2019 in Review: Moving From Vision to Reality
5 highlights & key lessons from San Jose’s journey to better digital services
At the start of 2019, the vision for “user-centered digital services” in the City of San Jose existed mostly in my head. It wasn’t yet real to anyone else.
Twelve months later, digital services is a funded body of work with a team, a growing portfolio, and engaged partners in multiple departments.
We’ve made big strides proving the value of user research, design, and product management to deliver better services for our 1 million residents and 60,000 businesses.
There’s much work ahead of us, but as I look back on what we accomplished in 2019, I couldn’t be prouder.
Here are five highlights from San Jose’s 2019 digital services work, with key lessons to carry forward to the new year.
1. We grew our team from 1 to 4 people
A year ago, the digital services portfolio was just me. Today, the digital services team is four people: two designer/researchers, one product strategist, and one team lead (me). I recommend you follow team members Julie, Nira, and Yasmeen to hear their perspectives.
We grew by being opportunistic and resourceful. The prior year, the Code for America Community Fellowship provided an easy way to get our feet wet hiring the City’s first-ever UX designers. At the end of the fellowship, we identified one-time funds to keep our two fellows on as full-time team members for a specific project. The product strategist position came out of a partnership to help our first “client” department develop a digital strategy for recycling and garbage services.
None of the accomplishments below would have been possible without our team. I was fortunate to find mission-driven professionals willing to take a chance on City government, and to have supportive executive sponsors willing to champion these positions.
Key lesson to carry forward: Recruit others with the skills to realize your vision — even if you haven’t specifically been given permission to form a team. It’s a lot easier to show the value of user research, design, and product strategy once you have the skills in the building.
2. We used design to improve real world services
Our first challenge of 2019 was to improve the experience of San Jose’s 311 app, used to report issues like illegal dumping and potholes. When it works well, it’s an empowering, almost magical tool for residents. But when it doesn’t work well, residents get frustrated by apparent lack of action from the City, and staff get overloaded with time-consuming back-end workflows.
Our team focused on end-to-end service delivery: not just reporting and responding, but also in-between touchpoints, like setting expectations, triaging requests, and getting feedback.
We connected the dots between the resident experience, the staff experience, and the technology platform, by interviewing customers, joining staff for ride-alongs, and documenting it all in service blueprints. We then picked key points in the journey that were ripe for improvement.
Here are a few interventions we implemented in 2019 in partnership with service teams across multiple departments.
- Setting expectations: We added descriptions of each service, and tell users how long to expect before their issue is resolved.
- Triaging reports: We worked with the illegal dumping service team to make their triaging workflow more efficient, reducing the time spent assigning reports by 9 percent.
- Asking for feedback: We redesigned our email notifications and customer survey to invite transactional feedback every time we close out a report, providing a new, valuable source of customer satisfaction data.
Key lesson to carry forward: An empowered product team plays a critical role in consistently, persistently connecting the dots between the different parts of the process to achieve our shared goals for service delivery.
3. We rolled out the City’s first usability standards
In spring 2019, our team stepped up to the challenge of ensuring the City’s new website would make it easy for residents to find and complete common tasks.
Inspired by other governments who had used digital service standards to drive change, we created an 8 point usability standard to be applied to City services.
The standard is radical in ensuring that City staff evaluate services from a user-centered perspective that traditionally has not been prioritized. For example:
- Item 1, Easy to Use: Requires that services be tested with real users, on both computers and mobile devices.
- Item 7, Fast: Requires that we test the page load speed and make changes if necessary, to ensure that pages load quickly
- Item 8, Discoverable: Requires that services appear in internal and external search using popular key words.
Like all standards, the usability standard only means something when put into practice. We tested and iterated by applying the standard to the 10 top requested services on the website:
- Apply for a Job
- Call Junk Pick-Up
- Apply for a Building Permit
- Report an Issue
- Register for a Recreation Class
- Find a Council Agenda / Watch a Council Meeting
- Find Affordable Housing
- Pay a Parking Ticket
- Register for Business Tax
- Adopt a Pet
As a result of our repeatable process to apply the usability standards, the most popular tasks on our website are now measurable easier to find, easier to use, and more accessible for our residents.
Key lesson to carry forward: Standards have power in defining what goods look like, even in a decentralized organization.
4. We made usability testing a thing
At one of the last public meetings of 2019, our Director of Innovation pronounced to the City of San Jose’s Council Committee on Smart Cities & Service Improvements: “Usability is a thing in San Jose.”
In the last year, our team has conducted over 100 usability testing sessions for 16 different services, even running some sessions in Spanish and Vietnamese with the help of interpreters. To multiply “a-ha moments” throughout the organization, we arranged usability video viewing parties with our 10 partner departments. There’s been enough buzz that other teams throughout the City have started conducting usability testing on their own with guidance from our team.
Given our small team, we made a deliberate decision to rely on remote unmoderated testing for benchmarking usability, using platforms such as UserBrain. Although we get richer insights from moderated testing with San Jose residents, the time efficiency of remote unmoderated testing was a huge benefit. Most importantly, unmoderated testing, even with “professional” testers, was sufficient to help our department partners (a) get compelling evidence that their users behave differently than they might think, and, (b) take actionable steps to improve the user experience through changes to content and layout.
Key lessons to carry forward: While usability is only one component of the user experience, it’s a relevant and accessible starting point to get traction with government stakeholders on taking a user-centered approach.
5. We operationalized user research in government
In government, you can’t do user research at scale without some sort of ResearchOps chops. By that, I mean the ability to navigate the bureaucratic processes to enable user research through recruiting, incentives, data retention, and other procedures. This topic deserves a dedicated blog post for all the nitty gritty details, but for now, here are two snippets.
Consent forms: Thanks to our team’s efforts, we have attorney-approved consent forms in Vietnamese, Spanish and English, which we’ve already shared with multiple teams throughout the City. Special shout out to the Canadian Digital Service and Nava PBC for publishing their forms, so we could learn from their examples.
Gift cards: I’ve never bonded more quickly with other government digital teams than by mentioning the headaches of publicly-funded research incentives, aka gift cards. In 2019, we solved this by creating a pilot program that allowed us to use specific grant funds to purchase gift cards as incentives for user research. We picked a compensation amount of $5 per 15 minutes, which is lower than you would find from private sector companies.
Key lesson to carry forward: When it comes to bureaucracy hacking, yes, it’s true, sometimes the right play is to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. But you get more sustainable and scalable results when you can figure out a longer-term solution that will help you and others move faster in the future.
A note on all the other good stuff
Of course, there’s a lot of other important work we did this year that didn’t make it to the 2019 greatest hits list.
Government transformation is like gardening. You plant things that grow at different time scales, or flourish under different conditions, and it’s always a bit of an experiment depending on the weather and environment. Some plants require years of nurturing before they bear fruit. Other things surprise you and bloom faster than expected. And sometimes you reap the rewards just by watering something planted by someone else.
Our biggest hits from 2019 are possible because of investments made by others over the past few years to build the credibility of our team, obtain funding for specific projects, and develop foundational platforms.
And alongside our biggest hits in 2019, we also made investments in other bodies of work that aren’t ripe to report on yet. I look forward to sharing more updates these efforts as they unfold in 2020!
In the meantime, if you’re curious to learn more about our team’s work, check out the articles below:
- Building great customer experiences in City government, profile by Bloomberg Cities
- Discovery Sprints Do Work (Even in Government), by Julie Kim and Nira Datta
- Relying on Outcomes: San Jose’s Digital Services Blueprint, profile in GovLoop
If you have questions or feedback for us, we’d love to hear from you! Post a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter.
