Author: Maike

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Promoklip

How do we “cut across order”?

In actie tijdens de boekpresentatie van Arre Zuurmond. Foto door Martijn Bennis.

Crossing the Order is the latest book by Arre Zuurmond, government information management commissioner. During his book presentation (yesterday) he asked me to comment on the chapter Transformation. A great honor of course, you can read my speech below.

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Fun things to do

When Arre asked me to comment today on the Transformation chapter of his new book, he said it was because “I was doing nice things.”

So I had to chuckle because I guess that is not what my director was thinking 8 years ago when he found out that I had been blogging for 2 years about what students thought about the loan system and how we as DUO could learn from their experiences and then what we should do differently.

That was not very board-sensitive of me.

Blogging is a way for me to think out loud, to make explicit things I don’t know or can’t do. To connect with others who can help me and thus learn more. In science, this is called reflection in action.

I often write about how we can be more reflective in government, alone and with citizens and colleagues. For example, in this blog: How to Reflect.

When I started as a utilization researcher in an implementation organization 10 years ago, this was a new job. We did not yet know exactly what it entailed and what to do with it in the organization. Feedback from citizens? While we just have our running systems and processes? What to do with that?

We don’t have an overview

In the beginning when I joined the government, I found it difficult to understand how the bureaucracy came together. It wasn’t until I went into schools, community centers, and talked to people dealing with government services that I understood how it came together. Or it didn’t.

In recent years, for example, I once walked with a bailiff, spent an entire afternoon sitting on a picnic bench in the library at an IDO where people can come by with issues about digital government, and listened to colleagues in call centers at DUO and the UWV.

I quickly noticed that there are few people in government who really have an overview of how the one is connected to the other. Who know why we actually have all these systems and information processes in place. As far as I’m concerned, this is the reason for the ever-expanding red tape that Arre mentions in his book.

I gained this insight during my master’s study on an Understanding Digital Government. You can read about it in the essay: We can’t be an understanding civil servant because we have lost the overview.

A chat in the neighborhood is the best way to find illogical bureaucracy in your organization. So my advice to anyone is always “go out of your office and have that chat with someone related to your service, product, policy, organization.”

Don’t know where to start? Here fixed 20 ways how to connect with your target audience.

How the government collects money

A good example of red tape is the current topic I am working on: how the government collects money from citizens. They all do that separately, as competitors of each other, with separate regulations, at separate speeds, and also with separate definitions and methods of how you calculate someone’s subsistence level, for example. And that works out disastrously for a lot of people in our country.

Only when you have that chat in the neighborhood with someone in that situation do you see that, because with blinders on from your own organization, it kind of seems to make sense.

What makes me very happy, then, is that for about 2 years now, the advice to have a chat is no longer met with a sigh. It is no longer a strange thought that you would do that, as it was 10 years ago.

And perhaps the biggest change is that people today consider me board-sensitive, even though I’m doing exactly the same thing I was doing 8 years ago. I still put all this stuff on my blog, where you are now reading this piece.

It tells me that this “new order” of Arre is closer than we might sometimes think.

Pracademic

With me, a lot of others in government are now learning along the way. I am now doing PhD research with TU Delft and 8 major implementers on how to design good digital services in government. Like Arre, I try to be a pracademic, a scientist from/in practice.

The guiding principles in my research are user engagement and iterative learning. For this research I am following for 2 years the program Clustering National Debt Collection where they are redesigning in this human-centered way how the government collects debt jointly with consideration for personal situations. Among other things, they create a debt overview for overview and insight and a joint payment scheme for citizens in arrears.

These are information services that are good for people.

Arre gives some drivers for change in government. He says that we have to make a conscious decision to work differently. That we have to think not in technology but in information and, I would add, relationship. And also, for example, that we just have to start somewhere. That’s great, because you can just do that in the place where you’re already sitting.

Cardinal virtues

Arre gives us a few cardinal virtues in his book: wisdom, justice, courage and moderation.

To that I would like to add 1. That is compassion. Understanding of each other.

Change is hard, and that’s okay.

When I was 14 I moved to the Netherlands and in a short time everything was suddenly different for me. I found that terrifying. I didn’t know the rules, the social codes and didn’t know the route in this new environment. Both figuratively and literally: I suddenly had to drive on the right instead of the left.

Just as Arre wants to flip bureaucracy, for me traffic was flipped.

I have lived in the Netherlands for 20 years now, but I still occasionally say, just before I want to drive away, “In the Netherlands we drive on the right.” This must not give my passengers much confidence and yet they always stay put.

Let’s have compassion for each other. Help each other find and learn the new rules, discover new routes, learn out loud, and thus navigate that “flipped bureaucracy” and arrive at the destination of a digital government that works for people.

A route guide

In addition to compassion, we also need concrete directions. What I needed at 14, we need now.

Someone to show you the way if you get lost, we now have Arre’s book for that. And examples of traffic situations and how to act then. Concrete examples with insights that you can also apply in other situations can help enormously in navigating together to that new destination.

So in addition to this speech, Arre has also asked me to develop such an example in the coming months. As an action perspective to his book for others in government. I think that’s super fun, and I’m going to enjoy doing that together with the team where I’m doing my research.

Learning from the Progress Chart Empire

One of the services being developed in the program Clustering State Debt Collection is the State Claims Overview. This fall the Receivables Overview will become available to a first group of users and this will be expanded and further developed in the coming years.

In this Claims Overview, citizens can get an overview of the payment obligations they have outstanding with the government, and understand what this means for their situation. For example, what kind of payments are involved and what the term is. In the future, more and more action perspectives will be added. For example, a payment schedule for multiple claims at the same time, which can take into account your ability to pay and a pause button if you are in danger of going underwater.

Interface of the Claims Statement for users. From archive VO Empire.

This project is special in 4 ways, and we are going to make those lessons explicit in the coming months.

