Why we need to consider co-design more
Source: apolitical | Janet Hughes, Programme Director for the Future Farming and Countryside Programme, DEFRA. This article was first published on the Services in Government GOV.UK Blog. You can read the original article here.
Instead of creating services for users, this civil servant is thinking about how we can embrace users as potential co-designers
Hi, I’m Janet. I used to work at the Government Digital Service (GDS) and have also worked on digital and other types of delivery in various other bits of government, including NHS Digital and the Department for Education (DfE).
In my current role, I’m Programme Director for the Future Farming and Countryside Programme at the UK Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). We’re here to help farmers and land managers make farming and the countryside more sustainable and productive. You can read about our programme over on our blog.
This post is about how we’re using a co-design approach to design our policies and services, how that’s different to the user-centred approach set out in the Government Service Standard, and why that difference matters.
Start with user needs; improve digital services
The first Government Design Principle, which started life in GDS, is: start with user needs. Understanding your users and their needs is the basis of the Service Standard, and the UK government’s approach to designing and delivering digital services.
This approach helps us to understand what our users need from a particular service or transaction, and make sure that we design services that meet those needs.
It helps us make forms work better for people. It helps us to make transactions simpler, clearer and faster. It can save us and our users a lot of time and money.
However, this approach has some important limitations when we look at things beyond relatively straightforward transactions:
it doesn’t help us understand the relationship between policy intent and user needs – you need to understand both in order to achieve real-world outcomes
it doesn’t help us with things that aren’t services such as laws, policy decisions, stewarding big complex systems like health or education, or setting and enforcing rules
it can lead us to miss some of the complexity of people’s lives and the context they’re operating in, because we tend to focus quite heavily on individual transactions and services rather than the wider picture
Take a user-centred approach to everything for users
When I worked in DfE, we wanted to apply user-centred ways of working to a wider range of things the department did. We also wanted to join up policy intent and user needs to achieve specific real-world outcomes, like recruiting more teachers or attracting more people into apprenticeships.
We wanted to bring together policy and delivery and make the whole department fit for the digital age, not just have a digital team as a siloed set of specialists working in very different ways to everyone else.
We wanted to do things differently, not just make things more efficient.
This required us to think about how to apply the principles of user-centred design and delivery to a broader set of things, and how to help everyone in the department develop the skills, mindset and understanding they would need to do that. That means digital skills, tools, mindset and ways of working for all public servants, not just digital teams.
We did this because we reasoned that if we applied user-centred practices more widely in the organisation we’d have:
fewer bad ideas making it into delivery
more things working better for people
better policy outcomes
less failure and waste
We respect, value and understand our users’ lived experiences and insights, rather than focusing only on their specific needs relating to an individual transaction or service.
We developed 6 user-centred practices for all civil servants, regardless of their particular profession or area of work:
define the outcome, from users’ perspective
understand users
test assumptions
involve users
observe actual behaviour
deliver, test, learn and adapt
This approach helped us link together policy outcomes with user needs and apply user-centred practices to a wider range of things ‒ 2 of the limitations of only using these approaches within digital teams. But it still didn’t give us ways to understand and respond to complexity.
Co-design things with users
In the Future Farming and Countryside Programme, we’ve made a commitment to co-design our policies and services with users, not just design things for them.
That means that we work actively with farmers, land managers and other users, all the time. We identify and work through problems together through meaningful, ongoing discussions, rather than solely relying on formal consultations about policies and observational user research relating to specific transactions.
We respect, value and understand our users’ lived experiences and insights, rather than focusing only on their specific needs relating to an individual transaction or service.
For example, we’ve been working with farmers, inspectors, land managers, environmental groups to understand what’s wrong with the way environmental and other farming rules are set and enforced, and how we might improve things. We’re now going to run some experiments to try out different ways of operating to achieve better outcomes in ways that work better for our users.
We’re also running 70 tests and trials, where farmers and land managers are leading projects to try out ideas and ways of operating to help inform the design of our new policies and services. There are about 3,000 farmers involved in these tests and trials.
This co-design approach is helping us to try out a range of different ideas, in partnership with our users, all at the same time and at a small scale so that we can learn relatively quickly and efficiently and apply that learning to the design of our services as we roll them out more widely.
A few lessons
There has been plenty written about how to do effective co-design – I won’t repeat that all here. Some of the main lessons for us so far have included:
be honest and direct: set clear constraints, make it clear what’s up for discussion and what’s already decided, don’t waste people’s time with things that look like co-design if you aren’t really going to act on what you learn
build trust: people aren’t used to government officials working in a genuine co-design way, you will need to build trust over time by demonstrating that the co-design work is for real
this stuff is hard because it’s hard, and you won’t always get it right – learn and adapt your approach as you go
co-design is not about pleasing everyone all the time, it’s about respecting and taking everyone’s views and experiences into proper consideration – you will still have to make some hard decisions that not everyone…