Design Principles for @_DigitalIndia

This is Day 2 of 8 days for DigitalIndia.

As more services are launched for Digital India program, I believe it is important to lay down the principles that should guide the efforts to build a better Digital India. Julie Zhuo, Product Design Director at Facebook does a great job on explaining the importance of Design Principles.

Here are the six principles:

1. Start with User Needs, not Government Needs
2. Be Inclusive
3. Create Useful and Actionable Content
4. Share Open Data
5. Establish Identity, Trust and Simplicity
6. Build, Iterate and Test with Data

Start with User Needs, not Government Needs

Start every project/exercise of building new services or revamping these services from understanding who the users of the service are. They are most often citizens of India and sometimes Government employees too. Understand what their needs are, design services around these needs. Most often the needs are to accomplish a goal. If websites or mobile apps are built without understanding the needs of the citizens they turn out to be not useful.

• Start with understanding the user needs
• Involve end users in the early stages of planning to learn from them and to test the services with them
• Understand that the services are built for people and not the screens
• Be vary that what the users ask for is not always what they need
• When services are designed around the user needs, they would have a friction-less experience with the service.

Be Inclusive

India is country of 1 billion plus population with 22 official languages. There is a common saying that the culture practices of the people change and differ every 100 kilometers you travel in the country. Any digital service that is designed for such a varied set of population should be able to cater to this target users. There are many ways to dissect the population to understand their differences, all these should be considered:

• Find out the context of use, where would be the person be while using the service, based on the geographic location(someone in NorthEast mountains, is probably using the service on a mobile phone vs a graduate student sitting in front of his laptop in a library with high bandwidth internet access)
• Social, economic, political, religious, language, education backgrounds determine how, when and how a service will be used
• Services should be planned for multi channel roll out, consistent information is available for someone who is accessing the service irrespective of where they access it from: be it on the social media, a website, mobile app or even a SMS service
• Accessibility guidelines are not just good to follow but must be mandatory
• The services should be designed in a way to encourage everyone to participate

Create Useful and Actionable Content

With approximately 4500 Indian government websites, it becomes quite hard for a common internet user to figure out what is the right place to get information. Another common mistake seen on Indian Websites is that they usually post scanned copies of circular on the website, mostly treating a website like a folder that they put their circulars in. This type of content is not at all actionable.

• Make sure the content is up-to-date and verified.
• Have specialized skills to make sure the content for Digital services is not a copy or a dump of print content
• Minimize content on digital service,s only content that is needed is posted
• Set the right expectations on each digital service
• Share outcomes of the various government activities
• Have clear call to actions on the websites
• Set priorities and boundaries for content
• Content should be aligned with the user objectives of use or needs

Share Open Data

Create a culture of sharing data within the government and outside the government more open. While we have had open data initiatives, the datasets are quite old and are not useful for a data enthusiast to use the data to build better services.

• While collecting user data, also allow users to correct it
• Share code, share ideas, share intentions and share failures
• Share common design patterns across web and mobile properties so that users can have consistent experience across these services
• Build platforms and provide resources(APIs) for others(citizens. state governments or even other departments)to build on top

Establish Identity, Trust and Simplicity

There are quite a few great online services that the government has been launching in the past few months(like this one to book appointment at government hospitals, or the live attendance data), it is very disheartening to see very few citizens making use of them. To create more awareness and engagement of the government digital services, the designers and developers have to work on establishing identity(awareness), trust(usefulness) and Simplicity(most of the underlying processes are complex and hard, extra effort needs to be put in to make these services simple for the end citizens)

• Visual identity plays a great role in establishing trust and making a good impression on the user. it also determines what kind of experience the user is going to have with the service.
• Identifying the organization and its relationship with the government plays a role in how users perceive the service and helps in building trust
• Provide a context and clarify purpose of each digital service, this helps in setting the right expectations to the citizens
• Have a solid privacy policy around collecting user data and robust security measures in safe guarding this information

Build, Test and Iterate with Data

Understanding user needs helps in collecting the data that can be used to build the right services and also prioritize what features or aspects of the service needs to be build.

• Always start with the existing knowledge of non-digital service or how the service is functioning with human work
• Build prototypes, release alpha/beta versions
• Small releases are better than one big bang launch which are prone to big failures.
• Build analytics into the new digital services that helps in evolving the services and making them better

These principles are meant to be open for everyone to contribute via feedback. Feel free to comment or add to them.

Inspiration and References:

1. UK Government Digital Service Design Principles: https://www.gov.uk/design-principles
2. Usability in Goverment Systems: User Experince design for Citizens and Public Servants. Edited by Elizabeth Buie, Dianne Murray: https://books.google.co.in/books?id=U3P4tdoETiwC&dq
3. Guidelines for Indian Government websites: Standards for enhancing web usability. Verma N. & Joshi, L.(2009)
4. Google Design Guidelines: Material Design: http://www.google.co.in/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html

5. Web Guidelines for Indian Government Websites: http://web.guidelines.gov.in/#&panel1-1