First, how you look at the relationship and interaction of citizens with government. In this particular case study, we put citizens on equal information status with the government. Citizens themselves request their data from the source, and the government does not have the total overview that citizens themselves have.

Citizens request their own data directly from the source. Drawing from VO Empire archive.

To this end, concrete technical standards are being developed that realize this interaction vision. Information between citizens and government will be exchanged with privacy by design as the starting point. This is the second point we are working on. These standards can also be applied in other projects.

The third aspect is the methodology. The Progress Chart is developed iteratively, involving users at each step. The insights from the user research are shared publicly every sprint. Every 3 months there is a Grand Demo, where the team shows all stakeholders and interested parties what has been achieved in the previous quarter.

A version of the Progress Summary interface is tested with a potential user. Photo from VO Empire archive.

The fourth and final aspect: the Claims Review is a collaboration between all kinds of organizations. Actually it belongs to no one, yes, to the citizen, but the service belongs to all organizations together. That also means you need a new form of governance. Where do you manage the technical protocols, who deals with the connections and who deals with the quality of the interaction with the citizen?

What we want to create is a blueprint of these 4 points. I imagine a kind of traffic guide that we can use to navigate to Arre’s new order and what that means for how we look at the relationship citizen government, what we create next, how we do it and how we govern it.

Can’t wait for us to finish this? At vorijk.co.uk you can already browse through all the documentation, such as source code, usage studies, and general explanations of what the Progress Chart is all about and how it is made.

Continue reading

Arre Zuurmond’s book of course: Dwars door de orde. An unorthodox route to responsive government. Fresh off the press!

Platformland, by Richard Pope (2024). Excellent book on how to create the next generation of public services.

Good services by Lou Downe (2020). About, yes, the title says it all, what good services are. Soon they will also come out with the counterpart Bad Services, no doubt also a reading tip.

My blog, you’re already here. Browse the archives. And check out debegripvolleambtenaar.nl, my master’s thesis on an understanding digital government.

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Categories
Human-centered design Promoklip

Iterative making

Foto door David Becker via Unsplash.

You cannot achieve the best human-centered design for an interactive service without iterations. In a series of blogs, I cover the principles of human-centered work. Iterative work is an important part of that. That’s what this blog is about.

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Getting it right in 1x

The other day I was at a meeting where two approaches were pitched on the whiteboard after a work session. One was a sort of intermediate step where a few things were temporarily taken care of. The other was the creation of a new law where issues could be thoroughly addressed properly. Both options had advantages and disadvantages. At one point, one attendee said, “We’d rather do it right the first time.”

I hear that more often in government. It doesn’t feel efficient to do things if we change it later. And it’s scary. The risk of something not being right and us as a government making mistakes (and getting in the newspaper!) is high.

Many implementing organizations have been involved in major service scandals in recent years, such as with the child care benefit, the WIA benefit or the student out-of-pocket grant. These issues have many different causes and consequences, but what they have in common is that they make organizations insecure about making new mistakes. This makes them reluctant to be creative and experiment. While that is exactly what is needed to make good services.

There are undoubtedly things in daily life that you can get right in 1x, but making services that people can use well, you can’t get that right in 1x. You have to learn, test and fine tune that as you go along. The ISO standard for human-centered design states that by repeating steps and seeking feedback in between, it is easier to achieve a desired result. By working iteratively, you can eliminate uncertainty during the conception and creation of services.

What is iterative work

Iterations literally means repetitions. When you create something, you do it in different versions. As soon as you have new information, you adapt policies, processes, systems, applications and letters again. In doing so, you reduce the risk that what you come up with will not meet the requirements of users and the societal goals at hand.

The complexity of how people interact with your service makes it impossible to fully know all the details at the start of your project. Many of the needs and expectations of users, as well as other stakeholders, only emerge during the course of the project.

It’s an interaction: as creators of services get better and better at understanding what their users need, they can devise and create something that hopefully fits that. Users can then provide feedback on that, upon which creators can adjust the services again.

Each iteration gives a better and better view of your direction and goal. Photo by Joel Fulgencio via Unsplash.

Is this just agile working, or is it not?

Yes and no.

Most government organizations now work agile when creating applications. But working agile does not yet mean that they also work in a people-oriented way and make feedback from users leading in change.

In addition, making services consists of more than technology. It is incredibly valuable that ICT systems are no longer built in the classic waterfall way and are set up in a much more flexible way. The same should be true for how we make policy, for implementing organizational processes, for sharing data between organizations and more.

By themselves, many officials are quite used to creating different versions and incorporating feedback from colleagues. Policy papers go around mailboxes and grow from version 0.1 to 0.9. But once something has version 1.0, the memo has been to the Stas, a law is in the Government Gazette, then it is – sort of – finished. If you notice at a later stage that things should have been done differently, just take a few steps back. That’s why you have to develop policy and implementation iteratively at the same time, so that one can give input to the other and vice versa.

It is precisely iterative practice in practice that provides many valuable insights. I follow an example of how to do that in my doctoral research with the Clustering National Debt Collection program.

When someone has debts with several government organizations, they can agree on one payment arrangement with the CJIB. At the back end, CJIB controls which organization receives which amount. Two years ago this payment arrangement started with a small group of claims from DUO, CJIB and CAK. Since then, a few more organizations or types of claims have been added each year.

A screen print of the CJIB website where you can make a payment arrangement. Created on March 19.

While it is unfortunate that not everyone in the Netherlands can apply for the scheme for every type of debt right away, CJIB can now learn in practice how the scheme works and what it takes on the back end to redesign the way the government collects debt. In this way, they are learning in practice how best to bundle policies and how to increasingly expand this to include more claims from other organizations. They do usage research on people currently using the scheme and learn why people do or do not persist with a scheme. They use those insights to adjust the policy and implementation of the scheme again. The experiences from the current scheme are also used in conversations with other organizations about how they can connect. In this way, the service continues to grow iteratively.

Iterative making or iterative talking?

