Service Design-in’ at PagoPA
An asynchronous interview with Agata Brilli, a Service and Information Designer at PagoPA.
Q: Ciao Agata, please introduce yourself.
A: Hi! I’m Agata and I like to describe myself as a service-information designer because I have a passion for analysing, processing and visualising data to address complex service design challenges: from experimenting with different quantitative and qualitative research approaches to mapping large amounts of information to unveil interesting insights.
I started working as an information designer in the academic field at the SciencesPO médialab, in Paris. It was a very stimulating experience where I conducted research in order to investigate the role of digital technology in our societies.
Then I had the chance to apply my approach to service design at oblo for many years, where I started collaborating — among other projects and clients — on the digitalisation of public services in Italy.
I felt from the very beginning that working for the public sector was very rewarding and made me feel happy to work as a designer. I was very lucky when I had the opportunity to join the PagoPA team from the beginning of 2022.
Q: What does PagoPA do?
A: PagoPA is a state-owned company specialising in the development of public payments and services through innovative products as well as the management of the technological infrastructure of those services, in order to support the modernization of the Italian Public Administration.
Hence, our everyday users are both Italian citizens as well as all the local and central administrations in our territory (around 24000 administrations in total!).
One of the most well-known projects we are running at PagoPA is the IO app: it represents the unique access point where local and national entities can easily and securely communicate with Italian citizens. The IO app has been downloaded almost 30 million times in two years (out of a total Italian population of 59 million).
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: That’s such a difficult question and I always answer it differently. Every time I experiment with new approaches when I attempt to make it clear to my family and friends ;)
This time, I’ll try this formulation: Service Design is the discipline that allows the exploration, inquiry and design of complex solutions, which often involve different actors, touchpoints and infrastructures. Starting from people’s needs, and ending with proposing a solution that embeds the values and ethical approach of the designer and the whole company.
The last part is especially relevant to me: I feel it is no longer enough to say we focus only on users’ needs without taking into account the responsibility (and creativity) we personally have — as service designers- of what and how we design.
I think it’s a promising moment of change for the service design practice: I know it’s a bit of a provocation, but I think we are surpassing the stereotypical image of the designer in front of walls of post-it (physical or digital), and in which I recognize myself and my everyday job very poorly.
I feel there are emerging new skills linked to the profession, such as the ability to manipulate and analyse quantitative data, or the necessity to learn and then master a more specific language in order to work side-by-side with tech experts and data architects.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your company? What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at PagoPA?
A: At this very moment, I’m the only person with a “Service Designer” job title (luckily another person will join me in a few weeks!), even if the entire design team shares a strong and common approach to service design methodologies and these are at the centre of how we envision and implement our products.
Because the core activity of PagoPA is actually to design public services, the company’s mindset is very user-centered (whether my colleagues are conscious of the user-centred design notion or not). This is a good starting point, but we are also trying (as a design team) to spread the approach and toolbox of the service design practice to the rest of the company.
For example, trying to make more and more frequent co-design moments and workshops in which we try to make people emerge from their silos and single tasks and create space to discuss about the whole process, the whole product.
We are also providing departments, that are more in contact with the users, with frameworks to collect better and more structured insights from their meetings, treating those meetings as if they were interviews.
It’s slowly working: I started a project a few months ago about a new way of receiving public economic benefits and spending them using your personal ID as if it were a payment method. The first step we did as a multidisciplinary team was to find a common ground in envisioning the process for this future ambitious service. We decided to work together using a shared blueprint (by means of a FigJam) in which everybody was contributing.
It was great to see our legal and privacy experts becoming familiar and working together on the blueprint before they had to “lock themselves in a room” to write down the first draft of the legislative decree that will make this project possible!
It’s not always that cool. Sometimes, the law is written first and it was made by someone who did not take into account the design of the processes and how that particular digital tool would actually work. In those cases, the “brief” of the law becomes a stringent constraint and it gets more frustrating and challenging to move the project forward in a direction that we deem satisfactory.
Q: How do you prove the impact of Service Design and how do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: The best way to prove the impact of service design practice is to let your colleagues and collaborators experience it. I feel lucky because it has been possible and easy for me so far thanks to very open-minded managers and people, who are ready to try out new or different ways of proceeding.
