A while ago I wrote my first article about optimizing the citizen experience of public services. It’s been widely read and has been taken as an example by Mathilde, queen of the Belgians, at Davos 2023 on how to design our public lives. Thank you for that Mathilde!

It’s a topic that is dear to me, because as citizens we deal with communal services all the time. When they’re off or just plane irritating, it slows down our efficiency or it may render these public services up to useless (or ‘horseshit’ as my 7-year old would say). As a UX designer it’s my duty to be the advocate of users, which citizens ultimately are.

So here’s a question: How much do you trust your public government to give you the interaction experience you expect? The answer surely depends on where you live, but where I live, there’s work to be done at the shop (like we say in Flanders).

Bureaucracy is an enabler.

When thinking about public services, the first thing that’s springs to (my) mind is bureaucracy. It’s the layered cake of responsibilities and proverbial umbrellas that prevents good design to spring on top as the savoury cherry. Bureaucracy is a foul-sounding term but as in any organisation, it’s indispensable. It makes things work and distributes the pieces of information to the right container. If done correctly and efficiently, at least. 

By default, we can uphold the fact that governments are designed to be efficient, only they’re not. How come? 1 simple answer: people. People come together to make something work, but when there’s too many of them and they’re not aligned, things won’t work. The solutions that are then built are used by people who don’t feel connected through the service. So somewhere along the line, all that hard work sums up to poor experiences, resulting in a disunion with your local government. If there’s anything we should have, it’s a connection as a society. And this is where public bureaucracy should act as an enabler. Wy should we feel more connected to a brand like Starbucks than with our own government?

An example. IDEO, the leading company in service design, has partnered up with Nesta to make up a guide for design thinking in government. A growing number of cities worldwide, from Canada to Australia, are implementing these services into their public offering. It’s a guide with toolkits. I like it. It starts with people’s needs considering both citizens and civil servants. It feels like they’re lost in process and regulation instead of being enabled by them. The underlying issue has much to do with the manner in which executive administrators are siloed in, away from the policymakers. It makes for an incoherent service experience for citizens. A design-led organization connects these dots, aiming to synthesize the two. As IDEO so clearly stated, we need to shift from ‘designing from the inside out’ to ‘designing from the outside in.’ It would require a prototyping approach to solutions. The general aim is to connect more closely with its citizens and concurrently deliver a better experience for the civil servants too. So a great side-effect of improving the experience is that you also improve the efficiency of the organization.

I know, I know, you heard that stuff before and sure, you acknowledge its value. Approaches like the one described above work in various governmental institutions, but they’re rather the exception than the rule. Public services may seem complex, but the underlying process is actually quite simple. I’m a citizen, I need some service and the public office gives me that service without frictions. If they don’t, I’ll find some other government that will.

Design thinking is blurry.

I often get the feedback from clients that a design thinking process in which various stakeholders (like citizens) get asked for feedback, is a blurry and abstract methodology that just simply eats up time and resources when the client already knows what they want or what the problem is. That’s absolutely true. It is a blurry, abstract thing, even a great service designer leading the process has no clear answer for. Not me at least. And yes, the client knows what they want and they know what the problem is. Except that they don’t. Not always.

What at first seems obvious is many times over a symptom of something deeper. The people in the organization have a very clear idea of what they’re doing and where the issues lie. Yet, they’re too embedded in their context and they mostly talk about the requirements, whereby every stakeholder seems married to his own terminology. So meanings and intentions are often misaligned between internal stakeholders on the one hand and the apprehension of external users on the other. We’ll need to step out of the context and take a look at it with fresh eyes. A good salesman is able to listen to the client and uncover latent needs the client didn’t even realize she had. That’s because the salesman listens and connects the right dots. The same goes for a service designer. Never do we enter a room knowing full well what to expect. We merely listen and bring our toolkits to the table to uncover the real needs, guiding the stakeholders through the process and landing at a workable solution that underpins a valuable experience. In the end it’s always the client who comes up with the solution. They just need to be pushed forward a bit.

