The politics of making it easier to design digital services
The politics of making it easier to design digital services
A couple of weeks ago I asked on Twitter if there was a term in service design for the explicit, political choice to make something harder to do through sub-optimal implementation.
I was not thinking of the intentional designing-in of inertia to help users reflect, to prevent a service from being overwhelmed, or to allow for additional checks. I was thinking of situations where there is a genuine political will for making a service less good than it could be, either indirectly by restricting its funding, or directly through the passing of laws.
It turns out there isn’t, but inspired replies included complification, egdun (nudge spelt backwards), socialUXclusion, policy dark pattern and just ‘politics’.
Whatever it’s called, it is a genuine phenomenon. Examples include:
- Requiring registration (with payment by law) to access land registration data in the name of fraud prevention
- The paper process through which guns are traced in the USA
- The additional ‘waiting days’ that were added people’s Universal Credit claims in the UK, with a separate, additional application process for people who could not afford to wait that long for assistance.
I asked the question as a proxy for several other issues I’ve been thinking about in relation to platforms in government. In a future world where shared components and platforms, along with the general adoption of open source and agile in government, make it easier and cheaper to build services:
- Does it remove an excuse for not fixing things in situations where the real motivation is political? Could the politics of delivering services become a tiny bit more honest? Is there any evidence this is already happening?
- What are the situations where it is genuinely an advantage for things to be suboptimal for the individual in the interests of wider society? For example, could real-time searching of certain types of public records have the side effect of making it easier to doxx people? How do we get better at articulating the difference?
- What information needs to be in the public domain about how services work to enable a better political conversation about alternatives? The code? The software tests? Audits? What would help journalists and campaigners to tell the difference between easy and hard?
Ultimately, these things are a question of ‘politics’, so what needs to be in place so that political debate is as good as it can be?