We don’t have KPIs in place to quantitatively measure this impact but still, as a whole design team, we work hard to advocate for a service design approach at two levels: both on the way in which we structure the workflow of our projects, as well as on using it internally to help improve processes and flows in some departments of the company.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: There are various activities I’m currently carrying on as a service designer.
First of all, the company is developing a lot of new digital products to help both public administrations and citizens. I’m working on the new “IO back-office”, a tool for administrations to be able to manage the digitalization of their services (for example services are reminders for identity cards’ expiry dates, warnings for fees that need to be paid, communications for local public tenders) and the communication with their audience (aka the Italian citizens) through the IO app.
In this case, I’m working with both designers and developers to design new functions for the back-office, considering that for now most of the public administrations are interacting with the app only via API integrations. It means we need to redesign the back-office interface but at the same time, we must consider how to make it easy to upgrade for those who will continue to use just APIs.
Another activity I’m following is to envision how a new public administration — if interested in joining us on the IO app or any other upcoming product — could integrate its services at best. It’s about joining forces with the sales team, which is the bridge we have with these users, in understanding what they need but also how we can propose something valuable for citizens.
As you can see from these two examples, my job goes from being very operative to being more strategic, from collaborating with developers and the tech team to working with sales.
I like this aspect. It puts me in the position to know the company and what is going on at different levels and this is something anybody who is “service design-in” should be able to do.
Q: Which are the big challenges in working as somebody who is “service design-in’?
A: The number of users we are working with and who are accessing every day our products carry a very strong responsibility; as well as the need to change the approach to our design research.
For example, it’s challenging and maybe even misleading to think of making personas for the entire population (that’s why in PagoPA we decided not to use this tool at all). You cannot think of doing fieldwork research in order to map the needs of all your users or to respond with your concepts to all those needs.
This can be very disorienting when you come from a consultancy and projects’ outcomes were very much based on those activities. For these reasons, the approach to the research is more based on the need to gain strong confidence through quantitative research. We, therefore, base a lot of our work on product performance data, reviews, and customer service feedback.
The latter is especially important for me, as I was reminded of a valuable lesson: sometimes other departments in our company are more in contact with users than designers! The sales department is our constant connection with institutions, as they take care of all the relations with administrations, they present and promote both our products and the best way to integrate their services with us. Customer care is our constant connection with citizens.
In this case, my colleagues from other departments are the experts and knowledge carriers so I can interview them to collect meaningful insights.
At the same time, the design department feels the need for a closer relationship with citizens as well, so we are developing an in-app service (within the IO app) in which we can ask citizens to apply and form a long-lasting pool for user research and tests.
Q: What’s the future of Service Design in your organisation?
A: I believe in a very successful future for the service design discipline in PagoPA. Our colleagues from all departments are starting to appreciate and really believe in the strengths of this approach and are asking us to support them in solving complex challenges: how to improve the customer service flow in order for them to not be overwhelmed, how to increase the way in which we collect feedback from all our users, and so on.
I hope the service design team will grow in number (we are working on it, if interested) in order to really make a difference in the quality of products we are developing for Italian citizens and administrations!
Q: A service you wish you had designed.
A: I recently started to use 1Password and I love it.
Even if it presents itself just as a simple app and browser extension, it hides the complexity of developing those integrations that are completely transparent to the user.
I consider myself to be sensitive to personal privacy issues but I’m also a very lazy person, hence I was terrified by the burden of adopting tools that would help me manage my passwords all over the digital world. Instead, the experience with 1Password is extremely seamless: after the initial password imports, all your passwords are synchronised instantly on all your devices and browsers. Passwords are securely stored and can be grouped in different “vaults” so that you can for example keep your personal life separated from your work life (no more personal passwords on your work computer!). 1Password also tries to recognize which password is needed in which context and autocompletes 2-factor authentications (if they have been added to the login through 1Password), which I find really cool. As simple as worthwhile!
Q: How can people follow you?
A: Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agata-brilli/
Medium: Agata Brilli
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Service Designers working within organisations. If you want to share your views, please reach out.
