Public Strategist

Paul Clarke had been on a journey. Well two, actually.

The first was to get a bit of routine business done with government, updating the photograph on his driving licence. He has written a blow by blow account of how that didn’t work the way it should have done. Follow the link and read it now.

The second was to give not only that account, but a powerful message which should be heard and acted on by designers of public services – designers of any services – anywhere and everywhere. It is that it is the journey which matters, the whole package  which adds up to the complete experience of getting done what needs to be done. We need better web design. We need better form design. We need contact centres which can be human and effective. But we don’t need any of those things in isolation. They add up to a service, and it is the service we need to get right.

You are walking down the stairs in an office building. At each level, there is a sign on the door to tell you where you are. Quick, which floor are you on?

The fact that I asked the question probably made you look more closely than you would otherwise have done, so spotting that the right answer is 3, not 5. But all the visual emphasis is on the 5 – from more than a couple of feet away, that’s all that really registers.

Knowing which staircase is which clearly matters to some people for some purposes – being able to specify where a light bulb needs fixing, for example.  For almost all people for almost all purposes, it does not matter at all.  The only piece of information which matters is the floor number – and that matters a lot.

It is hard to think of a simpler example than this one of how a user interface could be improved.  But the real lesson is perhaps not that it would be better to make the 3 big and the 5 tiny or non-existent on that sign – though undoubtedly it would be – but that there is something about the process which led to the wrong answer having been reached in the first place.

My guess about this one (and it is only a guess) is that users were involved in the decisions about the signs, but that they were the wrong users.  By unhappy coincidence, the people responsible for putting signs on staircases are precisely the people for whom the non-standard use of the sign matters most, because they are also the people who fix the light bulbs.  They have, it appears, treated themselves as typical customers.

I have seen the same mistake made at much greater expense and with much more serious consequences in much bigger and more complicated systems than this. When specialised users are in a position to specify a service to meet their needs, that is what they will do, even if they are a small minority of the overall user base.

We may be users of the services we design.  But we are not the users we should be designing for.

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• That’s not my name « We Love Local Government So what are we to do? Firstly, stop getting so het up about how we describe the people who we serve. Secondly, realise that universal names don’t work. Universally decreeing that we must describe everyone as customers is not going to help any more than seeing everyone as merely a council tax payer. And if anyone fancies adding a few names to the list do let us know!
• Public service blogging is not redundant | Patrick Butler | Society | The Guardian Bloggers, I believed, were rewriting the media script: the mainstream press would feel inauthentic by comparison; bloggers would become influential, and would, by virtue of their powerful truth-telling, influence policy and force institutions, from Whitehall to the town hall, to become more open and accountable. “It is bloggers… and not politicians, PR managers or the traditional media, who are beginning to tell the real inside story of public services,” I wrote.Was I right? No.
• You wouldn’t do this to a dog… – honestlyreal And six times a year, I faithfully type out my full credit card details and address, having already repeated the names and school of my children. This is utter rubbish. A classic example of a government transaction that nobody seems to care about. Where even the rational benefits of reducing error and saving someone in the school the trouble of filling in all those little handwritten slips seem to count for absolutely nothing.[...]
  So it stays up there—yet another orphaned bastard child of an e-government movement that stubbornly refuses to stop looking utterly crap.
• Who herded the cats? | Emma Mulqueeny The problem is that the future is catching up with us, and we need to free the thinkers again. A collective deep breath needs to be taken and we all need to be a little bit more brave and trust in our own abilities, despite the occasional hissing and spitting, and free up some time for those we respect. Of course there is a mammoth amount of work to do and people who still need help working through everything that has changed, but this needs to become part of the day job for everyone now.
• Peak State revisited | Flip Chart Fairy Tales The welfare state, then, has peaked. It is now, like the UK’s relative economic position, in a steady long-term decline. We are unlikely to see high levels of state provision again. Historians of the future will no doubt argue about when the Peak State point was reached. What is almost certain, though, is that we are now well past it.
• Method: Eight Things Stand-Up Comedy Teaches Us About Innovation | Co.Design Comedy, especially stand-up, is widely regarded as the most difficult gig in show business. Similarly, successful product innovation is so difficult, it could be regarded as the stand-up comedy of the business world.
• How the Government Gateway works – honestlyreal For a service that plays a part in millions of online public service transactions a year, the Government Gateway is surprisingly poorly understood, and described. What you can find online varies from the noble attempt (but not exactly functionally descriptive) to the flamboyant, to the technical, and on to the slightly bizarre.But nothing in plain language that really sets out what’s going on. And, perhaps, what isn’t. I have something of a fascination around the mechanics of authorisation and authentication, particularly when applied to government services, so here goes.

