Resident-Centered Design

You might’ve heard the terms, “human-centered design,” “user-centered design,” or “resident-centered design.” Whatever you call it, it’s a tool that can be vital, whether you’re trying to create a parking sign that clearly shows when you’re allowed to park, an easy-to-use form to enroll a child in school, or an application for a new type of rental subsidy. For The Lab @ DC, it’s designing things for—and often with—residents.

Let’s imagine you make incredible sandwiches. Let’s also imagine you decide to start a food truck to sell your famous sandwiches. Congratulations! Now what? Maybe you purchase a truck and assemble your menu. Perhaps you think about getting your business squared away with the government. Maybe you give the Health Department a call, because you know they inspect restaurants, and say, “I want to start a food truck. What do I need to do?”

This is the mindset The Lab adopts when we’re designing programs and interventions—what would a resident do? We try to put ourselves in their shoes. We think about what residents are trying to achieve and call out the sticking points or points of confusion that might prevent them from getting there.

Confusion and sticking points aren’t just annoying inconveniences. Instead of a food truck owner, imagine you’re a parent trying to get food assistance for three kids. This sticking point can prevent people from gaining access to essential services or making informed decisions. As part of the DC government, we believe it’s our responsibility to design our processes, letters, forms, websites, and signage for our users: residents. But this isn’t always easy or natural to do.

Why does resident-centered design matter?
As government staff, we understand our programs and processes really well. We interact with them on a daily basis. But understandably, residents opening their first food truck likely do not.

Think about a time when you were in an unfamiliar place and you asked someone for directions. Did the local’s reply begin with, “Oh it’s easy...”? It is, in fact, easy for the local who travels these roads regularly and has a mental map of how they all fit together. But for an outsider, there is no mental map to provide guidance. Economists refer to this as the “curse of knowledge.” It’s hard to imagine what it’s like for someone else to not know what you know.

Government isn’t trying to confuse residents with left and right turns. The directions just seem more obvious from where we’re standing.

Resident-centered design helps us remove our blinders and regain the resident’s perspective. It forces us to slow down, makes us consider questions we might not otherwise, and gives us tools like behavioral audits and user testing to “reverse” the curse of knowledge.

When we don’t adopt a resident-centered approach to our work, we fail in some significant ways:

We waste residents’ valuable time. If poor signage results in a parking ticket, we may put someone in the position of having to take an unpaid day-off to argue it in court or pay the cost.
We prevent residents from accessing essential services in a timely manner or at all. If a parent can’t figure out how to submit the free meals application to their child’s school, the well-intended work of those who designed the food program doesn’t have the intended impact for residents.
We fail to honor someone’s personhood. We might not think to provide space for our non-binary residents to indicate their gender. We may phrase our communications or questions in a demeaning or traumatic way. We may leave our non-English speaking residents feeling powerless to communicate their needs.

It sounds easy to consider your user, but how do we actually do it? We use these five steps: 1) identify the user, 2) identify pitfalls in the user experience, 3) use plain language in our redesign; 4) use behavioral science in our redesign; and 5) test with users. While we follow this general sequence, we frequently jump around and repeat steps until we get to a good final product.

1. Identify the user
We start by identifying our users. Say we’re trying to reduce the number of families who fail to renew their cash assistance on time at a service center. We’ll want to figure out who they are. We do this to identify what barriers they might have in getting to a service center. For example, will their work hours make it hard to visit? Do they have reliable childcare? Do they have reliable transportation? Is the travel a financial burden? This information helps us zero-in on who we’re designing for.

2. Identify pitfalls in the user experience
In the same cash assistance renewal example, we then move through every step from receiving their renewal notice to successfully renewing at the service center. Where are the pitfalls that might keep them from succeeding? First, they get a letter in the mail. Perhaps it’s full of intimidating legal language that’s hard to understand. Maybe they understand the letter, but they’re not available on their assigned appointment. Maybe they understand the letter, are available for the appointment, but can’t find enough bus fare to get to the service center. These are just a few places where a user might get stuck. By granularly thinking through the entire user experience, we flag the pain points and attempt to eliminate or minimize them.

Thinking through the user experience of a resident often requires a lot of space and collaboration with agency partners and residents, who know the process best. (Credit: The Lab @ DC)

3. Use plain language in our design
Next we think about our communication style: can everyone understand what we are saying? Who are we leaving out? What words and phrases are we using? Can they be understood at an elementary reading level? Is our tone approachable and conversational? This is where we decode our government acronyms, define any industry terms, and simplify our legal language as best we can.

Staff from the Department of Human Services review design suggestions from DC residents gathered during user testing early in the design process. (Credit: The Lab @ DC)

4. Use behavioral science in our design
We then pull from lessons in psychology. For example, we know that we can only hold so much information in our heads at once. This is why we try to identify the most important information and present it in a way that allows for absorption. We break information up with headings and bullets (e.g. items you need to bring with you to the service center), provide checklists for items that need to be completed, or include visuals like maps or tables to prompt people to plan ahead.

5. Test with users
Most importantly, we work with residents throughout this process. Who better to check our work? This might mean setting up a randomized control trial to see if a resident-centered designed reminder letter successfully encourages families to renew their cash assistance or if a postcard helps recruit new applicants to the police force. It could also mean going to the DMV asking residents in line to fill-out our newly designed driver’s license application and letting us see where they are getting stuck.

What are the ethical considerations of resident-centered design?
When we’re using a resident-centered design approach in our work, we ask ourselves:

Are we doing our best to hear from residents with different perspectives? Have we heard from a diverse group of users? Do we have representation across age, written/spoken language, place of residence, race, etc.? We do this by talking with agency staff, community organizations, and residents who know the key users and can help us reach them.
Are we being respectful of people’s time when we ask them to test what we are working on? Ten minutes of someone’s time to sample a redesign application form seems reasonable, but if we’re asking for an hour, perhaps we should consider compensation like a nominal gift card or a free lunch.
Are we building our processes and communications in a way that doesn’t cause residents to relive past trauma? Losing a job, being evicted, or experiencing the stress of mounting bills is not something anyone wants to rehash more than necessary. When we use a resident-centered design approach we think about ways we can minimize the number of times someone has to tell their story to get things like food or cash assistance.

How is The Lab using resident-centered design?
Now that you’ve read about resident-centered design, check out how we’re using the technique to answer these questions for Washingtonians: