What is civic design
Civic design methods help us create government services that center the people who use them. Civic design applies human-centered design principles to government contexts. This supports services being designed with instead of just for the public and the staff administering them.
There are several civic design practices that The Lab uses often:
Process mapping illustrates, in great detail, the steps a resident takes to go from expressing a need to successfully addressing it—the end-to-end experience. This helps us spot pain points and adjust for them.
User personas identify a few profiles of the residents using a service. This helps us think through how resident experiences of the same service may be different and where we may need to adapt for that to ensure that a service works well for everyone.
Interviewing involves asking residents semi-structured questions about a particular topic. This helps us deepen and broaden our understanding of a resident’s need and lived experience.
Co-design creates solutions to challenges together with residents. This helps us think of ideas we never would on our own and ensures that they’re rooted in residents’ realities.
Prototyping is when we build a simple version of a solution to see how it may or may not work. This helps us test ideas fast and find problems before spending lots of time and money on solutions that ultimately don’t work for residents.
Plain language is clear and concise writing in our government forms, notices, websites, etc. so that finding, understanding, and using that information the first time a resident reads it is manageable and unburdensome.
User testing puts a product like a website, form, or notice in front of a resident, allowing us to watch them use it to see where they are confused, misunderstand, or get stuck.
The Lab convenes a co-design session with DC government staff, housing case managers, landlords, and residents to brainstorm ways to improve the housing voucher process.
Why is civic design important?
In short, because it makes it easier for residents to find and use the government services they need. When we adopt a human-centered approach to our service delivery, we protect a resident’s valuable time, we honor their personhood, and we minimize the chance that they go without essential services.
Civic design also contributes to positive realities for governments employees. When services are designed well, it reduces the administrative burden on the government staff providing them. For example, a well-designed form might mean fewer questions from the public filling it out and less review time from frontline staff. That’s a win for public servants.
Why do we need civic design?
We need civic design to help us, as public servants, deliver for the public. We’ve had the honor of working alongside hundreds of dedicated public servants, and we’ve seen that when residents’ needs are going unmet, it often is a result of some mix of these four things:
The curse of knowledge: It’s hard to imagine what it’s like for someone to not know what you know. As a public servant, you hold extensive knowledge about your service. But that makes it very hard to give clear and complete information to the public, who might interact with your service every few years or just once in a lifetime. The curse of knowledge results in unconsciously leaving out pieces of information that help the user complete your form successfully or providing unnecessary information that might overwhelm them. If you want to really understand the curse of knowledge, watch these kids write instructions for their dad to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Sediment: Government tends to add new programs, policies, and regulations faster than it removes or replaces them. These new requirements get added into programs without a holistic review of the user experience. As a result, the process gets longer, steps may become duplicative or even contradictory, leaving the resident feeling lost.
Silos: What the public expresses as a singular need—e.g. opening a business—often transcends a single agency or department. In these cases, it is rarely any one public servants’ explicit responsibility to think about the public’s experience as they work through multiple agencies, and even within government, coordinating across agencies can be challenging.
A lack of testing: Often, government tries to stand up a new process, form, or communication as quickly as possible even if that means they haven’t been tested with people in different situations who will use them. Despite our best attempts to create a good product or process on the first draft, no one can account for everything. This results in common user errors and accessibility challenges for those who have needs unique from the majority.
Civic design helps us solve for each of these challenges.
How does The Lab use civic design?
Now that you’ve read about civic design, check out a few examples of how we’ve used the technique to answer these questions for Washingtonians: