Articles
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The work of the Laboratorio de Innovación Pública UC in Chile is a nice example of this I saw recently. They have a team that includes nurses and designers working to reduce waiting lists through iterative improvement of services. ↩︎
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My strong hunch is that the answer lies not in fully automated, stand alone digital tools, but in blended AI and human interactions. Some types of coaching and learning seem to rely on epistemic trust and theory of mind that, AI, logically must have some limits in respect of, not being conscious. There is also a risk that we get a trench of AI tools that create a separate ‘channel’. Jay Springett has written about how “This brand-new technology is becoming invisible, baked into workflows so seamlessly we stop noticing them. This shift feels inevitable.” I read that via Matt Jones, who has written on designing for AI as an addition to human capacbilities. ↩︎
- People value the feeling of the interaction, not just the outcome
- People’s interactions in one service, including services they have experienced by helping others, may change how they interact with government beyond the boundaries of that service
- The spaces for users to discuss and reflect on services are unclear, often privatised, and have poor feedback loops to service delivery
- Finally, how services implement the rules that politicians make and the decisions that public servants make can be unclear and, in some situations, essentially unknowable
- Firstly, user centred design has simply not been applied to these problems yet - for example because business cases or how government organises its work mean they go unaddressed
- Secondly, that external professions like campaigners and lawyers have not yet figured out how to operate within the iterative development cycle and alongside digital services, meaning they are unable to articulate their concerns in a way that digital teams can act on
- Thirdly that there are limits to how far we can stretch user centred design to beyond the individualistic and the utilitarian, and that we may need framings in addition to user centred design to guide the development of digital public services
Thoughts on the NHS 10 year plan (with a digital skew)
The UK government has published the 10 year plan for the National Health Service. It is based around ‘three big shifts’: analogue to digital, hospital to community, and sickness to prevention.
Some people have said it’s less of a plan and more of a vision, which is probably fair, but also probably necessary to rewire such a complex set of organisations. I’d add that the three big shifts feel like incomplete sentences: “analogue to digital means …”. Maybe that’s the bit where the plans need to live. Here’s my (digitally skewed) take:
Analogue to digital means applying digital principles to the design of everything the NHS does, not just the digital bits
Of the three big shifts, this one carries with it the biggest risk of misinterpretation and, ultimately, failure. If it is interpreted as a series of technology projects driven by near term costs it will go the way of previous efforts that look good on project plans but don’t survive contact with reality. That’s because the things that are expensive and complex for the public and clinicians are not necessarily the things that are complex and expensive for the bureaucracy.
The plan should be to create dozens more delivery teams that are organised around outcomes, not technology. These should be truly multidisciplinary - staffed by designers, technologists, clinicians, public health etc.1 They should be funded to deliver incrementally, starting small and with ruthless focus on identifying and removing health admin. Digital is not just about technology, it’s an iterative way of delivering value for service users.
Hospital to community means designing tools that help neighborhood health teams quickly create services that work for the people they serve
Typically, policymakers have had to choose which layer of the bureaucracy is responsible for the delivery of a service. Digital changes that. Common platforms, such as the NHS app or GOV.UK Notify, can enable the delivery of local services. A failure to understand that central vs local is a false dichotomy, coupled with a desire to devolve more power leads to the sort of world where every hospital trust buys the same thing from a limited pool of suppliers.
However, just creating central tools mandating them is also a risky strategy because they might not meet local needs, slowing down delivery. The lesson from GOV.UK’s common platforms and around the world is that effective public sector platforms meet the needs of teams delivering frontline services.
The plan should be to understand the needs of local health teams through user research and then create common platforms and open-source tools that support their work. Anything else is a guess from the center and the obvious guesses (authentication, notifications etc) are already spoken for. Separate teams should be tasked with identifying and platforming the common needs that emerge from those local health teams. Again, some of those platforms, such as fulfillment for home testing delivery, might only be partly digital.