Sitting in a meeting on user interface design, which might or might not have tipped over into being about user centred design, but seemed at little risk of drifting into user experience design, my mind began to wander.

Unaccountably, a passage from the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy drifted to the front of my mind:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major land masses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

Sometimes, doing service design in the public sector (only in the public sector?) feels a bit like that. There has been a huge step forward, not just in recognising the principle that designing for and with customers is the right approach, but in making serious attempts to do it.

We have dug deep into their neural pathways. We have documented their attitudes and expectations. We know what they like and what they don’t. We know what they think they are trying to achieve.

And then we serve up a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

So not only do we fail to provide tea when tea is wanted, we also keep providing the same thing to everyone despite having some understanding of individual needs and expectations.

I am confidently looking forward to my trip to Sirius Tau to take up my new position in the nether regions of the complaints department.

As I was getting money out of a cash machine, I saw a proud boast in the window of the bank, highlighting one of the commitments in their customer charter:

We will aim to serve the majority of customers within 5 minutes in our branches

Pause, if you will, to savour that masterpiece of wording. Their intention, which they may or not achieve, is to serve a majority of their customers, a group into which you may or may not fall, within five minutes.

At an overall level, that is testable: counting average queuing times is relatively straightforward, though on a strict (if somewhat unlikely) interpretation, almost half their customers could have been waiting for much longer than five minutes, and the target could still have been achieved. But for any individual customer, it is not: is my ten minute wait a sign that the commitment has been broken or an expected outlier?  There is no way of telling.

To their credit, the bank concerned does a pretty good job of being transparent about how they are doing, even though slightly oddly, the ‘goals’ which add up to this particular commitment don’t seem to allow them (or us) to know whether or not they are actually delivering their promise or to know what level of improvement there has been – if any – since the commitment was made. But they are willing to be at least a bit self-critical, which is usually a promising sign:

In November we measured queue times in our 300 busiest branches. 75% of customers were served within 5 minutes and the average waiting time was 4 minutes. We know, however, that there are times and places where customers have waited longer and we have much more to work on.

My point though is not to point the finger at the bank concerned.  Rather, it is to observe that it is difficult to be clear about the nature of a customer service standard, and harder still to be clear about appropriate values for any measure chosen.  That that is true in retail banking, which has not had a reputation for delivering the acme of customer service in recent years, is perhaps no great surprise. But if it is hard there, how much harder is it for public services, where the value of good service can be harder to pin down.

So there are probably lessons here in both directions.  The fact that a large bank is struggling to make sense of, still less achieve, the apparently simple ambition of having short queues in its branches should help public sector managers, often of much more complicated and variable services recognise the scale of their challenge and the difficulties inherent in meeting it. And perhaps too, it should help private sector managers appreciate that however hard it is for them to get this right, theirs is the easier task.

When it comes to innovation, the customer is rarely right. At least, they’re rarely right about what they want next.

Paul Valerio (via Amanda Gore)

Real understanding lies in finding simplifications that bring order to disparate facts.

People in the middle of events often know less about them than those watching from the outside, which is why interviews with senior business figures inform us about what these people think rather than what is happening.

