Can UX design help bridging the gap between citizens and local government?

The short answer is Yes. If you are interested in knowing why and how, read on.

The US elections highlighted the disconnection between citizens and politics, with almost half of eligible voters not going to the polls. I was also amused by how Australians were captivated by that far away “show” and vocal about the candidates. On the contrary, they seem rather careless about internal matters, starting from what happens in their neighbourhood, i.e. local government.

Guilty as charged, when I started writing this article I realised I had not even checked who won my City Council elections. There you go, Robbie, you are not any better.

But why is that? A number of recent research studies showed citizens have a desire for engagement, but suffer also from a bigger frustration stemming from the perception that their opinions do not matter to local government and that the traditional bureaucratic machinery of representative democracies is not capable any longer of delivering against expectations that social networks have dramatically changed. In an “uberised” world, local government seems still addicted to bureaucratic paper-based forms and jargon and is failing both at consulting with the community and keeping it informed.

As a result, a sense of disconnection from government and reluctance to engage in local political matters (let alone national) is growing or maybe already well established.

Citizens interact with their local government for a plethora of different reasons, and these days the traditional touchpoints of phone or visit to the council’s front desk are increasingly being replaced by websites or phone apps.

Anyone paying their bills, lodging a request for service, applying for a business license or a building permit, is interacting with the government as they do every day with brands. The subtle difference with a typical commercial customer-brand relationship is that the latter is voluntary, whereas most of transactional interaction with a council are not (you must pay your taxes — unless you are in Italy, where I am from, where it actually seems optional). However, citizens are in a way co-owners of these services, and should therefore be able to influence them.

So, in a digital society, the council’s website should be the first source of information, the preferred tool for communication and engagement and should provide a seamless transactional experience.

But is it?

Let’s face it, the average city council website is developed according to organisation-centric principles, structured in silos reflecting its departments, cluttered with irrelevant details, full of bureaucratic jargon. Poorly accessible, not mobile responsive. Shall we go on?

As such, it acts as a barrier to people, it increases the gap between citizens and local government, rather than being the natural connection.

That’s why, UX design can help and we designers have a responsibility, a mission to reconnect people and politics, by enabling citizen to participate, to co-create the services they need in the way they want to use it, to deliver a delightful experience even when we have to pay our rates.

Go to your website and try the three Rs (Rates, Roads and Rubbish) which are the main drivers of interaction. Ah-ha I feel your disappointment. Now, close your eyes and imagine the same website where your experience is pleasant, in terms of retrieving information or transactional functions. Where forms are easy to fill, require only relevant information and prevent you from errors. Where you can lodge an application and track it. Where you can navigate seamlessly to the right location to find information, easy to find, read and understand. Where you can contribute to the decision making process, where you can read and debate policies that affect your everyday life.

It’s not dream, this can be achieved with a user centric approach, which is at the foundations of UX Design. We have a gap and we want to build a bridge. On one side of the bridge we have the residents (and businesses), on the other side of the bridge internal stakeholders. We are here on a mission to reconnect citizens and politics.

Here is a quick plan to build this bridge:

Discover: take users’ needs (citizens and businesses) and mix them carefully with internal stakeholders’ desires to give solid foundations. This framework should guide the development of jargon free content to invite full participation and remove any barrier to entry. Add in-page task based links for common actions; these are the shortcuts which helps skipping the line as nobody likes to be stuck in traffic.

Design: Come up with an information architecture and navigation design to enable users to complete tasks seamlessly. The two ends of the bridge must meet in the middle: citizens and government are working toward a common goal. Add some iconography to help finding the right path and UI to create a delightful experience. Empower the citizen with an application tracking system to make the counterpart accountable. Facilitate community consultation forms for easy exchange of opinions and feedback.

Develop: mobile-first to allow an anywhere-anytime experience. Avoid having sub-sites as they are detours from the main bridge; sub-site should only exist in response to a very specific and distinct audience, purpose and brand.

The result (a.k.a. ROI)?:

· Dramatic decrease in calls and front-desk visits

· Uptake in online transactions — 24/7 — which enable people of interacting anytime anywhere

· As a consequence, a savings of possibly $10 per resident per year. What? That’s it? Well multiply it by 100,000 citizens. That’s a big bucket of gold coins.

· But most of all, increased citizen engagement, rediscovered feeling of having an impact as citizens and redeveloped sense of connection with government and politics.

Let’s go and do it.

PS: I checked the results of my local council’s election. Saying that the experience was frustrating is an understatement, lost between irrelevant pages, repeated searches to try to find the results … yes we definitely can help and have a moral obligation to.