Sickness to prevention means organising to test assumptions and scale what works
There are lots of assertions about how technology might prevent sickness, such as the use of AI based triage, but the fact is that we don’t know what a digital first, prevention first health service look like because it doesn’t exist yet. Can you use technology to recommend someone a stop smoking or weight-loss service? Almost certainly. Can you use technology to get people to stop smoking or loose weight? That’s a different question.2
The plan has to start to use the NHS app to design feedback loops where more data about a person can be presented back to them in meaningful ways and effective next steps suggested. Those are not primarily technology or data problems, they are clinical and interaction design questions. You need to understand what works, what can be automated and what cannot before you attempt to scale.
Organising to test assumptions probably means a lot of hand cranking in the short term, just as when Universal Credit launched it had a digital interface, but much of the behind the scenes processes were still manual. ‘What works’ has to be in part (mostly?) about patient reported outcomes and the NHS app provides a way to collect those systematically. Starting to create those feedback loops does not have to be expensive, but it does require a certain mindset.
Milton Keynes marathon 2025
I was supposed to run the Brighton marathon last month, but bug between a charity’s CRM and the marathon meant I didn’t actually have a place. Lots of people very kindly sponsored me, so to make sure I delivered my side of the deal I ran Milton Keynes.
I hadn’t done a very convincing job of training for Brighton because of other commitments. I thought a month more might mean I could make up for that, but that was wishful thinking. The result was I didn’t really have a plan or a target time, so I just ran what felt Ok and didn’t push it too much.
That was liberating and had a nice run as a result. I’m also limping considerably less than after the London marathon last year. I still did 3:43, which is pretty convincing and only 10 minutes slower than London.
I got a Bolt to the start because the busses didn’t seem to be running. Bolt seems to have basically the same coverage as Uber now, so I’m choosing Europe.
Milton Keynes, as viewed from the satnav, doesn’t seem to exist. It’s liminal connective tissue, like corridors in a hotel laid, over the countryside. It does connect some very beautiful places though. I really liked running through all the under passes too, you could almost imagine the roads and the cars weren’t there.
Administrative Fairness Lab Conference 2025
I was in York for the Administrative Fairness Lab’s conference. Somehow I’ve never visited before.
The photo above is from York Minster’s stone mason yard, cathedral’s being things that are never done.
One of the sessions at the conference, by Maria Lee and Sam Guy was about due process in the planning system. One of the key ideas I took away was that removing things like consultations doesn’t remove the contested viewpoints they exist to air. Those still exist and some process are there as a safety value.
There was also lots of talk, as there is everywhere, about AI. But this was good talk, rather than the same old same old.
Jed Meers presented findings from prototyping chat bots and automated transcription that included more or less human intervention and how that might impact people’s sense of procedural fairness. Tom Tyler referenced similar tradeoffs and blended human-automated systems.
My dream interdisciplinary mashup at the moment is public sector designers, rule of law people researching administrative fairness, and psychologists researching mentalization/epistemic trust. Somewhere in there lies some of the answers on what decent public AI looks like.
Designing the seams, not seamless design
Designing the seams, not seamless design
On YouTube, there’s a compilation of Steve Jobs speeches where he says: ‘It just works. Seamlessly.’ There are forty-four examples in total. ‘It just works’ sums up Jobs’ approach to design: remove and simplify. He thought design should ‘get out of the way’. Products that just worked were not there to be meddled with either (when Apple discovered repair shops opening the iPhone 4, they added tamper-proof screws).
It has become an article of faith that a good design is one that just works. One school of thought is that it is enough to apply these principles to the public sphere — to create public services that ‘just work’. But do we really want to design our public services like an iPad? Functional yes, even magical, but good luck if you want to understand how it works.
A functional, transactional view of the relationship between citizen and state — characterised by the argument: I pay my taxes, so all the council has to do is collect the bins and fix potholes — is hardly a new one. But those arguments often come from the privileged position of people who don’t have to interact with public services all that much. It also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public.
