Feedback is about change
On Thursday I joined a roundtable to help shape the future vision for UK digital public services.
In the spirit of working in the open, this is the second of 2 blog posts sharing ideas for the digital centre of government. In the first post I shared 3 ideas to shape the government digital vision. In this final post I expand my thoughts on feedback in digital public service design.
One of the questions we were asked to think about for the roundtable was “Can the centre promote innovations that build citizen feedback into public service design, and shape services around people’s needs and patterns of behaviour?”
There are many different kinds of feedback mechanisms, from public engagement or involvement, citizen juries, citizens’ assemblies, civil society campaigning or user research. This blog post focusses on feedback within digital services, once they are live.
Public services should be accountable to the public
Given that public services belong to all people, services should adapt and improve based on citizen input. But digital public service design tends to take a top down approach, where teams make decisions that can be distant from the issues of people or communities. Feedback helps bridge this gap, helping product or policy teams stay attuned to the changing expectations of people and communities.
The opportunity of designing feedback into services is faster iteration time. This means better services, that meet more needs, in use by the public. Real-world change. But these benefits are only possible if feedback is understandable, able to be acted on, and that people can feel that something has changed. In short, feedback needs design.
Last year we ran a discovery project on feedback mechanisms for a private sector client. We were researching with underserved communities, prototyping and testing how feedback could be designed to better meet their needs. Here are some of the insights:
Feedback is a form of co-production
The opportunity of designing feedback into services directly is that feedback can become faster and more accessible. Through the work we came to understand that feedback can engender co-production between people and the teams behind the service. In this way, feedback can share power with the people or communities at need.
But sharing power doesn’t just happen. The community we were researching with had little trust that feedback would create change. This is important for digital services in particular. We often hear in research that people have low trust in technology, or have experienced negative disparities as a result of technology. Without trust, the chance of people engaging in initiatives like feedback is very low.
We heard that seeing other people’s success stories first could help rebuild trust and inspire participation. So our prototypes explored different ways that the user experience could offer this kind of collective experience and decision-making.
Feedback requires new collective design patterns
To date public sector design patterns have been transactional and individualistic. To support meaningful feedback, new relational patterns that add more friction are needed. People need to feel their input is valued, safe, that feedback processes are fair and worth their time.
In research we heard that people thought their voice didn’t matter. So we tested ways to boost user confidence through transparency, and social context, to make participation feel more communal and impactful.
Of course feedback is not only about the experience design. It requires technical work, organisational commitment, and ongoing reporting mechanisms. For feedback to be effective and maintain trust, it has to be seen to create change. In this project we started talking about feedback as an emerging capability.
Structuring feedback as data
Feedback design patterns should help people structure their feedback in ways that reflect their mental models, and are most useful to product teams. That means feedback should be structured data, readable to people as well as machines.
Structuring feedback reduces user effort and allows for easier analysis and prioritisation by product teams. And it benefits multi-stakeholder models, allowing civil society to access insights about public concerns.
To meet the needs of all people, public services need feedback
Feedback is powerful because it drives change. When we design public services that include feedback, we help bridge the gap between users and product and policy teams. This can help services become more effective and fair over time.
The future of public services should be one where feedback isn’t just welcomed, but is a key part of making services work for all people.