Look, per se, in government we have quite a talent for iterative work. But working iteratively without making it gets bogged down in iterative talking. Constantly bringing things up for discussion, from different points of view, it sometimes seems like projects don’t move forward.

So many memos. Photo by Sear Greyson via Unsplash.

That is also iterative work, but not what I mean in this blog. In fact, getting real-world input and testing your idea or design with people who will use it will help move your project forward.

The best way to do that is to make things tangible. How to do that, I’ll tell you soon in an upcoming blog.

I also do my research iteratively, together with you

It is now second nature to me to work iteratively. This is also how I approach my doctoral research. Sometimes it makes me insecure: can’t I think of anything myself? I regularly have versions of articles read by others. My supervisors at the university, as well as readers of my monthly newsletter, regularly comment on preliminary insights and/or read along. Therefore, it also means working openly and transparently.

It is exciting to show something to another person that is not yet finished. You tend to immediately add a hundred things you want to improve, and to cover yourself, but what for? My experience, both with my current research and before when I did user research for DUO and the Corona app, is that people like to give feedback, to help test and help get the job done together.

How do you begin?

Start with the problem and not the solution. When it is shouted in the House of Representatives that “Organization X should also have an app,” yes, you can’t really do anything else. Therefore, start not with a product or concrete solution but with understanding the problem and start from the whole experience of your target group and not just your own organization. Engage users and then consider together what outcome you would like.

For example: it is a problem that many people in the Netherlands are in debt and cannot get out of it themselves. The government itself also plays a role in this as a creditor. How can we as a government solve this problem by collecting debt socially? The outcome: fewer people in (problematic) debt through better services! What kind of service… We design that iteratively together with users.

And: work openly! Share your work, actively seek input from stakeholders including your users. Open working is exciting for government. I previously wrote this guide on how to do this practically.

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How do you do research? Promoklip

Involve users continuously

Photo by Bewakoof.com Official on Unsplash

When you want to create government services that people can use to achieve their goals, it is important to design them human-centered from the beginning. You do this by continuously involving users during the conception and creation of services. In a series of blogs, I explore the principles of human-centered design. Involving citizens continuously is the third principle.

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Calculation tools for students

Ten years ago, I started as a junior researcher at DUO. I researched how students were preparing for the new loan system and what digital services could help them do so. I helped create these calculation tools. This was my first project where I learned how to engage your target audience when you create something.

By interviewing students in their senior year, I learned that they needed not only a button to apply for student loans, but also an explanation of what stufi entails and help understanding their financial situation for this new phase of life. With laptop under our arms, we went back to a high school again to validate the first sketches and later clickable prototypes with young people. Could they use these tools and did it help them achieve their goals? Did it help them prepare for student loans and make good loan choices?

A year later, I started this blog and shared the lessons I learned in doing this kind of usage research. The archives in this blog are full of them:

You are not the user

The ISO standard on human-centered design calls the continuous involvement of users one of the important principles for making human-centered services. Precisely in order to fulfill other important principles such as understanding your users and starting from their whole experience, you must seek them out and involve them in your creation process.

It is often said, “But we are also users,” or “we are also citizens.” To some extent, this is true. But … as creators of digital public services, there is still a gap between us and the users.

Just as many people have a “guy” for their car, in my family I am the person to whom all questions around bureaucracy are asked, even about government organizations where I have never worked. “You ‘get’ government,” my mother-in-law would say. That’s right. The (im)logic of forms, the different counters, how to disagree with a decision and what to do then. I know the way or can easily find it. This well-known phenomenon is called the designer-user gap.

Card from a student with a tip for DUO officials

Makers, which in this case are the lawyers, designers, developers and all other colleagues involved in making services, and they:

  • Know too much. They know the policies and little rules well and are familiar with the internal processes.
  • Can do too much. They know where all the buttons are on the website because they created them themselves. They know how to fill out forms because they formulated the questions themselves.
  • Are too attached to the service or product. They have made their own design choices and have their reasons for doing so. You are proud of your work, and you want to defend this.

That’s why you need to involve real users. They don’t know the policy (yet), and otherwise probably not in as much detail as you do. They are not experts in your website or form, nor are they attached to the choices you have made. They just want to use your service to achieve their goal. Whether that succeeds is the ultimate test. You yourself are not representative enough to judge that.

By engaging your target audience, you are directly at one of the most valuable sources of knowledge about the use of your product or service. A service becomes more effective the better the creators and users work together, according to the ISO standard.

Risk management

Working with users is useful to avoid major mistakes. When people can’t use your service or product when they should, it creates all sorts of additional problems. This is especially true in government, where users cannot switch to competitors.

For example, people get extra stress and have to figure out and do extra things. For example, in Groningen for people with earthquake damage where it is regularly a Billy bureaucracy.

Costs can move unnoticed. When the loan system was introduced, DUO warned in advance that the student loan system was going to be very challenging to implement. Because there were more and more “cohorts,” it became very difficult to explain on the website and you noticed that later on in the questions asked on the phone.

Because during corona it was not always possible for the elderly to go to the ballot box themselves, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations thought of allowing them to vote by letter. Only this was not properly tested beforehand, so many well-intentioned votes were rejected in the counting process. In total, this saved almost one chamber seat!

In addition to potential stress for citizens and inefficiency for organizations, not collaborating with your target audience can also lead to failure to achieve the societal goals we want policy to achieve, or even exacerbate problems. See, suddenly it’s no longer a soft story to engage users, but a way to manage risk. And we love that in government!

How do you begin?

Start by approaching representative users. Make sure the experiencers you work with have the abilities, characteristics and experiences that are representative of your future users. At CoronaMelder, for example, I worked very specifically with language ambassadors who could explain to me exactly what medical terms or phrases they did not understand, and probably a lot of other people who had trouble reading as well. For finding the right respondents for usage research, there are also many good agencies with a large network.

When working with your target audience, don’t just ask what “they think about it. What someone says is not always what someone thinks or feels, let alone does. Behavior and feelings can sometimes be difficult for someone to put into words, if we can get a good handle on them at all. Use a wide range of research methods where you alternate interviews and observations.