Public services are different because people have to use them. They must work, and they must work for everyone. Their quality is measured not through the number of units sold, but by feedback from the public.
Regardless of how well they are perceived to have been designed by designers or policymakers, public services require an element of ‘co-production’ with the public.
The concept of co-production has its origins in the early 1970s and the work of Elinor Ostrom. As part of her work on co-production, Ostrom described the ‘service paradox’ where the quality of services as defined by professionals results in suboptimal outcomes as defined by users.
For example, better-designed textbooks might make education worse if the content is so clear that students no longer feel the need to discuss issues with their class or teachers. In a school, pupils are co-producers of learning with their teachers and with each other.
At the UK Government Digital Service, our version of ‘it just works, seamlessly’ was ‘do the hard work to make it simple’. That principle summed up what we’d tried to do with GOV.UK: people should not need to understand government to interact with it. But as modern design practice spread across government, the simplicity principle took on a life of its own. The idea that people should not have to understand the rules and the structure of government seemed to morph into an assertion that the workings of government should be obfuscated.
When I was working on the UK’s digital welfare system, Universal Credit, in 2014, it became abundantly clear that the next-generation digital public services that automate, abstract and have complex data flows demanded a different approach to design.
Despite the aspiration of public sector design to make services simpler, clearer and faster, we also need to acknowledge that a focus on simplicity, especially when combined with the inherent opaqueness of technology and data, make it harder for people to understand government.
The ability for users to ‘meddle’ is a key feature of public services. Democracy is about more than voting every four or five years, it’s about the opportunities people have to shape the services and the rules that, in turn, shape their world. Understanding the way things are is a precondition for being able to change them. Democracy, it has been said, is ‘government by explanation’.
To avoid the service paradox in the next generation of public services, there need to be clear opportunities to understand the workings of those services.
But can we reconcile ‘it just works’ with ‘government by explanation’?
For inspiration, we can look to the work of the late Mark Weiser, who was the chief technologist of Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 1990s. He argued that we should aspire to design ‘calm technology’. ‘Beautiful seams’ would, he proposed, be the way to interact with digital tools that would otherwise exist in the background. Rather than being totally hidden, complexity is there to be revealed. Users can configure, understand or take control of automated processes, as needed.
Rather than designing seamless public services, we should aspire to design better seams. Services should orientate users so they can adopt the correct stance for the organisation they are dealing with. They should help people understand how data about them is used and when that data is used in a new context. If a decision just doesn’t look right, services need to help users switch tasks: from seeking an outcome to trying to understand what has happened. Finally, there should be a route from the service to the underlying rules that say why the service works the way it does and who is accountable.
Digital services should work, yes, but they should also actively educate people about how democracy works and where power and accountability lie by putting transparency at the point of use. After all, democracy is a user need too.
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Richard Pope was part of the founding team of the UK Government Digital Service and the first product manager for GOV.UK. He is the author of the book ‘Platformland’.
Standing inside the machine
I was in the Netherlands to deliver a keynote at the User Needs First conference. While I was there I visited the Zaanse Schans open air museum. Windmills and other industrial buildings were transported and reconstructed there in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s also a museum of industry, mostly chocolate and biscuits.
Compared to most preserved windmills in the UK, many of the windmills at Zaanse Schans actually work and it was a very windy day. I’ve been in power stations and factories, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had the feeling of being inside a machine. Big, but you can still walk about it at human scale.
It’s just jogged a memory of The Mouse Mill episode of Bagpuss where the mice pretend to make a biscuit factory. The reveal being that there is only one biscuit and it just goes round and around. For some reason that really stuck with me as a kid.
I’ve been going all in on Obsidian the past few months. Normally open-source software that is endlessly configureable is a total mess, but with obsidian it feels less like configuring, more like being inside the machine.
Public sector design — time for a reset
Public sector design — time for a reset
Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design.
The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services. The public have been engaged as consumers, not as part of a democratic society, in a way that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public.
