User feedback on the Digital Service Standard
A few months ago, I mentioned that our team was doing user research for the Digital Service Standard, in order to make sure it was applicable and understandable by everyone delivering services to Ontarians. Since then, many of you have asked what we’ve been learning from that user research. Over the past few weeks, we’ve compiled some of our learnings..
It was a busy summer for us: we interviewed 36 people who work in digital, communications and IT, and 19 people working in policy, legal and business units. We also took a field trip to Peterborough to meet with the Land and Resources IT team in person. We’ve also held meetings with, and given presentations to, various stakeholder groups within the Ontario Public Service.
I was pleasantly surprised, and immensely heartened, at how many people across the public service volunteered to be interviewed for user research — government employees really are passionate about making better, faster, and simpler services for Ontarians.
What we heard
Our interviews mostly revealed challenges that people would face in applying the Standard.
The common themes included:
- a general lack of understanding of user research, service design, agile approaches and what’s possible with technology
- challenges defining and hiring for new roles and skills
- how to work with vendors to follow the Standard
- finding easy ways to collaborate virtually via chat or video
- making time for user research or agile approaches in a deadline-driven environment
- facilitating collaboration between groups with different priorities, goals and deadlines
- planning and budgeting processes that require knowing solutions up-front, sometimes years in advance of building them
- a siloed approach to work that requires the permission of many managers to create a multidisciplinary team
- lack of knowledge on how to recruit, pay and interview user research participants
- software solutions that are inflexible or require special adaptations to the Ontario.ca look and feel
- a lack of skills or people to support open standards and platforms
- not understanding what success looks like for a digital service or a fear of defining success because of the potential for failure
What impressed me the most
Beyond the challenges, I also heard a ton of smart ideas about what needs to happen within the public service to enable better digital service design. I also heard about people who’ve taken the initiative and are already working in user-centred ways, using agile methods or practicing inclusive design.
I heard thank yous for creating the Standard, from people who were looking to bring more awareness of the ways they are already working to the rest of the organization.
Best of all, I heard willingness to change and improve. Challenges were not framed as “we can’t do this,” but instead as, “we’ve been waiting for help to get this done,” or “we’ve already started doing this, but here are the barriers we faced.”
User research is never finished
The feedback we received from these interviews, along with the comments we’re getting from the civic tech community and on GitHub, is shaping how we’re prioritizing updates to the Standard and development of additional resources.
The research is also informing the development of the Digital Action Plan. I’m also using these findings to prepare recommendations for digital skills training to support the Standard. (Of course, we’ll be sharing more about the training here soon, too.)
Some of the themes above can only be addressed by making institutional changes. It’s one thing to publish a Standard, quite another to make it real by removing barriers to working with many partners across government. We’re going to keep doing that, to help drive this change, as the Standard progresses.
Thanks again to everyone who participated in the interviews or emailed us about the Standard. We’re still excited to hear from public servants who have thoughts on its progress, and continue to look forward to your feedback, from inside and outside of government, via GitHub or email.
