Why online government services often suck — in one graphic
We regularly poll users on their feelings when interacting with the City of Boston online. When they have a good experience, how do they most often describe their feelings? “Surprised”.
People expect online government interactions to suck.
And for good reason. In many situations, you’re dealing with city services because you don’t have a choice and it usually involves a fee (think paying a parking ticket or getting a marriage certificate). But it’s more than that. Often the online experience itself sucks. They use language or acronyms you don’t understand. You go back one page and it erases all the info you spent 20 minutes typing in. Once you’re done, you’re not even sure you did it right. You yell at your screen: “Why do they make this so difficult!?”
I’ve spent the last 2+ years trying to fix those experiences from inside city hall. I’ve seen firsthand why it’s hard. There’s not just one cause, but during a recent IDEO presentation I saw the bulk of it captured elegantly in one slide. Since then, I’ve been re-drawing the same graphic in many conversations so I finally made my own slide and hung it up on the wall:
Constituents: When you interact with government services, your first impression is the user interface. It doesn’t take long with any UI before you have a good sense for how technically “with it” the company or org is that you’re dealing with. A secondary consideration is the actual information you’re passing to them. Finally — the part users rarely (if ever) come into contact with — is the backend system used to process all that information.
City employees: The priority hierarchy is exactly reversed for city employees. For them, the process begins with the (often complex) backend systems that they work in every day. From there, they ask: “What info do I need from an end user to pull up that parking ticket or license etc. in our backend system?” Lastly, they make sure the UI asks the questions they need to have answered.
And so you see the problem.
That mismatch is where we (Boston’s Digital Team) live: getting in the weeds on backend systems enough to understand their complexities and constraints while empathizing with end users and delivering them a modern experience. Resolving that mismatch involves borrowing best practices (usually from the private sector) on forms and UI and being creative in streamlining that with backend software that is often quite antiquated and with deep, winding roots in business processes. It’s a gnarly and fun challenge, and also an important one. Without people focused on this mismatch, government services are likely to live up to peoples’ (often very low) expectations for digital interactions.
