Governmental agencies - time to step up your game.
This is a follow-up to my previous blog post that we wrote about the work we did for economical aid. I wanted to tell it from another perspective. One where you as a designer and developer coming from a world where you build the best you can and not as we often are forced to do within the public build with limited tools and environments. Tools without proper APIs or tools. But maybe more importantly I want it to be a call to the other public, government, and private organizations that are delivering digital access to their documentation about users and why they need to open up and in what way.
The main learning from our work with first-time economical aid is the enormous amount of documentation you need to provide to the social department to validate that you are actually in a bad situation and need aid. I don’t want to question whether that documentation is needed. I think it is a severe thing to apply for aid and hence it needs a serious process for it. However, by working on the application using normal technical standards and inventing some new we could have built a sincerely better user experience for our citizens. This blog post is a brain dump of a proposal.
Depending on your situation the social services could potentially ask you for about 70 different documents from different government agencies and private companies such as your bank, tax authorities, housing companies, work agency, etc. you can find all documents Malmö Stad asks for here in full with links and examples.
The three most important ones were a bank statement for the last 3 months, your tax declaration from last year, and your rental contract. These 3 documents are required for all applications. Today these documents are accessible online however we cannot help the user by assigning them a link to the direct document. Instead, the correct document is hidden behind a general user profile link. This lack of deep linking within the governmental services providing the documents is sad from a user perspective because it risks the user accessing and uploading the wrong document. We would want at least a precise link to the correct document to make it easier for the user. As an example here is the Swedish tax authority only making it possible to link to a general “my pages” on their website (https://sso.skatteverket.se/ms/ms_web/page.do#/privat/start) which does not make it easier for the user since there are a massive amount of different documents available and the social services are needing a specific one.
In a reasonable world, a user should be able to add these documents without a broken experience of leaving the application form and without needing to know which one is the correct one. A simple example wireframe for such a flow would look something like this.
We could also work on a route where we allow the user to upload all relevant documents in one for their application. Making it less cumbersome to keep reproducing the above behavior for every document.
So of course by now some of you are wondering why not allow the social services access to all relevant data directly from the source through a proper API. In my opinion, I hope we get there but as of now, it is far away for two reasons one being the technical maturity of other government services and two the maturity in the balance between legal and user knowledge. The user understands the logic of uploading a document and I think it provides a nice legal safety where they can preview exactly what’s being delivered in a format they understand and are used to.
With the bank statement however it is different. The EU passed a law where all banks should follow a standardized set of ways of sharing their data. It's a set of APIs where computers can talk to other computers after that the user has given their consent. This would make it possible in practice for us to build a very easy way for the user to provide us with their bank statement. We set up a prototype and this is what it looks like.
https://www.loom.com/share/ad21497b586b440385be78a55b27da1d
We feel that this kind of way of collecting the relevant documents and data would make it extensively easier and user-friendly from the citizen’s perspective. It would also allow us to make our internal systems for dealing with economical aid better since they in theory now would be able to provide raw data. However, being able to perform this kind of operation requires a rigorous process to being allowed to apply for access. Unfortunately, it is hard for a small municipality to do this on its own but maybe a larger collaboration across the nation would make it possible.