Minimalism can’t scale to the types of services that do much more for the public, it can’t meet the demands of accountability. Trust in a public institution is a function of their ability to deliver the public good they are tasked with, and public services only get better if there is a public understanding of them. But designing government out of the way degrades the public image of government.
Shunning technology means conversations about better use of data, remain stuck in the rut of ‘data sharing’ and critical infrastructure is too easily dismissed as solutionism.
A focus on utility leads us down a route to ‘personalised’ and ‘simplified’ services which, while OK for the minimal interactions that some may with the state, are useless at explaining the messy and demanding.
User needs, as a guiding principle was, it turned out, poorly suited to situations where the needs of government and the public were at odds with each government, or where people wanted more from government than a simple outcome.
Much of this was already obvious in 2013/14. Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.
Public sector design — time for a reset
Public services should work much harder for the public. However, the new UK government isn’t going to meet its aspirations for digital and data unless it resets the public sector’s approach to design.
The approach that grew from GOV.UK and the Government Digital Service was, if not flawed, at least incomplete at source. It ended up prioritising utilitarian simplicity, at the cost of designing government out of the way, and shunned technology as inconsequential to the design of services. The public have been engaged as consumers, not as part of a democratic society, in a way that fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public.
Minimalism can’t scale to the types of services that do much more for the public, it can’t meet the demands of accountability. Trust in a public institution is a function of their ability to deliver the public good they are tasked with, and public services only get better if there is a public understanding of them. But designing government out of the way degrades the public image of government. Shunning technology means conversations about better use of data, remain stuck in the rut of ‘data sharing’ and critical infrastructure is too easily dismissed as solutionism.
A focus on utility leads us down a route to ‘personalised’ and ‘simplified’ services which, while OK for the minimal interactions that some may with the state, are useless at explaining the messy and demanding.
User needs, as a guiding principle was, it turned out, poorly suited to situations where the needs of government and the public were at odds with each government, or where people wanted more from government than a simple outcome.
Much of this was already obvious in 2013/14. Designing the digital account for the Universal Credit digital account, it was abundantly clear that the approach to design that worked for GOV.UK and was spreading across government was fundamentally unsuited to services that used automation, intentionally placed burdens on the public through policy choice, and used data from across government. As was the need for greater transparency and accountability. But as design practice spread across government, the focus on simplicity took on a life of its own, developing into what, at times, felt like a tyranny of design, where anything that distracted from the proximate user need was impossible to justify. The idea that digital public services needed to be more than transactional was lost.
Digital talent and precariousness in government
Given there’s a UK election coming up, there’s going to talk about how to get more tech talent into government. Most is probably going to be encouraging ‘tours of duty’ from the tech industry. That short-term engagements are the way to get people with digital skills in to government. I thoughts I’d share my experience from 2011 on the precariousness that creates.
I originally joined the civil service on a 2 year fixed term as a civil servant. That was extended once (after a stressful period of uncertainty). Then when it should have rolled over into a full-term contract, I was told it wouldn’t. Just a letter in the post. No one anywhere in the civil service/gds could or would help. Nor could I transfer, despite trying. I was trying to move house at the time, in the middle of what turned out to be a series of miscarriages, and undergoing mental health treatment that was the result of the GDS transformation projects. At what felt like the last minute I was told it could maybe rollover if I did a sort of internal contracting role, but there was nothing concrete and the uncertainty of that had already taken its toll, so I quit.
I never wanted to be a contractor, I’d spent years before working on government things outside of government and played a not insignificant hand in several successes (GOV.UK, Universal Credit, Service Standard, GaaP, etc). I built built everything around the assumption of remaining a product manager in the civil service. But contracting was where I found myself having to absorb with covid, unpaid parental leave, several episodes of cancer in the family, deaths and a everything that life throws at you. Treating digital skills an exception, or something to be passed onto people already in management positions in a short bursts forces this kind of precariousness and costs on to people. If you want digital people in government, give them stable jobs and responsibilities.
