Connecting Citizens and Government for Better Designed Services
This blog provides a behind-the-scenes look at work we have been doing for the Office of the Chief Designer in Scotland.
In Scotland, millions of people — with all of the wonderful diversity of needs and abilities those numbers imply — use various digital and traditional public services on a day-to-day basis. Spending on public services in the UK represents about one third of gross domestic product and providing services to the public amounts to around 80% of government expenditure. For the wellbeing of citizens, as well as the returns on their taxes they deserve, it’s important that the people responsible for designing and building these services deliver good services.
We have spent the past few months immersed in the world of designing public services in Scottish Government. We spent hours in conversation around their approach to designing public services, during which it became clear they share our total commitment to putting people in the centre.
Public design teams — like teams in any sector — need to understand what they’re designing from the citizen’s perspective. As with the Scottish approach to government more generally, the Office of the Chief Designer emphasises the need to design ‘with, not for’. And yet, it’s actually quite difficult to engage citizens in the process.
In October last year, CivTech published a ‘sprint’ challenge:
‘How can technology be used to engage citizens in designing Digital Public Services?’
CivTech is a programme of Scottish Government that connects public sector organisations with technology companies like Mydex CIC to co-create the solutions to specific challenges they’re facing.
This challenge was sponsored by a team from the Office of the Chief Designer and Connecting Scotland. The Office of the Chief Designer are responsible for bringing design thinking into how Scottish Government ‘does government’, whilst Connecting Scotland have been getting digitally excluded people online during the pandemic by providing them with devices and broadband connections. The sponsors wanted a product that would facilitate meaningful engagement with Scotland’s citizens to make sure co-design is the default approach to designing public services, so public sector organisations can build better services with, not for Scotland’s citizens.
After reading the challenge, we thought of our Inclued platform:
- It’s built to create a two-way, direct line of communication between organisations and citizens, so the values designed into it are already about putting citizens and organisations on a collaborative footing. It is focussed on the Scottish public and third sectors now, but it can be used by any organisation anywhere.
- Inclued’s fundamental purpose is to improve access to services — influencing the design of services is another way of taking this goal even further.
- We originally built the Inclued platform during the CivTech 3.0 programme, where we were lucky to work with some great people at Glasgow City Council as our challenge sponsors. Through this, we already knew that CivTech was an effective approach and how valuable it is to our mission.
This citizen design challenge was a ‘sprint’ challenge so it was more compressed timewise than CivTech’s usual programme, which ran alongside it. For all the reasons listed above, along with this time pressure, using the Inclued platform as a foundation and extending it made sense.
So, we submitted an application, got invited to the interview stage and made it through to the ‘exploration stage’ with another group. We spent an intense two weeks over November meeting various people in Scottish Government service design, mapping out where the barriers to engaging citizens were and thinking about what extensions to Inclued could potentially overcome them. This then led to us submitting an updated proposal with everything we had learnt. We were delighted when the challenge sponsors came back saying they would like to work with us to build a minimum viable product (MVP) over a ‘development stage’ between January and March of 2021.
From January to March, we gained a huge amount of insight and lots of encouragement from a wonderful, diverse group of stakeholders, with whom we discovered the friction, effort, risk and cost involved in the current approach. Their experience closely matched our own, developed over the last 14 years working in public services. The process really validated our thinking and approach behind the Inclued platform, as well as our general approach of improving services by putting citizens in control of their data.
Our challenge sponsor team was incredible at linking us to the right people. We spoke and ran virtual workshops with Scottish Government service designers, people working on the Connecting Scotland programme, accessibility experts, user researchers, the Scottish Council of Voluntary Organisations, digital ethicists, and citizens. We saw real alignment with and commitment to our own values of citizen-centred public services across the board, and used their knowledge and experiences to translate our post-exploration proposal into an MVP, built by our development team and staged online for everyone who helped design it to give feedback on.
The MVP focussed on showing the basic flow of the extension on both sides of the Inclued platform. For citizens, we showed how they could:
- go through a one-time set-up of their profiles and preferences in their personal data store,
- review projects they have been invited to and request participation in projects that they would like to take part in.
For subscribers, we showed how they can:
- create projects,
- invite citizens to participate,
- Streamline and make consistent a lot of routine administration, such as making sure data ethics has been comprehensively considered,
- recruit citizens based on any criteria needed without anyone needing to reveal these often protected characteristics,
- gain an overview of all design projects, including various metrics like participant’s feedback,
- view a showcase of present and past projects in the same organisation, so they can better maintain and share best practice and past learning.
The main benefits identified during the development stage were that the extension would reduce cost and administration in public service design, improve design teams’ adoption and alignment with the Scottish Approach to Service Design, provide access to a broader range of citizens in a safe, privacy-protecting way, and lead to subscribers consistently building a better evidence basis for designing public services.
We hope to develop the MVP extensions into a full product, which we think has massive potential to transform live co-design projects in the public sector and indeed any organisation with a service design function.
For example: this sprint finished just as Scottish Government’s most recent digital strategy was published: ‘A changing nation: how Scotland will thrive in a digital world.’ In the strategy, Scottish Government outlines its aims to ‘use common operating platforms for the processes that are common across Government’ and for services ‘to be inclusive and designed around citizens’ needs, rather than the organisational structures or traditions of the organisations that provide them.’ It’s great news that co-design is an increasingly common process across government and Inclued, with this extension, is a good example of a platform that could underpin that, making co-design so straightforward it becomes the default choice for making public services work for everyone.
Our vision for Inclued is for it to become the de facto choice for two-way, secure citizen engagement that empowers citizens to not only access services but influence what is delivered to them, while giving governments and citizens insight and evidence into the value and impact of working with, not for citizens.
