Posted on Ideal Government

Posted on Ideal Government blog:

I'm going to return to the idea of process as opposed to object.

At the launch of Touching the State last week (co-produced by the Design Council and think tank IPPR) at the Houses of Parliament, someone asked whether we need to educate politicians about design. Most concurred. And, I'd add, we need to educate civil servants too. [It was a pity that Alan Milburn didn't hang around to actually listen to most of the other speakers or the questions.]

Much of the general public thinks 'design' is about the superficial, about style. It's actually about much more than that: it's the process of deciding what is going to be built or created. Design thinking can be applied to anything from a building to a computer system to a service.

The idea that we can design interactions between citizen and state is I believe an important one. At present, citizen encounters are 'designed' by government lawyers drafting acts of parliament, statutory instruments, rules etc. This may provide something that is legally watertight, but it leads to something that is all too often based on no real understanding of the citizen perspective.

What we get are a thousand badly designed encounters that are often legalistic and may well deter participation. For example, the disability charity SCOPE - which reports each year on the electoral pilots in the UK - reported this year that, "The Parliamentary Rules prescribing wording and layout of key documents [such as ballot papers and information documents] impact negatively on the accessibility of the election" and "the whole process [of postal voting] could be made simpler and more user friendly". Though this year's pilots were all-postal, most of the other channels being piloted in past and future years have been and will be electronic, and exactly the same problems arise. Moving to new technologies frequently exacerbates rather than improves encounters *unless* these encounters are well designed.

The Design Council announced last week that: "In public services, the Design Council is urging Government to dedicate 0.5% of public procurement spending to designing services around the end user. The public services debate currently centres on the scale, not the target of investment. But, if design thinking - which puts end-users' needs first - is missing then there is a high risk that services will fail the people that use them, be they teachers, nurses or members of the public."

Designing services around the end user implies conducting user research (and no, that does *not* mean focus groups).

At present, government is not about good design, it's about policy and politics, and about the 'big idea'. Policy makers pull a series of big ideas out of a hat (the 'active citizen' for example, or electronic prescribing) that seem to bear little relation to citizens' needs or wants. It's all top down. Who has defined a need for electronic prescribing (and does it really offer anything useful when you still can't get to see a GP any more quickly)? How does it help the citizen? What research has been done?

We currently have literally thousands of government websites, many of them rarely visited and badly thought out silos. The public sector is seeking to put more and more stuff into the electronic domain, but rarely thinks beyond simply making electronic that which is on paper, without considering what the new medium enables - see, for example, the dreadful Hansard online - and almost never considers the potential unintended consequences of turning brick-and-mortar encounters into electronic ones e.g. the impact on (a) election campaigning (b) accessibility (c) coercion (d) forms of democracy or (e) voter trust, (to name just a few issues) of electronic voting. Turning a poor real world encounter into a poor online one is too often the sole objective.

Government is seemingly increasingly interested in evidence-based approaches to everything... except its own initiatives. Is the Design Council's 0.5% for user-focused design asking so much?

Comments posted to that post by William Heath:

1. Very interesting. Well, if it’s 0.5% of public sector IT spend...spending £65m a year on designing e-services is better than wasting £13bn a year producing computerised government services that nobody wants to use.

I agree with the Design Council wanting to see e-services that meet people’s needs. Maybe it is, as they say, a design issue (though politicians might call it politics, managers might say it’s good management, and we might say it’s plain common sense).

Louise - do you have references to the Design council work and the people behind it?

2. Funny - I just spoke to the Design Council. It hadn’t occurred to them that what they say above is applicable to e-enabled systems - they were thinking of school classrooms and patient’s experiences in hospital. But what they say is totally applicable to e-government!