With the public sector increasingly focused on enhancing the user experience, many agencies are looking to leverage human-centered design principles to design services with constituents in mind. But while the approach is growing in popularity, successful implementation remains a challenge, as it requires government entities to engage their constituents in an entirely new way.
Government agencies, forced to navigate layers of policy and regulations accumulated over the decades, often use a waterfall approach, ensuring that a product or service is 100% complete before offering it to the public. This approach is great if you are trying to adhere to a rigid interpretation of a policy or regulation, but not great if you are trying to create a service or product based on a user’s lived experiences.
By contrast, human-centered design puts people impacted by the design of a product or service at the center of the discovery, design and creation process. Through this lens, agencies can reimagine their processes, cut through bureaucratic inertia and design services that genuinely meet the needs of the communities they serve.
Consider, for example, the streamlining of a government benefits application process — a process that historically requires hours of tedious paperwork on the part of applicants.
By using an human-centered design approach to engage directly with constituents and test prototypes, a government think tank reduced the process to just seven minutes, significantly improving accessibility and satisfaction. When government agencies commit to listening and iterating, human-centered design can transform how they serve their constituents.
# The Five Phases of Human-Centered Design
Human-centered design begins with an acknowledgment that constituents are experts in their own experiences. It emphasizes curiosity, empathy and collaboration, enabling governments to move beyond assumptions and stereotypes.
Unlike traditional top-down approaches, human-centered design calls for iterative co-creation with the people the services are intended to benefit.
As such, the approach is aligned with the general ethos of the public sector, which revolves around serving the public good and fostering the well-being of communities. Empathy and understanding of the community’s struggles are key values, and agencies are driven by mission-oriented employees who have a passion to drive social impact in their community.
The public sector’s risk-averse culture, however, can present obstacles to adopting human-centered design. Wary of public scrutiny, resource constraints and potential lawsuits, many agencies operate under a culture of fear. Balancing these tensions requires a thoughtful and courageous approach — one that prioritizes a bias toward action and iterative learning.
The human-centered design framework offers a solution structured in five key phases.
Learn what those five phases are and how to put it into action in the full article on Route Fifty.
