Empathy, the User and Public Policy
This past week demonstrated the “in-the-field” approach taken during this intensive course: We attended Evergreen Brickworks in the Don Valley, the Evergreen location in Hamilton (my first time to the city!) and in our spare time, some of us attended the Joe Cressy Consultation on the Thursday for one of the course’s assignment. The common classroom felt excitingly non-existent.
The overarching theme of the past week’s work was the process of consultation and involving those in the community. At Evergreen Brickworks, we participated in a one-hour mission to redesign the “gift-giving experience” for your partner. What followed was collecting information on the interviewee, actively listening to their concerns and issues surrounding the current experience and observing how they reacted to proposed solutions to redesigning their experience. By building empathy, the outcome of the interviews and information gathering posits a more human touch. This is something that is not always present in the regular discussions surrounding the technocratic details of public policy. Quicksey (2017) outlines the benefits of this design. People posit bounded rationality, and thus may contradict their stated preferences in certain capacities. By going deeper into the target’s behaviour outside of simply a mass survey, understanding their point of view and having the target express how they feel in emotive terms (rather than potentially technocratic or pre-selected terms), individual users’ experiences are more directly obtained and understood. A combination of these rich qualitative insights can allow designers to work more clearly with gathered quantitative data in developing user-focused programs.
The Danish government (through one of its innovation units) used this approach to examine its tax system by conducting in-depth one-on-one interviews with nine youth in three Danish cities. Through detailed, empathy-oriented discussions, the unit was able to discover that many youth had difficulty understanding the online tax pay system as well as their tax obligations. This led to user-focused policy initiatives by the Danish Tax and Customs Administration (SKAT), including providing accessible language on the online pay system and making the self-service site easier to use, and improving teaching materials for the young taxpayers.
While this isn’t to say that this approach may be appropriate for every policy decision at every level, it allows us to better understand the users that are actually affected on the ground by policy decisions. Sometimes just listening the voices of the experts at the top or gathering superficial surveys may not be enough to get to the heart of what people are thinking about a given issue. To design policies for the user, we have to truly know the user.
