enough grassroots movements to make government more user-friendly, but as an individual contributor there’s this much that you can influence with your work. The efforts of a designer striving for a better service often end up being surface-level improvements. If you do not have a mandate to change the system and the process behind, you end up having a pretty design, which still does not work for the user. You kinda bluff the user-friendliness.

To be fair, for-profit organisations too are guilty of implementing surface-level ‘user-friendliness’. Explaining a process in a pleasant voice and well-staged video does improve the experience of ‘press for 8 seconds, wait for 2 seconds, press for 5 seconds, wait for 5 seconds, press for 2 seconds…’. It almost seems too bad to be true.

So how do you get there?

Digital transformation in governments does not happen of its own accord, and the people who help it get there are not magicians. I learned that during the Delivering Digital Government conference this week. There were a number of great speakers who were at the roots of gov.uk, including Francis Maude (the politician who started the whole Government Digital Services shebang) and Andrew Greenway (who thought setting up gov.uk was not enough and went on rocking more governments and large organizations). They shared their side of the story, and a number of success factors to get this change going. I must admit, these are not much different from what you’d expect any commercial company to do when they want change, yet it is amazing to see that a government pulled this off. These are not all of the suggestions they gave, but these are the most impactful:

Start small

This seems so obvious when agile is a prevalent mindset in tech companies. But this was a great starting strategy for the team to build the proof-of concept, first gov.uk site with just a 100 most frequently used services.

Digital transformation is about transformation, not about digital

This is a recurring point from multiple public servants on the conference. Just making a process digital does not solve anything. The transformation is about culture, process, business and technology (as also explained in their book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery’).

A leader, a mandate, and critical mass of the technical capability

If the leader does not get the mandate to take decisions, you will lose the leader. Without the technical capability you cannot get the mandate to change things. Without a good leader all the rest will fall apart. You need all three.

Do not plan it, start doing

This one is related to ‘Start small’. It was very disarming when Francis Maude said something along the lines of ‘I too didn’t know at the start how the whole picture will look like. I just put a number of very smart people in the room with wi-fi and let them go at it. Only after a couple of years of seeing what works, and what doesn’t we could make it into a proper strategy. Delivering the first working prototype fast was our original strategy’. This is an example of a true agile mindset.