I’m Kati and I joined Made Tech this week as a Senior Designer.
I’ve been working at a local authority the last 3 years as a UX Designer and Researcher.
Bin business
Let’s be honest, when you tell anyone that you work for a council, most people will immediately start talking about their bins. My non-representative survey confirms this hypothesis – bins, every time. I’m not going to lie, I’ve worked on a project of redesigning and building the green bin collection process for our council. And on so much more.
Non-bin business
Because here’s the thing, councils do so much more, it’s almost incomprehensible to someone coming from the private sector or a digital agency. All the social services, financial support, and infrastructure of an area ride on the council and the people who make it all work. It is a major melting pot of experience and skills so that it all doesn’t fall apart.
And all these different types of work require one thing from all of the people who work there: to be user-centred in one way or the other. They have their own language and methods, but at the end of the day just as us user-centred designers, they have one goal: helping people.
When designing a service, you want to help people solve their problems the easiest way possible. Plain language, few steps and accessible to everyone. Just like how social services want to help those in need and how street care “gangs” (yes, that’s what they’re called) want to fix potholes.
Hurdles to jump
Then why is it actually so hard, making digital transformation user-centred in local government? Oh yes, I might have forgotten to mention it – it’s not easy to champion user-centredness in councils.
On a higher level it’s all about risk aversion and the state of digital maturity. If your organisation hasn’t seen user research before, unless you are able to put a price tag on the benefits and savings they would get from it, you will not get backing.
On the ground level though, among the people who do the day-to-day work, risk aversion feels like a more intrinsic fear of losing control and possibly security. The history of digitising services came with redundancies, shrinking positions and major changes to how people worked. This has caused a type of “muscle memory” which can prove difficult to ease when introducing user-centred design to rebuilding their services.
Superpowers activate!
So, what is it that we can do to enable collaboration? Empathise. The people you will be working with want the same thing as you, but many times while being under-resourced and over-stretched. Many will have experienced bad change and will be wary of your methods, or your push for iterations and talking to the actual users.
It’s empathy and patience that helped me the most to understand and value not just the work that happens in local government but the people who do that work. Will I still clash with them, will I still challenge preconceptions and their hanging on to past disappointments? Of course, but I will do this humbly and with care.