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:
- 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
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:
- 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
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.
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.
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.
3 axes graph showing user needs, policy intent and capability to operate. There is a spiral that grows in size away from the origin
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.
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.
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.