Designing the seams, not seamless design

On YouTube, there’s a compilation of Steve Jobs speeches where he says: ‘It just works. Seamlessly.’ There are ­forty-four examples in total. ‘It just works’ sums up Jobs’ approach to design: remove and simplify. He thought design should ‘get out of the way’. Products that just worked were not there to be meddled with either (when Apple discovered repair shops opening the iPhone 4, they added tamper-proof screws).

It has become an article of faith that a good design is one that just works. One school of thought is that it is enough to apply these principles to the public sphere — to create public services that ‘just work’. But do we really want to design our public services like an iPad? Functional yes, even magical, but good luck if you want to understand how it works.

A functional, transactional view of the relationship between citizen and state — characterised by the argument: I pay my taxes, so all the council has to do is collect the bins and fix potholes — is hardly a new one. But those arguments often come from the privileged position of people who don’t have to interact with public services all that much. It also fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what makes public services public.

Public services are different because people have to use them. They must work, and they must work for everyone. Their quality is measured not through the number of units sold, but by feedback from the public.

Regardless of how well they are perceived to have been designed by designers or policymakers, public services require an element of ‘co-production’ with the public.

The concept of co-production has its origins in the early 1970s and the work of Elinor Ostrom. As part of her work on co-production, Ostrom described the ‘service paradox’ where the quality of services as defined by professionals results in suboptimal outcomes as defined by users.

For example, better-designed textbooks might make education worse if the content is so clear that students no longer feel the need to discuss issues with their class or teachers. In a school, pupils are co-producers of learning with their teachers and with each other.

At the UK Government Digital Service, our version of ‘it just works, seamlessly’ was ‘do the hard work to make it simple’. That principle summed up what we’d tried to do with GOV.UK: people should not need to understand government to interact with it. But as modern design practice spread across government, the simplicity principle took on a life of its own. The idea that people should not have to understand the rules and the structure of government seemed to morph into an assertion that the workings of government should be obfuscated.

When I was working on the UK’s digital welfare system, Universal Credit, in 2014, it became abundantly clear that the next-generation digital public services that automate, abstract and have complex data flows demanded a different approach to design.

Despite the aspiration of public sector design to make services simpler, clearer and faster, we also need to acknowledge that a focus on simplicity, especially when combined with the inherent opaqueness of technology and data, make it harder for people to understand government.

The ability for users to ‘meddle’ is a key feature of public services. Democracy is about more than voting every four or five years, it’s about the opportunities people have to shape the services and the rules that, in turn, shape their world. Understanding the way things are is a precondition for being able to change them. Democracy, it has been said, is ‘government by explanation’.

To avoid the service paradox in the next generation of public services, there need to be clear opportunities to understand the workings of those services.

But can we reconcile ‘it just works’ with ‘government by explanation’?

For inspiration, we can look to the work of the late Mark Weiser, who was the chief technologist of Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 1990s. He argued that we should aspire to design ‘calm technology’. ‘Beautiful seams’ would, he proposed, be the way to interact with digital tools that would otherwise exist in the background. Rather than being totally hidden, complexity is there to be revealed. Users can configure, understand or take control of automated processes, as needed.

Rather than designing seamless public services, we should aspire to design better seams. Services should orientate users so they can adopt the correct stance for the organisation they are dealing with. They should help people understand how data about them is used and when that data is used in a new context. If a decision just doesn’t look right, services need to help users switch tasks: from seeking an outcome to trying to understand what has happened. Finally, there should be a route from the service to the underlying rules that say why the service works the way it does and who is accountable.

Digital services should work, yes, but they should also actively educate people about how democracy works and where power and accountability lie by putting transparency at the point of use. After all, democracy is a user need too.

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Richard Pope was part of the founding team of the UK Government Digital Service and the first product manager for GOV.UK. He is the author of the book ‘Platformland’.