From Policy Designer to User Researcher
A few musings about my journey from policy designer to user researcher and how the two are intimately connected.
Hello! I’m Yelena Bidé, one of the newest members of Made Tech’s user-centred design team. I joined about a month ago as a senior user researcher. I still can’t believe I get to spend most of my time talking to people who use government services, learning about their challenges and ideas for improving a process or service. Before joining Made Tech, I was working as a policy designer in Camden Council’s newly-minted Policy Design service. This post contains a few musings about policy design, user research, and how the two are intimately connected.
Firstly, what exactly is policy design? It’s a good question and one that I – and many others in the profession – have been asking ourselves too. It’s a somewhat contested term and a standard definition is still emerging from the dust of lively debates within organisations, at conferences, and on blogs.
For me, policy design is essentially about developing (and implementing) policy based on sound evidence – and vitally, this evidence should always involve direct engagement with a policy’s users. These “users” might be civil servants who want a better way to communicate internally to achieve a department’s policy ambitions. Or they might be people living in social housing who need an efficient way to report repairs needed in their homes.
Ultimately, I think policy design is about putting the user at the heart of decision-making. Understanding their needs, their challenges, their ideas – and using this evidence alongside other data as the foundation for designing a policy intervention or a public service. (As an aside: isn’t it crazy to think that many public services we use today were designed with little or no user input?!)
At Camden, being a policy designer involved working on exciting projects like prototyping Universal Basic Services (the universal provision of key public services to enable access to economic and civic participation for all) and re-thinking the council’s approach to capturing social value for local communities.
The UBS project showed the value that a design approach can bring to a complex policy area. In “traditional” policy making, a decision is typically made by a senior leader and then transformed into a project plan by a team of government officers, often with little user engagement. In contrast, a policy design approach meant our work was led by what we were hearing from residents.
For example, residents told us that the cost of transport was a barrier to accessing employment support, taking a job, and staying in work. Using a policy design approach, we held deep-dive interviews with residents, built paper prototypes based on interview insights, got further resident feedback on these emerging ideas, and then developed a live prototype. This user-centred process meant our recommendations for potential scale-up were informed by user experience rather than assumptions or theory.
I also spent a lot of time at Camden supporting the uptake of agile in the organisation – running “Agile 101” sessions or coaching colleagues in these ways of working that are still relatively new to the public sector.
At Made Tech, I’m looking forward to bringing my policy design background to the world of public sector digital transformation. As I deep-dive into the nitty gritty of user experiences, I want to make sure I keep looking at the bigger picture – supporting teams to think about the wider systems into which a particular digital transformation project fits. More on this soon!