Online public service report

 

Today I was at the launch of the collaboration between Thinkpublic and Consumer Focus on the manifesto for online public services.  This is timely as we are in full swing of a digital revolution allowing us to buy, sell, move, make, collaborate, feedback in more ways than ever before.  This isn’t html website land anymore, no, we are far smarter than that.  In the same way the 1800s extension of the industrial revolution brought us new materials: steel, new networks: railways and new spaces: crystal palace/ great exhibitions.  We are looking at new materials: data, new networks: fibre optic cables and facebook, new spaces: apps stores and social networks.  This new digital revolution has the potential to fundamentally shift the way we live.

But we have some catching up to do as a public sector, in fact, some pushing and innovating to do.  Tech uptake is moving at such a fast pace (see exponential rates of smart phone usage) that if the public sector is to survive it has to innovate, and I believe a part of that picture is using design.  *

The report itself hosts ten manifesto points pulled together from a report researched and delivered by Think Public.  The report used existing literature, expert interviews and qualitative investigation methods including interviews, focus groups, service walkthroughs to understand and articulate what people expect from online public services.

As Ivo Gormley kicked off at the launch he described the report as maintaining simplicity which I think was a good move, we don’t need more heavy papers on ‘how to’ in the public sector. As he describes, it takes on an optimistic viewpoint to consider what online public services could mean in the future for consumers.

There was discussion following themes of personal data and safety, the relationship between ‘consumer’ and government, the way in which we create online public services, the word consumer…(could go on)  As Ivo had pointed out, backed by Colin from Consumer Focus the report did not explore any of these themes in detail but they were raised by the people who were involved in the report and noted.  I think these are good questions to be asking and that there is more work to be done here.

“We want online public services that are understandable and easier to use”
-Participant in report

However, I think what the report stands for is a way of altering mindsets to think about putting people at the heart of public services, and meaningfully, not in some corporate strategy tokenistic way.  This should be a standard service principle for all projects, organisations and government should be thinking about what they want people to say after using their service.  Easy to use and understand are the first things we write down when it comes to crafting how you would describe a service experience.

 

This talk is now online

 

Orchestrated by Paul Clark I was honoured to be asked to come talk about service design, presentation above highlights some of the thinking. My role today was to move slightly away from the report and open up the conversation on the design of online public services.  Firing through thoughts (fifteen minutes goes fast), I talked about the need to prototype public services and organisations to adopt more agile approaches.  Working with designers can help bring form to ideas and realise possible futures.

I talked about embedding design and the need to become organisations who can think and do in a perpetual beta mode, something mentioned several times this afternoon, ‘continuous improvement’ is a much sought after practice but battles the more traditional viewpoint of the ‘big IT projects’. Ideate, procure, deliver, move on. This is not how we should be moving forward.

 

 

I highlighted that design is not the only answer to a shifting culture (needed to accept design into the current status quo of the public sector) but as Anthony Zacharzewski pointed out, we don’t need another ‘culture change’ project but a way of testing and prototyping ideas pre implementation using today’s technology and agile methodologies.

Beta is fast becoming a word in our regular vocabulary, perhaps amongst the types of people who were present but I can report from my experience working inside and around public bodies, that this is not the case.  The report fits in nicely here as another push to take a user centred point of view and look at working in beta with people.  Just think, if something was difficult and hard to use in a commercial context, a company would not make any money.  We need the same level of rigour and testing of public platforms as commercial companies have.

It is easy to overlook but even points like the move to apps (and not websites) being a favoured ‘channel’ of consumers, is a tap on the shoulder for many working in the public sector.  I’ve unfortuneatly been privy to closed board room conversations where nothing is designed and an idea is tendered without any consideration of a user’s need or the context for where a service offering needs to sit in.  Pushing to get up to date websites is hard enough, never mind IT illiterate decision makers who think they know best (and completely ignore their customers too).  Not good enough, bring on the manifesto!

“Put yourself in the user’s position. That doesn’t happen enough”
Isabella, 53,

I think design is the vehicle to help us achieve this, and it’s great to see many organisations offering this as a service to the public sector. We need to get more serious however about how we scale this skillset and discipline up to make itself useful. I’ve always been a strong believer in design as a process to house creativity (and boy do we need some creative solutions now), so lets find a way to help others use it, tool up, and start innovating.

“It would be wrong for public services to be 100% online.  What if you live in an area which doesnt have good broadband access? Or what if English isnt your first language?”

 

I was served a reminder today about the power of the blueprint and the thinking behind organisations not turning just to making services online, but to make this an extra channel to deliver services on.  We must not lose blueprints as a coherent way to consider the multiple user journeys that can take place and how they move across channels to receive/interact/transact with service providers.  The blueprint helps to design services to be seamless and as the report points out, ‘understandable and easy to use’.  What we should not forget is that public services ‘going online’ does not remove face to face, physical touchpoints, paper receipts (although it can for the better in certain contexts) and this also doesn’t mean people losing jobs. I’ve also been privy to witness ‘fear of the online’ from frontline staff, worried about removing face to face and making people redundant.

“The majority of the attention has focused on the mechanics of shifting public services online, working out how to drive more traffic to them”
- Quote from report

The last thing, and a stand out for me in the report was that online public services is not about putting information (lots of it) online, or merely transferring channels.  This is about the potential opportunities that being/going online can provide public services with.  The report sets out some nice ideas from focus groups on paying back student loans, giving community time in return for council tax benefits visualised by the team.  We should allow some scoping time for the potential of data and online public services.  This will need to be a collaborative approach, so in some basic format, could there be a jam/camp to bring orgs, customers, designers and developers together with a focus on designing services that help government/public sector achieve the mission they are working towards?  This may be a basic start, but perhaps worth pursuing.

 

 

The presentation covers more thinking as this is a complex discussion not just about online, but about creating organisations and structures geared up to follow through on their mission/visions.   We’re about to launch our embeddingdesign platform which will continue some of my research/thinking from my masters thesis on embedding design so watch this space.

To cap off, good report, a vehicle for starting some new conversations and glad that in the way it was developed, it practices what it preaches.

Always up for a chat;
sarah@wearesnook.com
@rufflemuffin

* As the report points out, and I myself note, I have not focused on the digital divide between people using online technology and those who cannot access it. There are people doing good work in this field.

By Sarah in Our thoughts on January 25, 2012