Speaker notes: administrative fairness in practice
The following is (approximatly) the talk I gave as part of the Administrative Fairness Lab’s panel at the ESRC Festival of Social Science.
Starting with GOV.UK in 2012, the changes to how the UK government designs and builds digital services over the past decade have been significant. User centered design practice and agile development are now the norm, at least in some form. Digital services are tested with real users throughout the development lifecycle. Common standards around design and writing set a baseline of what good looks like. They are launched early and iterated based on feedback. Long gone are the days when ministers would launch a service on the Today programme only for it to crash 20 minutes later, and the basic usability of digital services rarely makes headlines (as it did for example when DWP launched the fated Universal Jobmatch in 2012).
The introduction of user centered design to government was a necessary and, it now seems, inevitable adoption of industry best practice that means services work for users and meet their needs. However, I think it is fair to say that user centered design, at least as practiced in UK central government, is quite utilitarian. The priority is getting the immediate task done and within the bounds of a particular service. Externalities tend to remain external concerns. It is also fair to say that the framing is quite individualistic. It deals mainly in the interaction between “the user” and the service. Or we could say the surface of the service.
For digital design practitioners, the question raised by the work of the Administrative Fairness Lab, and work by others on how ‘rule of law principles’ apply in digital services, is not whether user centered design is necessary for delivering the quality of digital public services that society needs (it is clear that it is and that it’s here to stay), but whether it is on its own sufficient.
To summarise the issues we have heard today:
These issues present against a backdrop of: digital moving from the periphery to central to how public services are delivered; digital being applied to more significant areas such as welfare; design having collapsed the distinctions between different parts of government; and rapidly changing public understanding about what good digital services look like.
On the question of if user centered design practice is sufficient, it seems that there are three possibilities:
I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive.
There is almost certainly value in applying user centred design to how, for example, welfare rights advisors could understand decisions, how services can be made to feel psychologically fair, creating spaces for public dialogue, or designing appeals processes that are as simple to use as the application process. Indeed, there are many practitioners who attempt this. However, it will be hard to prioritise that from within departmental digital teams, especially where they might cost money or the externalities are felt elsewhere in government. It will probably need to come from the centre through changes to practice, patterns, platforms and policy.
There also need to be new ‘hooks’ for other professions to work within the new normal that digital services have created. The work of the Child Poverty Action Group on Universal Credit has started to show the value of things like early warning systems, creating design provocations rather than policy documents, and mapping user interfaces of a digital service so there is a ‘ground truth’ to understand policy gaps. These sorts of processes could be systematised, but again, it’s not going to come from service delivery departments.
Finally, administrative burden and rule of law principles could provide a useful framing alongside user centred design. Administrative burden lets teams consider the psychological costs alongside the learning and compliance costs. I’d like to see an incoming government make the systematic elimination of administrative burden the aim for a revitalised Government Digital Service. A reference to rule of law principles should also be added to the government’s digital service standard, placing a responsibility on all digital teams.
To wrap up, user centered design and the digitisation of services are here to stay. Digital government practitioners need to be given the space (and make the space) to reforge and expand what design means in the context of public services.
A measure of value for digital public service delivery
A measure of value for digital public service delivery
User need: outcomes for people, their representatives or communities
Policy intent: meeting explicit outcomes sought by politicians or ones implicit in legislation
Capability to operate: building a collegiate team, unpicking legacy software or answering a knotty technical question
Product leadership in the public sector is, more often than not, about balancing these 3 things.
Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government
Talk: designing means-tested welfare procedures in government
Short talk from the tail-end of last year that I gave to the Administrative Fairness Lab’s webinar on the Energy Crisis, Fuel Poverty, and Administrative Fairness on digital means testing *
](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qnDCmAccU2a_5zzlWVfLww.png)
* Not a judgement on if means-testing is good/bad and the social implications therein
Government service design: outcomes and ‘fairness’?
