We Are All Stakeholders: Usability and User Experience in Government Systems

We Are All Stakeholders

Usability in Government
Systems
User Experience Design
for Citizens
and Public Servants

Elizabeth Buie
Luminanze Consulting
@ebuie

Who Am I?

• I’ve specialized in UI/
usability/UX since the
Beginning of Time 1978
• I’ve worked on government
systems even longer 1975
• I’ve worked in a very large
firm, a very small firm, and a
solo practice (current)

Some Notes on Terminology
• “Usability” — effectiveness, efficiency, and
satisfaction (from ISO 9241)
• “User experience” (UX) — users’ subjective
experience surrounding their use of a product
• Good usability is (usually) necessary for a good
user experience, but they are not the same thing
• We can design FOR good user experience, but
we cannot (for the most part) design the
experience itself: “UX design” is a shorthand

How many lives do govt. systems affect?
Can you think of anyone whose life is NOT
touched in some way by a government system?
– Their own govt.
• national
• state/regional/local
– Nearby
governments
– The US
Government

About 6.8 billion lives

The audiences of government systems

What do you think of when you hear this phrase?

“usability in government”

Agency websites?
Gov 2.0?
Voting?

It’s all of these, and more.

Two kinds of audiences
• Public: citizens and
others
– citizens
– non-citizen residents
– visitors and potential
visitors to the area
– hopeful immigrants
• Internal: public servants
– employees
– contractors
• At all levels: national, state/regional, local

Major goals of public-facing systems
• Provide information and services to the
broadest possible audience
• Conduct transactions with the public
– Optional
• e.g., find a library book and put it on hold
– Required (but doing them on line may be optional)
• e.g., pay taxes, renew vehicle registration
• Encourage citizen participation (Gov 2.0)
• Protect citizen privacy

Some major goals of internal systems
• Conduct the work of the government as
effectively and efficiently as possible
• Maintain national/regional/local security

Internal systems: some examples
• Defense systems
• Air traffic control, spacecraft control
– some of these are defense related
• Agency intranets
• Emergency response systems
• Management of critical infrastructures
• Legislative drafting (lawmaking)
• Internal social media applications (e.g., the US
Department of Transportation’s IdeaHub)

Public and internal share many concerns
• Content strategy
• Plain language
• Accessibility
• Mobile access
• Security
• Biometrics (fingerprints,
iris recognition, etc.)
• Cross-cultural issues

Photo by NIST

Usability and UX in the process
• Getting UX work into the contract
• Use of usability process standards
• User-centered requirements engineering
• User-centered software development
• Usability evaluation

biggest
Public-facing systems are not the problem
^

• Government often sees the public as customers
• A good experience motivates people to use the
site or system
of democracies
• Governments want to be responsive to their
^
citizens

I redesigned this interaction, yay.


Internal systems can be a bigger challenge
• Internal users are a captive audience*
• Using the system is part of their jobs*
• Systems can be very complex

*with some exceptions

Internal: Usability more sellable than UX
• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Satisfaction ?
– Not quite as easy
– Can be couched in terms of employee morale
and therefore productivity
– Less important than the other two, but a case
can be made
• But experience? Surely you jest.

What makes govt. projects different?
• Access to users in advance
– Once an RFP is issued, bidders
cannot talk to users
• Contract structure
– Usability and UX may not be
mentioned in the RFP
– Can be difficult to bid it if not
• Effect of national politics
– Priorities
– Direction
– Funding

What makes govt. projects special?
• Number and diversity of users
affected
• Potential to affect important
aspects of many people’s
lives
• Potential to help make
government itself more
effective and efficient
Dare I say “more satisfying”
too?

Challenges to UX in the govt. process
• Getting usability into the contract (or the RFP, if
you’re on that side of the project)
• Working it into the project if it’s not in the RFP
• Getting awesome UXers
– Being seen as sexy *
– Paying as well as commercial

*I do have to confess, though,
that NASA, ESA, and the
International Space Station are
pretty dadgum sexy projects.

Flexibility is essential

• Do what’s called for in each project
• Pay as much attention to the users’ subjective
experience as we can, within constraints
• I offer my motto:
Any improvement
is good news.

And finally, some wider issues
• Service design
– Cross-channel design
– Channel shifting
• Applying design to policymaking
• UX designers and e-democracy

Thank you!
Elizabeth Buie

Luminanze Consulting
www.luminanze.com
ebuie@luminanze.com

@ebuie

Order book from Amazon at http://is.gd/uxgov

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