Overview
Local governments address making services better and more inclusive — frequently all at once. Local governments are often leaders in redesigning public services. As a result, we need an inclusive approach that includes everyone.
Problem
Government services are often not designed to focus on people’s needs. Agencies prioritize technical details or features staff want instead of considering what residents need. This focus on features and organizational needs creates overcomplicated processes and exclusionary designs, limiting people’s access to services.
Solution
We can create services that meet community needs by including residents and government staff in the research process, allowing their feedback to inform decisions and testing ideas. It’s important to keep improving and making changes based on community input. Through research, metrics, and ongoing testing, we can ensure services increase everyone’s access to city services.
Context
Local governments can better reflect the populations they serve by considering lived experiences, accessibility, and data in their work. While larger cities may assemble comprehensive teams of product managers, designers, UX/UI experts, and engineers, smaller cities tend to succeed by leveraging hybrid teams of contractors, in-house talent, and community experts to design government services.
Build a team that reflects the community
Building diverse teams improves decision-making and can increase your organization’s connection to its constituents.
“Lived experience” is critical expertise about social issues, places, and people based on a person’s personal and professional experiences. This expertise offers valuable perspectives and knowledge to solve community problems and design for resident needs.
Including “lived experience” experts from your community can take many forms, including:
- Having them play key roles on your team
- Hiring them as consultants to a project
- Hiring community groups to lead the design project itself
Design around resident needs
Local governments can source quantitative information from call centers (i.e., 311), website analytics, and other data sources. Any service redesign should also include qualitative interviews with people using the service, especially the most vulnerable residents significantly impacted by your service.
Your research should tell you:
- How residents currently use and access the service
- Pain points experienced by residents in using and accessing a service
- What vulnerable community members need
Define and create success together
Use a combination of community insights and industry standards to determine success. Metrics could include:
- Accessibility: Ensure websites are usable for everyone, particularly for those with disabilities.
- Usability: Identify metrics to evaluate ease of use, friendliness, and efficiency of online tools.
- Product inclusion: Evaluate how well a product or service caters to the needs of diverse users.
Once you understand resident needs and successes, think about creative ways to address those metrics. Explore different possibilities before you begin prototyping.
Test with users
A prototype is an initial model of a product designed to test and refine concepts before the final version is developed. Once a service prototype is built, it is crucial to test it with people from different backgrounds, demographics, and abilities.
Testing prototypes generally involves observing someone using your product and noting their behavior against your success criteria. This allows you to identify opportunities for improvement and refine the prototype to better address user needs.
This iterative design approach allows for continuous enhancement of prototypes and even burdensome policies based on user input.
Closing the loop
After launching a service, it’s crucial to collect continuous feedback from the community and agency staff. You can:
- Embed feedback tools within a service for real-time user comments.
- Use analytics to track engagement and identify usage patterns.
- Create forums for community input.
Regular user testing sessions can help prioritize new features, updates, and adjustments. Leverage open communication channels like social media and newsletters for ongoing dialogue.
Responsiveness to this feedback is key, as it will inform the iterative changes that keep the service user-centered and effective in meeting the community’s evolving needs.
Mantras
- Designing for the margins helps everyone
- Include, iterate, improve
Checklist
- Design around resident needs.
- Build a team that reflects the population you serve.
- Learn about design standards and resources.
- Define success together.
- Test prototypes with diverse user groups.
- Collect feedback and iterate.
Questions to ask
- Does our team look and sound like our community?
- How can we design services for the margins? How does this benefit others?
- Who benefits most from our re-designed services?
- How will we measure success?