Would it be ok if a digital public service makes it simple for users to achieve a proximate outcome (get a widget licence, apply for a widget support allowance, pay widget tax, appeal a widget removal order etc) if the process feels less than fair? Or if the rules are opaque, inconsistent or unknowable? If it’s unclear who is making a decision and why? If no one has designed how it feels to interact with the procedures and processes that sit around it? Or if, collectively, services build a nagging sense of mistrust in government (or, at the very least, fail to maintain a level of trust)?
There’s a fundamental question that needs applying to todays digital government practice: is it possible to design for fairness and outcomes? Or are there trade-offs being made?
As this report from IIPP identifies, the design approach that developed at the UK Government Digital Service was a utilitarian one (see page 12): Get. This. Thing. Done. We never fully developed the words for anything else.
(As a civil servant at GDS, I tried a few times to make the case for greater transparency in how things work, but never had a good answer to the counter question of “whats the user need?” and ended up with the unsatisfactory ”sometimes the user need is: because democracy”, accompanied by copious arm waving.)
Where there are conversations about accountability and fairness in the public sector, they are more often than not in the hermetically sealed sphere of ‘innovation’, algorithms’ or AI frameworks. I wonder if that because it’s easier to have those debates in the future and hypothetical space, rather than in the day to day reality of services that people actually use?
Anyway, this is why I’m very interested in the new Administrative Fairness Lab, which is aiming to build an evidence base on how the public understands and experiences fairness across a wide range of (increasingly digital) public decision-making.
As Joe says:
Each year, millions of decisions are made in important areas such as social security, community care, and immigration using varying administrative decision-making procedures. We have very little evidence on what the public thinks fairness looks like in these procedures, and these procedures have not been shaped around what the public thinks is procedurally fair. This has negative consequences for both people and effective policy implementation. We want to change that.
Understanding how fairness is designed into digital public services is predicated on a better understanding of how the design process operates in the UK government today. The Administrative Fairness Lab’s first research project is on digital welfare and the team would like to talk to digital practitioners to understand how their practice is applied in that space.
If you are a designer (all types), researcher, product manager, developer or digital policy official and have previously worked on or currently work on a welfare project in UK government, the team would like to interview you in the new year. Please get in touch here and I can put you in touch.
Dyslexia
I recently came across my assessment for dyslexia from when I was 14. My mum had been fairly ruthless at decluttering, but she’d kept that, a source of vindication I think.
I thought I’d write a couple of notes about it - partly because misunderstandings about dyslexia abound (even from people whose job it is to communicate clearly), mostly as something to point people at to explain what it is like in my case.
My early 90’s assessment had three conclusions: problems with auditory sequencing (ability to remember what is heard and reproduce it), visual sequencing (to remember what you have seen, like a set of letters making up a word, for long enough to do something useful with it) and visual motor control (among other things, the ability to use a pencil to write words that can be easily understood).
I was lucky in that I got good support from then on, and those things didn’t really hinder my education going forwards. Practically, as an adult, they are not too big a deal. It turns out people with dyslexia tend to be good and a bunch of other things, which has turned out to be quite useful, plus I’ve got some strategies to deal with them. Still, it means a few things are harder than they should be.
Firstly, it means that holding a set of things in short-term memory when transposing them from one context to another is a right pain. That applies to simple strings of numbers and letters, so things like 2fa codes and reference numbers come with a high error rate, or I just plain forget them halfway through. “Enter the 5th, 9th and 15th letter from a password”? No chance without resorting to fingers or pen and paper.
A treacherous short-term memory stack can also be a pain in meetings. Maintaining a set of thoughts and planning ahead, while also actively listening can take a lot of concentration. Occasionally, it leads to things like saying I have 3 points to make and the third one having escaped by the time I get to it. Sometimes it’s interpreted as disengagement. Note-taking can help, and I take lots of notes these days, but the value of notes in the moment can be limited by 1) writing clear notes and 2) being able to scan them quickly, which is the second issue.