Doing some methods on the spectrum of utilization research

Vary the nature and frequency with which you involve your target group. How you organize collaboration, who you involve and what approach you choose, depends on the type of project and the phase you are in. If you are still in the exploratory phase, organize a round table to share current experiences or spend a day in someone’s own context. Do you already have sketches of possible solutions? Then organize targeted user tests like I did with the CoronaMelder.

Want more inspiration to engage your target audience? I talk all about it in the podcast Rich in Behavioral Insights:

Continue reading?

What is human-centered design? All the principles and activities based on the ISO standard at a glance.

Principle 1: Assume the whole experience of your target audience.

Principle 2: Understand users, tasks and environments.

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Human-centered design Promoklip

Understand users, tasks and environments

Prachtige selectie olifantenpaadjes in Amsterdam

How can you make government services that are good for people? To explore this, I look at the principles of human-centered design. In a series of blogs, I’ll cover them one by one. That way, I’ll start to understand them better and better myself.

In this blog, the second principle: design is based on an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments. What is it, how do you do it and how do you start? Read the first principle back here.

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Elephant trails

The first time someone explained “usage” to me was accompanied by the example of elephant trails. You know them. You may use them yourself or have even made one at some point. The municipality has built a neat sidewalk, but the most convenient route is just along here, between the bushes. And there you go, off the designed path.

Jan-Dirk van der Burg made a wonderful book about it. On his website he shows how a number of elephant paths are still being hard fought by municipalities, such as in Leiden:

Photo by Jan-Dirk van der Burg of Olifantenpaadjes.nl

Van der Burg writes: “In Leiden, there is an innovative experiment with three parallel hedges, it looks a bit like a military course. The municipality only made a rookie mistake. The hedge just doesn’t connect to the pond area, so then another…”

Photo by Jan-Dirk van der Burg of Olifantenpaadjes.nl

You see: designing something is perfectly possible without considering its use.

But if you want to design human-centered , you can’t avoid looking into how people want to use something and in what context the use takes place. This is true in public spaces, but equally true with products such as electric toothbrushes or government services such as using WIA benefits.

What is usability?

This is the extent to which a system, product or service can be used by certain users to achieve certain goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a given context of use.

Definition usability from ISO standard 9241-210.

When designing products, systems and services, you must consider the people who will use them, as well as people who may be indirectly affected by their use. It is therefore important to first know who these people are. Building systems without understanding who will use it is one of the main causes of system failure. Thus the ISO standard human-centered design for interactive systems.

Whether products or services are useful depends on the context in which they are used. People may have different goals when performing actions with your product or service. In the blog on the principle of “Starting from the whole user experience,” I showed how his-goals, do-goals and tasks relate to each other.

I find that in practice, when people think of usability (or the English “usability”) they often think that buttons should work conveniently on a Web site. But it is much more than that. In his book ‘How easy can you make it’ Jasper van Kuijk explains this with ‘the usabilityui’. Use of a product or service has several aspects that affect each other.

Jasper van Kuijk’s usui from How easy can you make it (2024).

Van Kuijk argues that needs and goals combined with features what a product or service can do makes you use something. Interacting with a product or service allows you to achieve your goal. Next, the user experience is what it does to you while you are using it.

‘Unintended’ additional interactions

An example: in December, my husband and I decided to end our joint business. As real salaried millennials but with creative side hustles, we were also getting a bit older and the side hustles have actually not been around for a while. I went to the site of the Chamber of Commerce, through the drop-down menu to form 17 to deregister a limited liability company. The form needs to be printed, so I to the copy shop in my neighborhood. Then to the Hema for an envelope and then to find out that, yes, on New Year’s Eve the mailboxes are of course sealed, so the whole thing has to be mailed a few days later.

My goal was to write out the vof. A digital function was missing; it had to be on paper. I suspect because of the double “wet” signature. Or perhaps more simply, that digitizing this process is still in the planning stages. However, it significantly affected my user experience. With this, my visit to the Copyshop and to 2 Post-NL points became part of “the customer journey” of the CoC. There was no elephant path, indeed there was a significant detour.

Next, van Kuijk contrasts ease of use with this. This is not a separate layer of usability, but a cross-section of all the above elements. If user experience is what it did to me (emotion), then ease of use is what I could do with it at all (accessibility). Let’s face it: for Henk, my dad, signing out on paper would have been a piece of cake. He has a printer next to his desk with no dried ink and a tray with several sizes of envelopes. And who doesn’t usually start figuring out how to get the job done 1 day before the deadline either. But yes, his daughter unfortunately does.

A design strategy may be to serve the largest group, which is what many commercial companies do. Are there more potential Henks in the target group? Those don’t mind making a print, even make an extra one for their own records. Or are there more Maikes in the target group, then you lose sales if you don’t offer your services differently.

Or as Van Kuijk draws it beautifully in his book with a normal distribution:

Job variation relative to your target distribution. From: How easy can you make it by Jasper van Kuijk (2024).

But different rules apply to the government: they cannot choose who they do and do not serve. They have both Henk and Maike in their target audience. The government has to make services for everyone. I could only achieve my goal with this one organization.

The same principles apply to a variety of other products and services. An extra sink at the McDonalds at kid’s height. An e-reader (without blue light) for when you’re still reading in bed at night. Being able to pay a government fine directly with a QR code. A coffee mug with a handy push button that doesn’t leak when you slam it into your bag. Tikkies! Komoot that reads the route flawlessly and on time, while you are running in the woods and you can foolishly follow the voice. Just some products and services that fit exactly with use in context.

How do they do this?

How do the organizations behind these products and services manage to design them so that not only can people achieve their goals with them, but they are also so tasty to use?

They research how and in what context their product is used. For example, one of my favorite running apps was created by people who are avid runners themselves. They understand me and what I need. But even if you don’t match your user, you can research what someone needs and in what context they use your product or service.

