Human-centered design: Lessons from IT can improve government efficiency, effectiveness and citizen satisfaction

Although human-centered design (HCD) began in the late 1970s, it didn’t become mainstream until this past decade, when the benefits became abundantly clear. As government agencies begin to modernize, it will be important to understand the citizen journey, and not only with their own agency but also with other agencies that coordinate government services. Citizen-centric government, or beneficiary-centric government, can help.

In fact, the Dec. 13, 2021 Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery introduced a new interagency framework by which the Office of Management and Budget will encourage high-impact service providers to work together on cross-agency collaboration to address complex service challenges.

Customer experience (CX) frameworks and methodologies can help agency employees and leaders see government in the context of its end beneficiaries — especially across more than one agency in a broader context. A great example of improving efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction across multiple agencies using CX comes from a recent redesign of services to victims of global human trafficking. When victims sought help, they had to present evidence and tell their story to prove that they were a victim four separate times to four separate agencies, reliving the trauma repeatedly. Victims had to work with the Department of Justice so that their victimizer could be prosecuted; with the Department of Homeland Security to gain the legal right to remain in the U.S.; with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to access housing benefits; and with the Department of Health and Human Services for social services and other support.

Prior to the start of the modernization of systems and processes, those agencies didn’t collaborate and didn’t accept each other’s determination of victimization. As a result, not only was the victim subject to undue stress from reliving their trauma repeatedly, but agencies duplicated each other’s effort to verify victimization.

What is the problem here?

Agencies are required to think first about how to implement the laws that they are assigned to administer. Agencies often must reconcile the implementation of a new law with interrelated, but occasionally conflicting, prior law. Public administrators also must think about how to implement laws efficiently within the constraints of budgets appropriated for their programs. In many instances, it is difficult and complex for agencies to reconcile legal requirements with customer/citizen experiences.

Historically, agencies haven’t had designated executives or administrators tasked with keeping CX in focus. Now, an increasing number of agencies have designated a chief CX officer. This gap in “who owns the problem” has been especially true for processes that require interactions with and between multiple federal agencies. The goal is that chief CX officers will initiate focus across agencies, as well as within their own agency, because they are successfully implementing HCD.

Implementing HCD makes you think more holistically

To be human-centered, an agency that is planning its strategies, designing its processes and developing its IT systems must think about the needs of its customers and beneficiaries first. This sequence should provoke an agency to consider a specific customer or beneficiary and their situation (their “use case”), and then ask: “What does the user need from us?” and “Which other agencies must the user interact with to meet their needs?” In the case of HHS, the “use case” was a victim of human trafficking who sought government assistance for multiple needs. This user-centric approach should also lead an agency to ask: “How can we reduce the user pain points?” It’s often helpful to ask users such questions directly, i.e., in a focus group. (Note: it is only possible to identify other agencies that interact with a user if the use case is identified first – thus the importance of the user-centric perspective.) That perspective also allows identification of pain points, such as the painful need for victims of trafficking to prove their victimization repeatedly.

In that example, when the agencies began their modernization journey, it was the human-centered design approach that led the several agencies to coordinate with each other. All agreed to accept one agency’s determination that a person is, in fact, a victim of human trafficking, rather than each of the four agencies working to make that same determination separately. Happily, that redesign made it possible for HHS to serve victims of human trafficking twice as fast and at half the cost.

Our advice is that agencies implementing HCD should seek to observe as closely as possible the experience and behaviors of real customers as they move through a process — especially a process that involves multiple agencies — to see what works and what doesn’t. User needs can then serve as the basis for performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction, service quality and timeliness.

Common customer experience pain points that we’ve encountered, and for which HCD could likely help improve customer experience, include:

• Being repeatedly required to prove one’s identity or status to multiple agencies.
• Not being aware of a deadline for action – particularly when one or more agencies have all the information needed to easily provide a reminder or prompt for that action.
• Information is hard to find/access because it is presented based upon its source or the presenting agency’s individual role, rather than being organized according to the user’s needs (this is compounded because government IT systems search capabilities rarely follow industry standards).
• Tools to access government IT systems (such as URLs, login pages and passwords) tend to be complicated/cluttered compared to the more simple and focused login pages used for commercial applications.

Benefits of human-centered design in government

One big, often unexpected benefit of HCD is to reduce duplication and save taxpayer dollars. The HCD approach can help government agencies pinpoint activities and even entire programs where efforts are duplicated or in conflict, therefore saving money, time and resources. In the human trafficking example, DoJ, DHS and HUD no longer needed to spend time and resources to verify a person’s victimization.

A second important benefit of human centered design is to reduce customer burden. Many interrelated programs operated by different agencies call on customers to do something similar. For example, providing information such as proof of income, family size, marital status and identity is required by the IRS for the earned-income tax credit. Several of those same factors must be proven to obtain food assistance from the Agriculture Department, housing benefits from HUD, Pell grants from the Education Department and other types of benefits administered by other agencies. Government should think about how to reduce these sorts of duplicative burdens on citizens – doing so would also likely reduce the workload of government agencies. We recognize that this is not an easy problem to solve given data privacy challenges and separate laws that mandate each agency take actions to carry out its own mandate, but it may not be impossible to solve. In fact, a human-centered design approach may be the best way to identify and justify which laws and regulations may need to be changed where they cause conflict or duplication of effort.

A pilot program would be a good first step

Tackling all cross-government services is taking on too much at once, but piloting programs for a few more use cases would be a great next step beyond the victims of human trafficking use case. The government could experiment with user-centric design, draw lessons from successes and failures, and work iteratively to improve the initiative before broadening the effort to a wider range of customers, beneficiaries, and programs. Some central coordination – perhaps by OMB or the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) – would likely be needed to achieve cross-agency human-centered design of both programs and the IT used to carry out those programs. OMB or DPC could select a group of pilot opportunities, by focusing on beneficiaries that must interact with multiple agencies – perhaps “wrap-around” social service programs delivered by multiple agencies, or by economic development efforts where multiple agencies make loans, train workers or issue regulations designed to help promote business and employment growth.

Andrew Zeswitz is the chief technology officer at REI Systems. He has helped over 20 government agencies make improvements to processes, performance and user experience using technology. Sandra Gerges is a user experience manager at REI Systems and has more than 10 years of experience consulting federal agencies on improving customer experiences via human-centered design solutions.

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