Anyone who has ever worked with me in person will know my handwriting is not the easiest to read. But to be honest, scanning even a neat set of text as a crib sheet can be hard (I think part of the reason I like working on whiteboards is it’s possible to use space to create meaning in a way that’s harder within the confines of written notes). It also means regularly missing mistakes in written work, regardless of how thorough the typo-hunting is.
Related to scanning is the third way that dyslexia still manifests itself for me (see: listing points is much easier in prose!). And that’s the focus it takes to read. (I’m not sure that ‘focus’ is the right word here, but let’s stick with it).
I am not a slow reader, but I generally say I am a slow reader. That’s really just short-hand, though. The issue is that parsing a sentence, within a page, within a chapter, and maintaining the eye position on a page takes a lot of focus to do at speed. That focus can come come crashing down (almost viscerally) with relatively little external stimulus and takes a long time to regain.
I realise I don’t have a neat way of wrapping this up and don’t have a particular point to make. Except maybe, if someone tells you they are dyslexic, try not to assume it’s directly about reading and spelling. And if someone could solve 2fa so there’s no numbers, that’d be lovely.
The limits of simple
I came across this paragraph in a review of the work of Elinor Ostrom:
The better services are, as defined by professional criteria, the less satisfied the citizens are with those services'. This paradox emerges when the evaluation of the production process focuses solely on the part provided by the regular producer, ignoring the part played by the consumer-producer. Consequently, in such cases, the co-production trade-off is drifting away from its optimum and the interaction between the two parts is becoming more and more defective, despite genuine efforts to improve the service.
To give a simple example, education may become worse, despite genuine improvements in textbooks and in classroom materials, if those developments undermine student motivation in some way, perhaps by presenting material so clearly that students no longer feel the need to discuss issues with classmates and teachers.
I thought it was a nice illustration of why the design of services needs to do so much more than help people complete a task, and that there are limits to ‘simple’, however much hard work is put in by designers.
Subsidising R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants
Mapbox found themselves in a similar position to Mongo and Redis: they were subsidizing R&D for a handful of trillion-dollar tech giants.
Once upon a time, I really thought you could give away your trade secrets and still be successful. I thought the scale of the internet had enabled a new genre of company that could become massive despite only capturing an infinitesimally small fraction of the value they created. I believed the act of building a company around open source software was virtuous and ethical. I saw it as an end in itself.
As noted here, those looking to open-source for the creation of digital infrastructure (AKA ‘digital public goods’) may find themselves needing to navigate similar forces.
Thanks to Andrew for pointing me at this story.
Service marginalia
It strikes me that Apple’s privacy labels ….
… are the same class of thing as …
… scribblings in the margins of a service that give context, help build a bigger picture about the ecosystem the service operates in, provide escape routes when things go wrong, or surface the rules that govern its use.
Digital design in the public sector doesn’t really make space for things like these. That’s hard to do if the design ethos is minimalist or reductive (which are generally good approaches if you are designing for task completion, maybe less so for signposting recourse or explaining who operates a service and how they do it).
How this thing works
These two plastic scoops came packaged with our dog’s food. It’s one of those monthly subscription services and the scoops came in the welcome pack. The food is dehydrated, you mix it one-to-one with water before serving it. One scoop is blue (for water), and one is yellow (for the dried food). But the scoops are the same size and have a volume of 4 tablespoons (save a millimetre or two). It doesn’t actually matter which one you use, or if you use one or both of them. The purpose of the two different scoops is not functional, it’s to communicate how the concept works straight out of the box. It says ‘here’s how these parts fit together’. It’s an example of self-explanatory design, of legible design.
I realise it’s a bit of a jump from dog food to complex public services, but those scoops are currently a daily reminder to me that one of the things I value about the design is its ability to explain and contextualise. This, I think, is at the root of my frustrations with the approach to design in the UK public sector. The ability for design to explain where something fits within in a larger system, not just design to achieve immediate outcomes, is under used.
Building public services with digital public goods
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the Omidyar Network for supporting their research. The views herein, however, do not necessarily reflect those of the funder.