For example, by:

  • Target your audience in their own environment. If you make services for students, walk into a university cafeteria and strike up a conversation. Are you working on services for people in debt? Take the time to hear the stories people are dealing with. Visit people in their own environment instead of hosting sessions in the office. It is precisely in their own environment that you understand how things impact each other. Observe how people use your service. Ask for examples and if they want to show you something, not just tell you about it.
  • Then engage in structured work to map usage information. Do focused in-depth interviews and observe several people while using existing services. Determine what their specific needs are. Fill in Van Kuijk’s usui based on your research. Let this guide the decisions you make during design.

These are also called the first two activities of human-centered design from the ISO standard.

Continue reading?

  • What is human-centered design? All the principles and activities based on the ISO standard at a glance.
  • The usui comes from: J. Van Kuijk (2024), How easy can you make it? Atlas contact.
  • Jan-Dirk van den Burg, 2011. Elephant trails. A series on the tension between planning mishaps and human instinct.
Categories
Promoklip

Recap 2024

Foto van ravijn zonder pad
Foto uit eigen vakantiearchief.

By now my annual tradition: a retrospective blog, phd edition. Read also the one from 2023 or the 2022 preparation year.

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January

The year got off to a flying start. I wrote a first draft of an article on a new conceptual framework for design in government. Much of the theoretical research I did in 2023 and the ideas I had got a place. A nice foundation for the rest of the research. I wrote these blogs about it:

Desk with papers
Writing, writing, writing

In December, I unexpectedly heard that I could start at the CJIB as early as January. They wanted to further facilitate the PhD and I could possibly do my practical case study there as well. There were many reasons why this went way too fast, but you shouldn’t let an opportunity slip away either. In the end, I started in February so I could spend the entire month of January writing undisturbed.

Spring

Until the summer, I took time to get to know the organization and observe the work. I also took a number of courses to learn how to tackle this practical part. Soon I was in the middle of a huge bucket of interesting data. So many fun and cool things were happening at CJIB. Together with my supervision team from the university, I decided: yes, this is a super cool case, this is where I’m going to do my practical research. In the fall, we even decided that ‘debt collection’ would become the entire capstone of the PhD. A possible follow-up case study will therefore also be about this topic but, for example, from the perspective of another organization.

Train to Ljouwert
In Amsterdam at the VU
Not yet unfortunately

I wrote these blogs:

I also took time during this period to further hone my conceptual framework and rewrite the January draft after feedback (that’s how it goes). I continued to do a lot of reading and refined my research questions.

In April, a good friend of mine died suddenly. Deadlines that were in play then, I left them for what they were. Much of the research then went on ratio and discipline. On the other hand, it was super nice to get more and more established at CJIB and to be part of a nice team.

Summer

From the beginning, I wrote down in a journal almost everything I encountered at the CJIB. Along with a collection of interviews, I now had an awful lot of data and took a data-gathering stop during the summer. Courageously, I made a first attempt to structure and analyze everything. This was tough work and required a lot of discipline and perseverance. My summer vacation slipped away but I found a rhythm of data analysis in the morning, a good lunch and running break, and in the afternoon continuing to code data again.

You can read about the data analysis approach in the blog: How to understand what you see when you research.

Training for the Teutolauf
Wall full of stickers and drying running clothes.
Okay okay
Okay okay!

Autumn

Buffing through the summer did allow me to discuss initial insights with the team in September. Together we looked at how we could use these insights in the program. I gave a few presentations externally that helped me get my thoughts in focus.

For example, at an event by PONT together with Kustaw Bessems that I wrote this blog about: About Design in/From Public Administration. The presentation is on Youtube:

In the last weeks of the year, I finally went on vacation and worked with the team at the CJIB to concretely apply some of the principles and activities of human-centered design. I added these sessions to my data collection for a potential second scholarly publication on the case study.

On my blog, I began a series on this, which continues in 2025.

Working with the team

December

The year ended somewhat in a minor way. The first day after my vacation there was a rejection in the mail. Over the summer, I had sent a research proposal to a scientific journal for the first time. The chances of it being accepted were slim, but still, a rejection without a boo-boo is never fun.

In the same week, I discovered that I had to do some of my data analysis differently, and thus partially redo it. “That’s part of it and completely normal,” my supervisors assured me but still, an hour later, I was running pathetically in the rain with my soul under my arm.

You know in advance that a doctoral study is tough. Everyone tells you so. And somewhere maybe you shouldn’t quite know it beforehand either, because otherwise would you even start? While mountain climbing on vacation I heard from my GPS that the trail was 90m to my left and I just thought “&*#&$ which left then?” It took me an hour to cover 1km but then the view was stunning, see the photo at the beginning of this blog. I just keep telling myself it’s the same with a PhD.

Well, we’re over halfway there. Hopefully, in 2025, the trail will be a little more viewable and less steep. And, good resolution, I’m going to enjoy the view a little more often with a snack.

Snack on vacation
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How do you do research? Promoklip

Starting from the whole experience of your target audience

Foto door Aline de Nadai via Unsplash

For the past few months, I have been following a team in the government that is redesigning services to help people repay their debts to the government. I am looking at what helps and hinders them in making these services human-centered. To find an answer to that question, I must first have a good understanding of what the principles and activities of human-centered design actually mean.

So in a number of blogs in the coming period I will explore these principles. Earlier I wrote about what these principles and activities are. Today we are going to go in depth on the principle: “starting from the whole experience of your users. What is it, how do you do it, and how do you start? Of course, with examples!

What is “the whole user experience”?

I use the ISO standard 9241-210 on human-centered design of interactive systems for definitions. User experience, according to this standard, is the outcome of an interaction a person has with a technological system. This experience is influenced by previous experiences, attitudes and skills of the user. Thus, when we talk about user friendliness (usability), it is more than just making systems easy to use. It is about whether someone can achieve a certain goal effectively, efficiently and to their satisfaction by using a system, service or product.

