The Service Factory: Putting citizens’ satisfaction at the centre when designing public services for the UAE
by Simone Carrier
This post originally appeared on the Mohammed bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation’s website.
Human-centred design is a fundamental growth driver for businesses around the world. Billion-dollar companies like Apple, Tesla, WhatsApp, and Uber haven’t built their successes on technological innovation alone — they’ve done it by creating technology that responds to and even anticipates their customers’ needs.
As FutureGov, the digital and design company for public services, we have helped many government organisations in the United Kingdom, Australia and Europe to use human-centred design to provide more efficient and human services. But none of them have done so as part of a mandate to improve national happiness.
The Prime Minister’s Office Government Services Team and the Mohammed bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation chose a citizen-driven approach to service design by initiating a program — the Service Factory — that will not only create 7 star services, but also have an impact on citizens’ happiness.
Building capacity and having a measurable impact on citizens’ lives
The goal of the Service Factory program was not only to build new capabilities within government — it was also to deliver tangible solutions citizens could interact with, so that the positive difference the teams’ ideas had could be measured.
To meet these objectives, the program provided participants with both a hands-on opportunity to experiment with new ways of doing things in a safe environment and the chance to apply their newly learned methods and tools to real projects.
80 government professionals with diverse backgrounds worked in multidisciplinary teams on eight different challenges. The challenges were chosen so that participants would come together around their subject matter expertise and form new service bundles: all the processes involved in getting married, having a baby, studying abroad, finding a job, starting a business, dealing with emergencies, and getting pensions.
FutureGov guided the teams through the human-centred design process and supported the teams with the development of new service ideas.
Here are three moments that had the biggest impact on how the participating government professionals think about designing services.
Qualitative user research: Building empathy and feeling inspired
FutureGov introduced qualitative research techniques like guerrilla research (a low-cost research technique that doesn’t require a lot of preparation) and depth interviews (meeting people in their environment for long semi-structured conversations) to encourage public service professionals to listen more carefully and get closer to citizens’ needs. At first, participants saw engaging with individual citizens as less “scientific” than using traditional, quantitative market research techniques such as customer surveys. But once they left the confines of the office and bravely opted open, inquisitive research behaviours, the benefits of qualitative research became visible.
In the end, the teams who showed the strongest appetite to reach out to citizens and an openness to having their ideas challenged were able to develop more innovative and scalable solutions than those who reverted to traditional models of decision-making.
“I didn’t want to approach citizens at first. But after I’ve done it — we learned so many new things. Back at my normal work, I try to bring in these new techniques. I think the empathy we gained helps us to deliver better services.”
— Service Factory participant
Prototyping: Making ideas tangible to get early feedback
Traditionally, services are delivered after a long planning phase as costly pilots. Customers get involved at the very last step — their feedback is used to validate what’s already been created, rather than to improve or iterate on the design.
FutureGov introduced a more agile way of service delivery: creating quick and inexpensive prototypes that can be tested with citizens much earlier. User feedback is used to improve and iterate the prototype; if the testing shows that it’s not solving a citizen problem, the prototype can even be thrown away altogether.
The participants’ appetite to embrace this new way of delivery was exceptional. All teams developed incredible creative solutions, including three dimensional models, roleplays and paper wireframes. They learned how citizen feedback could be used to improve their idea and better align it with citizens’ needs. And most importantly, they learned not to fall in love with their own ideas too early.
“Another thing (…) that changed my day to day work was “not falling in love with my own idea”. Through prototyping the intended design, I realised that when simulating an idea, we are testing the viability of that idea and that is systematically being reviewed by users. Challenges surface and details that we did not think of initially start to emerge which may require that we rethink the idea. You may end up with a completely new idea all in all.”
— Service Factory facilitator
Minimum viable services: implementing a service as early as possible to create value for citizens
Rather than implementing big pilots of services that have never been tested in real life, FutureGov introduced the idea of a “minimum viable service” (MVS) — the most basic possible version of a service that still creates value and lets citizens experience the service in real life.
Teams stripped back everything that wasn’t essential to their service and explored how they could deliver the most minimum viable version possible within the next three months — even if that meant implementing a manually delivered “concierge” service rather than a digital option.
But Emiratis are used to thinking big! Initially, teams felt discouraged when asked to create small versions of their services. Once FutureGov created a strong link between the minimum viable project and their bigger vision, the team’s motivation picked up again. Through this process, the teams learned how a successful MVS gave them stronger leverage with internal stakeholders in gathering support and investment to scale their prototypes.
The legacy of the Service Factory
Although the Service Factory program has officially ended, the majority of participants wanted to continue working on their MVS to be scaled — and are still doing so today. Many government professionals adopted new tools and methodologies and use them to enrich their everyday practise. However, new ways of doing things require the right context.
“In my day-to-day job I wonder how I can use my new skills in the existing work environment.”
— Service Factory participant
The Prime Minister’s Office Government Services team and the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation know that their mission of creating a human-centred government is not yet complete. They will continue their journey to spread the philosophy of human-centred design in line with the Government’s strategy. Eventually, these ways of thinking and working will become part of government’s everyday practices and its culture.