Getting people crammed into a room to do a workshop gives a lot of clients the impression that it’s a waste of time and money. But have you ever experienced a moment where you sat down with friends or even people you don’t know and yet had a great time because you came up with fantastic new insights?

Let feedback enrich the process.

Looking into how cities deal with these issues, I came across a beautiful example of how effective feedback between the citizen and the city could be.  I say ‘could be’ because today some of the mentioned technologies are just too user-unfriendly.

The Indian city of Jaipur has adopted a 3D digital platform to connect all administrators in a single digital repository in order to plan, analyze, simulate and optimize services and infrastructure to provide residents with a better citizen experience and improve their quality of life. It allows everybody to view possible outcomes in 3D, enabling them to join and understand local issues better, thus informing local decision-makers better. 3D models allow all stakeholders to get a better understanding of local environmental issues, seeing how they unfold in space. It not only drives a better citizen experience but a true community engagement as well, which is what we all want in the end. When looking how to make your city smart, what’s better than to ask the people that populate it? 

Denmark does it!

Ever heard the saying ‘Denmark does it!’? No? I just invented it. Not only does it sound supercool, it has a lot of elemental meaning. If we were to agree that a government benefits from designed public services in favor of an effective citizen experience and that such a government endorses the expertise of experienced design teams to guide them through it, than we can only conclude that there are places in this world that breathe that philosophy and places that only talk about it. Denmark is a nice example of the former.

Agreed, the challenges governments deal with are complex, no doubt about it! Try arranging affordable usable healthcare for all, or pilot citizens through a transparent taxation process. It’s madness. But that’s just the beauty. For every challenge there’s a solution and if it works, the outcome is a happy nation of citizens. So let’s take Denmark. If you’ve ever been, it must strike you that a lot of public services seem to work wonderfully well. There’s an efficient public road system, public sanitation is clean and organized and most stuff is digitalized. Denmark knows how to cater for its citizens. In large part it’s due to the government’s inclination to work closely together with design organizations, like the Danish Design Centre. This is a semi-governmental organization that is mandated with enhancing Danish design, one aspect of which is the government’s public services itself. In the words of Christian Bason, the head of the DDC:

“The main issue for us is to help decision-makers in business and government understand how to tap into the underlying principles, practices and professional mindset of designers. To do so, we have chosen an approach that essentially involves bridging designers (suppliers of design methods) with business (potentially users of design methods) through processes of systematic experimentation. Or, in design terminology, we leverage design methods of inquiry, ideations and prototyping to explore how design can create value in such complex settings as business organizations.”

Now how does that sound?

Can Flanders do it?

So where do we start? Any government in any country will have some form of design thinking included but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just focus on mine, which is a mosaic construction named Belgium, and will focus on one of the 2 regions the country hosts and which I live in, named Flanders. 

At large, there are governmental institutions, like Flanders DC or Vlaio, that support the creative industry but don’t really focus on the government services itself. Then there are non-profit organizations like the Ministry of Makers -a designplatform founded by various governmental and educational partners – that links creative agencies to public services in light of design thinking. And third – on a commercial level – there are ample players who provide design thinking solutions for governmental organizations.

It’s great that we have these initiatives, but they largely remain consulting partners in the periphery and are not an integral part of public service implementations. Yet it seems that when you roll out services millions people make use of, a representation of this target group should be consulted in the design phase. That means that even deciding to release a new form for citizens to fill in online should have at least been validated and tested on an end-user (and I mean a real one, not 60-year old Rudy from the design department who has fiddled with Paintshop Pro in his old days).

A public government acts as an enabler for its citizens to live healthy, safe lives and do business with each other. It should not stand in its way or outmaneuver its citizens by providing frustrating digital experiences. These public services should thus be designed with its citizens in mind, listening to how they expect to live healthy, safe lives and how they wish to do business with each other. As such, citizens are an integral part of public life and not just its users. We must be included into the multi-disciplinary talks in which we co-conceive, challenge and test every decision a government makes. 

Stay tuned for more of these inspiring ideas on public service design. The next article will be about how we can communicate better with our citizens and make them feel more engaged. Like this article, it too will be an eye-opener!