App for citizens, designed with citizens
IO — the project to develop the public services app is one of the main projects of the Italian Digital Transformation Team. It exploits the potential of several enabling platforms, a new API (application programming interface) interoperability model, and the tools and guidelines shared by the Italian Designers and Developers communities to offer citizens an innovative way to access public services through a single, easy-to-use app for their smartphone.
Inclusiveness and accessibility are the two founding principles of the io project. We chose an app to make interaction between citizens and the public administration simpler and more direct, by leveraging the increasingly widespread use of smartphones across the Italian population to access the web. Allowing all citizens to have public services always available ‘in their own pocket’ and to manage complex operations in a few quick steps, the io app can also serve as a helpful tool to reduce the digital divide among elderly people or citizens who are simply less accustomed to using technology.
We gave ourselves a clear, yet ambitious goal: to publish the first public version of the io application on app stores by the end of 2019. Our journey started in early 2018, with an analysis of citizens’ daily needs, which then allowed us to develop and test an application capable of responding to those needs in a personalised manner. In the beginning, we mapped out some of the public services corresponding to citizens’ needs during specific moments of their life, in which citizens interact with the public administration, ordering them by the frequency of average use and percentage of the population involved. The Public Service Utilization Map shows the results.
This helped us prioritise public services in order to funnel them towards a single channel, starting with those used more frequently and by the largest number of people. Having identified this set of fundamental functions, we started researching the functioning and flow of each service, designing first mocks, and testing results accordingly.
In the summer of 2018, we validated the concept of the application itself for the first time, with an interactive prototype. A dozen people (ordinary citizens who volunteered as candidates) interacted with the prototype under observation according to the talk-aloud technique. This allowed us to see if the app was functional, simple and enjoyable to use, meeting users’ needs.
Then, in November, we started a new test phase with an alpha version of the app on the smartphones of 100 participants for a period of 15 days. We invited members of Parliament and representatives of the public bodies to share problems, doubts, and suggest improvements or new features, which became the next goals for the team of designers and developers working on io.
During the summer of 2019, hundreds of people living in both large cities (Milan and Turin) and smaller towns had the opportunity to install a beta version of the IO app on their smartphones to try out a handful of real services. For instance, they were able to:
• receive expiry notices for id or restricted traffic zone passes
• receive messages from their administration, e.g. as a summary of their personal data from the registry office and notifications about appointments
• make real payments for their waste taxes, car taxes, school lunches, fines
As citizens experimented with the app’s features, they were able to stay in touch with io’s development team to report bugs and errors, provide feedback on the app’s operation and make constructive suggestions.
This resulted in an extremely valuable flow of information for us: people using the app are generally enthusiastic and satisfied with how it works, proving that the app really does meet their needs. The majority of bugs have surfaced, which ensures the release of a much more solid version of the io app, later this year.
The truly extraordinary thing, however, was that our roadmap evolved during these months of testing, thanks to citizen feedback. This is a radical paradigm shift: citizens are telling us what to work on, what features to develop, how to improve the app to better suit their needs.
As an example among dozens, the addition of a new feature within io app (a digital copy of a fiscal code card), started with a user request.
In addition, the analysis of real, anonymised usage data allows us to understand how the product is actually being used, and recognise areas where difficulties are likely to be encountered.
By monitoring the data, we noticed that many users had troubles using the authentication system (SP), a necessary step when accessing io for the first time. This prompted us to evolve this aspect by integrating a release on biometric information and making this mandatory step quicker and easier. We are also working to integrate the National Resident Population Registry (ANPR) and the Electronic ID card (CIE) to provide an additional way for accessing online services. Even on this front, the io project is literally leading the way: once fully operational, this integration will allow ten and a half million citizens to authenticate themselves simply by placing their card on their smartphone via near-field communication (NFC) and entering a pin that was delivered with their card.
What is more, our experiences with institutions and the feedback we have received from their technological partners contributed to progress in other areas as well, especially those involving io’s infrastructure and backend system. This was fundamental since the real challenge for the next few months will be to foster the onboarding of as many public bodies as possible onto the project. Indeed, only by integrating a significant number of services provided by central and local administrations into the app, we will be able to prove to citizens the real value of io when it arrives in app stores.
From the very beginning, our work has been driven first and foremost by user-centricity. Our experiments with the io project involved testing a new method, an open and collaborative paradigm, which we hope will change the way Italian public services are designed in the future: we are developing an app for citizens, with citizens.
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Matteo De Santi is Chief Product and UX/UI Design Officer at the Italian Digital Transformation Team.