John Kay

Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web

• Why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories | Flip Chart Fairy Tales No-one is in control of the world. The most governments can hope for is to control some parts of it for some of the time. The same is true for leaders of large organisations. Kings, presidents, prime ministers and chief executives spend much of their time trying to make sense of what is going around them while trying to reassure people that they are in control. Running a conspiracy would be way beyond them.Conspiracy theories are rather like impossible structures; they entertain us and feed our imaginations but they would be impossible to construct and maintain in real-life. The world is a messy and chaotic place. It’s fun to imagine a group of people manipulating events behind the scenes but the truth is that no-one, anywhere in the world, is that good.
• Dispelling myths and stereotypes about public sector workers | Cabinet Office I cannot think of a single skill that one needs in the private sector that people don’t develop in spades in the public sector.
  Operational management? What about running a prison of sex offenders. Technology skills? Nothing comes close to the scale and complexity of the tax and benefit systems. Commercial skills? Have you ever let a contract for a science facility that accelerates electrons to near light speed? Customer relations? We serve everyone from the young and old, rich and poor, ill and healthy. Turnarounds? A failing company is one thing, a failing secondary school on a sink estate is quite another. Mergers and acquisitions? Try taking over a collapsing bank in a weekend. Human Resources? Just imagine what is involved in sending civilians to Helmand province. Security? I’d have to shoot you if I told you what our security services do on a daily basis, but, trust me, we are lucky to have them. Public relations? Well, we are always in the Thick of It!
• What government IT can learn from cycling in London | Blog Agile turns the traditional logic on its head. Rather than specifying detailed requirements in advance you let specifications evolve over time. Functionality is built in from day one, with users involved continuously rather than during a ‘test’ phase at the end. Flexibility is valued over following a predetermined plan. It’s the IT equivalent of cycling with your eyes wide open, and being fully prepared to change direction when necessary. Wise advice for cyclists and chief information officers alike.
• Cloudsourcing « The Great E-mancipator G-Cloud gives government the opportunity to dictate standards, quality and support to a level that the current regime of ‘divide and rule’ by suppliers has never permitted. It starts to give government IT the upper hand for once, so I can see why some won’t suppliers like it, but as to willy-nilly data-sharing –I don’t think so!
• US Congressional Report Challenges Open Government: It Was About Time Opening up government data isn’t a substitute for opening up government. Recycling my bike won’t save the planet. But it’s a whole lot better than keeping it shut up under the house where no one can use it.
• Indifferent government is so last decade | Helpful Technology Indifferent sites don’t much care what you do. They’ve put the information (or consultation, or campaign message) out there. The rest is up to you. Some people take it, most people leave it. It’s not the website’s fault if you don’t like the message. [...]The web is a communication medium, to persuade and influence, or even just to help people scan, prioritise and complete their tasks quickly. Indifferent design, as a symptom of indifferent public services online, is so last decade.
• The Department of ‘No’ – The Privacy, Identity & Consent Blog This means that incidents will always happen. This may be because security controls are judged to be disproportionately expensive (for example, spending many millions of pounds on security to protect assets worth only some thousands of pounds); because individuals failed to comply with the instructions given to them (for example, downloading unprotected files on to a memory stick to take home, then losing that memory stick); because the system is attacked by a capable and dedicated enemy (for example, an authorised user taking copies of MP’s expense claims); or because of a ‘zero day’ exploit (for example, a hacker breaking into a system using a weakness that was previously unknown to the security officer).Whatever the cause, security incidents will always occur, and the public sector culture is to look for someone to blame – remember how the HMRC incident was almost immediately blamed upon a ‘junior clerical officer’ before it was revealed that systemic failures were at the root of the problem? Security officers are rightly fearful of being blamed for incidents, and in the absence of someone who will act as an advocate for them when things go wrong, they are forced to fall back on the only safe path available to them, which is to say ‘no’ when the business wants to do anything which might carry an associated security risk. The likelihood of the current information assurance community being willing to support the government’s cloud computing ambitions seems slim indeed.As a result, most public servants view information assurance as an obstacle, not an asset. Because of poor leadership, excessive bureaucracy, and a culture of unnecessary secrecy, public authorities are unable to obtain cost-effective information security controls. The current infrastructure will neither permit nor support the new commitment to respecting personal data, making government data available, or protecting data that needs to be kept secret.
• Schneier on Security: Societal Security Humans have a natural propensity to trust non-kin, even strangers. We do it so often, so naturally, that we don’t even realize how remarkable it is. But except for a few simplistic counterexamples, it’s unique among life on this planet. Because we are intelligently calculating and value reciprocity (that is, fairness), we know that humans will be honest and nice: not for any immediate personal gain, but because that’s how they are. We also know that doesn’t work perfectly; most people will be dishonest some of the time, and some people will be dishonest most of the time. How does society — the honest majority — prevent the dishonest minority from taking over, or ruining society for everyone? How is the dishonest minority kept in check? The answer is security — in particular, something I’m calling societal security.