When you design a service, you make choices: what will the user do and what can the system do? When we look first at what the technology can do, and then leave the rest to the user, we create ineffective services. Instead, the point is to keep as much complexity away from the user as possible. So the tasks for people when interacting with government must, as a whole, be meaningful to them.

Designing from the whole experience therefore means that as a government you take into account the goals people have, the opportunities they have, and short-term (e.g., comfort and enjoyment) and long-term (health and well-being) satisfaction.

In the literature, that is actual Service with a capital letter. That with your service someone can achieve their own goals, and thus create value.

Be-goals and do-goals

So at first glance, user experience seems to be about when someone reads a letter, logs into a portal or uses another system. But it goes beyond that. It’s about whether someone can achieve a goal effectively, efficiently and to their satisfaction.

You have to distinguish between be-goals, do-goals and tasks. No one’s goal is to call CJIB on Tuesday afternoon. That is a task. And that is part of a do-goal, which is to see if, because of an unexpected setback, you can still arrange to pay your debt. And that in turn belongs to a be-goal: that you want to be in control of your own finances and be able to get by every month. A task like “calling CJIB” can support a lot of different do- and be-goals. User experience is as much about these higher goals as it is about tasks.

So what is the whole service?

At DUO, young status holders who are both integrating and studying have to log into two different portals: one for their study loan, which is accruing, and one for their civic integration loan, which is counting down. This is because different departments at DUO implement different legislation: the Student Loan Act from the Ministry of Education and the Integration Act from the Ministry of Justice. DUO is no exception. It often happens that departments are the mirror image of the organizational rake.

Any organization designing a system will create a design whose structure copies the organization’s communication structure.

Conway’s Law, from Platformland by Richard Pope

So to make services that are good for people, you have to start not from your own structure, but from how the user experiences it.

The way the government now collects debt from citizens is the mirror image of how the government itself is set up. The Tax Office collects tax debts, the Benefits Service collects overpayments of benefits, and the UWV offsets debts against the benefits you receive from them. Most customer journeys the government uses assume one claim the government has with someone. While someone can have many claims at the same time with multiple organizations. That’s what you have to design for. And that can include different do and be goals. In the program, we use a spectrum that looks something like this:

A schematic representation of the spectrum "debt in government.

Different things are needed at different points on the spectrum. At one end are people who experience a great deal of autonomy, and at the other end are in need of duty of care or repression. The services that are developed, such as a statement of receivables and a payment plan, help people achieve their goals in their situation. By thinking from the whole experience, you can also examine which tasks and goals are not yet supported well enough, and thus come up with new additional services.

Services that support different aspects on the spectrum.

I am discovering that thinking from the whole experience of someone in debt, and then designing services for it, is one of the greatest strengths of the program I am following. By eliminating their own organizational logic, they saw how much overlap there can be in debt. And problems around debt easily spill over into other domains, such as health and performance at school or work.

Looking from the whole experience of the citizen makes everyone look very differently at the systems and processes that are in place, at organizational structures and at policies and political assignments. Those are no longer leading, but you can change them all to work from that whole experience.

You don’t start seeing it until you realize it, but when you do, you can’t really go back either.

How do you do this?

How can you work from this principle? The first two activities of human-centered design from the ISO standard provide the perfect starting point:

  1. Understand and specify the context of use. This context involves both the user and all other parties involved in the problem. Exploratory usage research allows you to identify the actual Service. My blog is full of methods you can use for this. But you can also consider sources of information such as CBS.
  2. Identify the specific needs of users and other stakeholders. These may include opposing needs that you later need to reconcile in the design. In short, map out the being, doing goals and tasks.

Tips for getting started

  1. First, take off your organizational blinders. This is the most difficult step. Realize that the structure of your organization does not necessarily reflect the reality outside the office. Shake off Conway’s Law.
  2. Map out the being and doing goals of your target audience. Use sources that look across domains, such as the Court of Audit or the Ombudsman. Or look at what universities and lectorates write about general topics such as “Poverty” or “Housing.
  3. Seek out experiential expertise. This may well be on a small scale. Walk along for a day with someone from your target group or with a professional who works a lot with your target group. I recently did that with a bailiff and learned to look at the subject of debt much more broadly than I did before. Invite a few people from your target group to the office for a cup of coffee and swap stories. Listen. It will inspire you to see how broadly you actually need to look at the topic and how much overlap there is with other “files.
  4. Then actively (and professionally) engage in the first two activities of human-centered design.
  5. Good luck!

Continue reading

  • What is human-centered design? All the principles and activities based on the ISO standard at a glance.
  • The being and doing goals come from this article: Hassenzahl, M. (2008, September). User experience (UX) toward an experiential perspective on product quality. In Proceedings of the 20th Conference on l’Interaction Homme-Machine (pp. 11-15).
  • Conway’s law and inspiration on making services from the whole experience I got from: Pope, R. (2019). Playbook: government as a platform. Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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What is human-centered design?

Photo by Sebastien Bonneval via Unsplash.

Next week at the CRI program, where I am doing my practical research this year, I am giving a human-centered design workshop. For the past six months, I’ve been walking through consultations, interviewing colleagues and working on a sub-project myself. This summer I analyzed all the data so far, and starting this summer I will share the insights with the team. Part of that is reflecting about how to apply principles and activities of human-centered design.

This blog is in preparation for that reflection workshop. I was looking for a handy and simple introduction to the subject of human-centered design, which I can of course share with you as well. For my colleagues, I made a nice little clickable blog in which they could put their answers right away, unfortunately you have to make do with static content. There must be a difference of course.

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The first entrant

The essence of human-centered design, if you ask me, is still best explained by IDEO, one of the founders of the method (Kelley & Kelley, 2013).

There are many diagrams and pictures that explain the process and principles of human-centered design. Some have 3 steps, others 7. But all have fairly the same cycle. You put yourself in the situation of the person who has a problem, come up with one or more solutions, prototype one so you can test the idea and, again together with the person experiencing the problem, see which solution is the best.