The best service is the one which disappears.

Alan Mather has written an interesting piece about whether government is still doing too much of its own IT. His interest is not in the possibility of further outsourcing, but in letting third parties incorporate services which also provide value to government. He is on to something important, and I think it may be even more important than he suggests.

His first example is the tax disc. As he rightly points out, the issue here is not how good the existing online service is, but why that service needs to exist at all. I have long been of the view that the most obviously efficient way of ensuring that vehicles were insured, safe, and taxed would be to require insurance companies to add the amount due to the premiums they are collecting anyway. But what makes that interesting is the glue that hold the tax disc service together in the first place: it is an unlikely, and I suspect largely unforeseen, consequence of a European Directive on motor insurance, and the database insurers set up to comply with it.

So in a sense, the issue is less that the government allowed other people to develop IT for it as that advantage can be taken of other people developing capabilities for reasons of their own. This is not a new phenomenon: companies have invoicing systems or cash registers, which as a by-product can collect and account for VAT. They have payrolls which as a by-product collect and account for income tax and national insurance contributions. In both cases this removes any requirement for those ultimately paying the taxes to transact directly with government at the point of payment, and as a result renders the process much less visible than it would otherwise be.

That may have an interesting political consequence. Paying tax is a much more overt and much more immediately painful process for people who are self-employed or run small businesses than it is for employed earners, and that may have some affect on perceptions of the value of tax and of government more generally – a useful reminder that service delivery is not a neutral and politically agnostic activity.

The idea of the vanishing service sites not need to stop there. I was involved with the online change of address notification pilots ten years ago, where we took a very deliberate decision not to create the service ourselves. Nobody moves house for government purposes in isolation, and there is clear advantage in providing a service which can cover a full range of needs in one place. So the government service was still there, but hidden behind other providers whose primary focus was elsewhere.

So the interesting question becomes whether  there are other things government can get done more effectively by disappearing. That is not, in this context about outsourcing or privatisation. There is a place for that argument, but this is not it. The answer must surely be that more things could be done more smartly by aligning them with other activities done for other purposes. A list of specific services beyond those already identified might not be very long, but the real power of this idea may lie at a different level again.  The change of address example points the way. Rather than thinking of services which can be piggy-backed on other activities, perhaps we should think of the information driving those services as the real opportunity. The information I have about myself is not information I hold, by and large, because government wants it, it is information which describes and shapes my life. Managing that information, rather than managing fragments of it scattered across government databases could be the real opportunity here – which by yet another route gets us back to volunteered personal information. And that’s interesting not just in its own right, but because it’s not where I had expected to end up when I started writing this post.

Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make people happy – is to ask them.  And for years and years and years and years, Ragu and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit all you people down, and they would say, “What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce.” And for all those years – 20, 30 years – through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did.

Malcolm Gladwell

Update:  Nigel Bell cogently observes:

@pubstrat On sauces: excellent though deals only with sauce-eating population & we must also service those who don't or can't.

24 February 2011 9:38 am via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@funnyturn

Nigel Bell

He is, of course, spot on. Sauce manufacturers are not univeral service providers.  That makes the public sector service designer’s life more difficult, though it does not change the basic power of the perception that we are none of us even experts on our own preferences.