In my research I use the ISO standard human-centered design for interactive systems. I chose this one because it describes the human-centered design process well, and because my research focuses on government services that, for the most part, go through interactive human-computer systems and everything that is involved at the “back end. Think IT systems, organizational processes and public policy.

I used the principles and activities from the ISO standard to compare all observations of the past months and interviews with colleagues. I always looked at what I saw reflected, and which factors helped to work this way and which things did not.

During the workshop, I am especially curious about how colleagues themselves view this.

  1. What do you understand by this principle or activity?
  2. How do you recognize it or not in your way of working?
  3. What do you think works well for you and what doesn’t?
  4. Where do you see room for improvement?

You can also ask these questions in your organization. If anything interesting comes up, I’d love to hear about it!

Principles of human-centered design

  1. What we create and conceive is based on an explicit understanding of users, tasks and their context.
  2. We continuously involve users in devising and creating solutions
  3. Our designs are practiced and tested with real users, this determines the choices we make.
  4. We work iteratively.
  5. Our designs focus on the entire user experience of the entire service.
  6. Our team includes people with different skills and perspectives to design together in a human-centered way.

By the way, a design can be anything. For example, a design for an interactive app in which you can see your debts, or a design for a settlement a citizen can make with the government. Or a design for adapted policies around legal protection.

A design is a potential solution to a problem.

Potentially, because the cool thing about design is that you can try something out. You do that by making an unfinished version of the design (a prototype) that you can test with real users. For example, people in debt, but also colleagues from the helpdesk who are making payment arrangements with a citizen.

If you work from these principles, you should – if all goes well – see that reflected in what you do and what actually happens.

Activities of human-centered design

Human-centered design is an iterative process, a cycle in which the last step restarts the first.

The only step, step 0, that still takes place before that is: planning the human-centered design process. This includes creating preconditions to work this way. The steps after that:

  1. Understand and specify the context of use. This context is both that of the user and all other parties involved in the problem.
  2. Identify the needs of users and other stakeholders. These may include opposing needs.
  3. Creating design solutions. In other words, coming up with solutions to the problem, how they fit the context of the users and what they need, and then developing this into tangible prototypes.
  4. Evaluate the design. You can do this with those tangible prototypes, but also do it over the long term. When solutions are already (partly) implemented, you keep monitoring. You use the feedback to iteratively make it ever more appropriate to the context of use, step 1.

If you would like to read the entire ISO standard human-centered design with all the explanations and definitions, please send me an email.

Resources

ISO. (2019). ISO 9421-210 – Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 210: Human-centred design for interactive systems. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.

ISO. (2023). ISO 9421-221 – Ergonomics of human-system interaction – Part 221: Human-centred design process assessment model. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.

Kelley, D., & Kelley, T. (2013). Creative confidence: Unleashing the creative potential within us all. Crown Business.

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(Re)considering design in public administration

Photo by Ivan Bandura on Unsplash

Can a design-based approach lead to better governance?

During the event From Steerless to Steering Power, organized by PONT, Kustaw Bessems talked about his new book, Stuurloos (Steerless). The room was full of people interested in the overlap between design and government. Kustaw mentioned 4 patterns that are difficult in government, and for each pattern a designer talked about its own practice in a public context and how such a pattern can be broken.

For example, one pattern was that the government is cut up into different specialties working hard in their own square inches. As a result, there is often no eye for the whole and problems are tackled from those individual boxes. That just does not lead to good solutions to the large social problems.

Een belangrijk principe van mensgericht ontwerpen is juist ‘uitgaan van de gehele ervaring van de gebruiker’ en van daaruit diensten en beleid ontwerpen. Ik vertelde hoe in de casus die ik onderzoek, het programma Clustering Rijksincasso, dit principe toegepast wordt en tot welke nieuwe diensten dit leidt.

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From an explanation video from Program Clustering State Debt Collection

A clear gap

“How can design-based approaches lead to better governance? Together with the audience, we discussed what it takes to “make it work” and what ingredients are already in place within government. At the same time, we also saw a clear gap.

On the train back I was thinking about that a bit more. Not alone, because with some design friends in government who were also there, I happily continued to text about it.

Indeed, I also see a gap. Fortunately, because it forms the basis for my doctoral research. I see two causes.

Rationality clashes with creativity

First, government practice is indeed unruly for designers. There is a hierarchy in public administration in which feedback from citizens, as users of services, must compete with democratically decided policy adjustments. This leads to a rather rational and technocratic approach to making policies and services and is at odds with the empathetic and creative nature of a design approach. I also write this in my first research publication of my PhD.

As a result, design is often seen as an exception: a creative project, just for the fringes of the service, or at worst – but now I’m being very cynical – as a fun team-building activity. Many designers working in or for government organizations will recognize this. It sometimes feels like working against the grain.

Naive about public traditions

The second cause is found if you look at the matter from the other side. The design approach, as taught at many design universities and art schools, takes no account, or at least far too little, of essential administrative traditions such as democracy and the rule of law.

Designers still too often see themselves as visionaries and even among fellow designers in the Netherlands I regularly hear comments about ‘those civil servants’ and ‘that government’. I always feel some cringe then because it is precisely designers who need a deep understanding of these traditions to be able to offer their qualities to that government. If you want to do something as a designer in the government, and you don’t know what the General Administrative Law Act is, then you’re basically finished, I think.

You probably understand how happy I was when last year, during a guest lecture for first-year Industrial Design students in Delft, a group looked at the Student Finance Act for their group assignment on DUO’s scholarship check.

Want a crash course in rule-of-law traditions? Then be sure to read the first chapters of Kustaw’s book Stuurloos.

Even more so

We actually do the government a disservice by pretending that the design approach is new and that it needs to learn it. Designing is its core business and it has been doing it for years. Government continuously creates strategies, policies and services to create a better society every day. She collaborates and involves different perspectives. In short: it designs. Only it does so from a different logic, but this is just as much a designing logic. This argues Geert Brinkman, PhD candidate at the Faculty of Public Administration at Erasmus University.

The gap may be much smaller than we think.

So I think it is time to tell a different story on this subject. A story in which the expertise of civil servants and designers are both embraced equally. A modest story about what they can offer each other and, above all, a lot of curiosity about the qualities on both sides. A story in which we search together for how our working methods should be adjusted, those of the government as well as those of designers.

Together with Geert, I am hosting a panel at the academic NIG Conference in Ghent on February 6-7, 2025 to explore this new story. Sign up for our panel 13 to participate.

We are looking for what this combined design approach might look like and are curious to hear from other scientists researching this. You can also participate if you have a research idea and want feedback on it. Who knows, maybe one day you want to embark on a PhD adventure too! If so, be sure to sign up.

Continue reading?

  • Trusting the process is not enough. Initial insights from my own doctoral research.
  • Bessems, K (2024). Stuurloos. Wegwijzers voor een land op drift. Das Mag Publishing.
  • Brinkman, G., van Buuren, A., Voorberg, W., van der Bijl-Brouwer, M. (2023). Making way for design thinking in the public sector: a taxonomy of strategies. Policy Design and Practice, 6(3), 241-265.
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How do you do research? Promoklip

Making sense of your research data

Photo by Bud Helisson via Unsplash.

This summer I am immersing myself in all the observations, conversations and activities I have participated in over the past six months. Since February, I have been following the Clustering Government Collection program. In early July, I got the bright idea to take a look at the data I had collected so far. That was quite a lot. In this blog I will tell you how I collected this data, and how I analyze it.

If you want to follow my research, subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

Last month I wrote about how I set up the empirical study. As an action researcher, I observe what is happening but also actively participate. I am following a government program that is redesigning services in the debt domain based on human-centered principles. You can read this blog here: case selection done.

PhD research timeline. The unfolded gray area runs from February this year untill now, which is what I am focusing on this summer.

In that blog, you’ll also see that I divide my research into several phases. The outcome of one phase determines the approach to the subsequent phase. I determine the approach together with the participants who participate in the research. This summer I am focusing on the “unfolded” gray area.

You always start with a question

There is, of course, a reason why you engage in a particular group and context. You want to know something. This semester I have focused mainly on 2 sub-questions:

  1. How do organizations create a service together?
  2. What helps and hinders them in the human-centered design of such a service?
Almost vintage post-it with the research question so I am reminded of it every week.

Before I began this doctoral research, I had some experience doing research. This blog is full of it! This is mostly applied qualitative research for organizations. Over the past two years, I have read a lot about the requirements of science for new knowledge based on qualitative research. In particular, I looked at how data is collected and analyzed in ethnographic and participatory action research.

An important principle, for example, is triangulation: using different data sources that complement each other. If you observe something in behavior, discuss it in interviews and find it in the organization’s documents used, your story is better substantiated. This also applies the other way around: someone can say something, but then if you don’t observe it or can’t find it anywhere in the organization’s archives, well….

My data-gathering strategy

I collected data in several ways. Some were intended as input to another way of collecting data, which were then important sources for my analysis.

I kept observations each week in a diary. In all, I have 22 diaries, ranging from 4 to 10 A4 sheets. I joined meetings, had lunch with participants and talked with colleagues between activities. I wrote down what was happening and what I noticed.

In early April, I organized a workshop with the program’s core team. Everyone made a timeline with moments that were defining for them. We then exchanged experiences in a group discussion and responded to each other’s timeline. I made a start on a joint timeline during the discussion.

The observations and timelines provided the input for personal interviews with 13 colleagues involved in the program. The interviews were free format. We discussed the timeline they had made and I asked about their general ideas about what good services are and how to make them.

I myself collaborated on a sub-project. I kept my own reflections in the same diary. I already wrote the blogs Reframing leads to new solutions? and A day with a court bailiff about this project.

I used program documentation such as mail exchanges, meeting notes and vision documents. There is even a Whatsapp message in my data collection! I used these documents primarily as additional substantiation for observations or statements from the interviews.

How the sources support each other looks like this:

Visual overview of how I use different data sources in my research.

Through the pile of data

In early July, I temporarily stopped collecting data. Time to see if I could already formulate answers to the questions. In 2 ways I went through all the data thoroughly.

My research focuses on change, and this requires time. Therefore, I chose a process lens to look at all the data. I explain how this works in the blog Studying a process. It involves plotting my data on timelines to see the sequence of events and actions in order to find underlying mechanisms. This timeline approach is the first way I went through the data.

On the wall of my home office I made a large timeline of a few years on which I placed the defining moments of colleagues. I added stickers with their names when they talked about such a moment or period in their interview. Then I divided the timeline into periods that made sense to me.

Me this summer. If you know, you know.

One such period I experienced up close: the past six months. I made a detailed version of this by going through all my diaries and noting the important events per week. Events that I influenced got an extra black dot. Judging by the growth of the black dots, my role changed from passive observer to more active team member the longer I was involved in the program. That’s fine, and I’m glad I captured this so well and kept my reflections on it in the journal.

1988 unique codes

The second way I went through all the data is by encoding it. Almost all of my data consists of text. Even the visual data have been “translated” into text as colleagues talk about it in the group discussion and their interview.

Of the conversations I recorded in audio, I made a verbatim transcript. For some, that took some getting used to, because every um is in there. No one talks in neat full sentences. Often we search for words and come up with a new ending mid-sentence. I wanted to follow the thought processes and excursions. And I wanted to stay as close as possible to the exact wording of the participants.

For coding all the data, I use ATLAS.ti. On their website they have a handy explanation of what coding in qualitative research entails. In short: I go through each piece of text to see what it is about. This I give a label, a code in other words. An average one-hour interview gave me 125 codes. In total, a first round of coding all the texts yielded 1988 unique codes.

While coding the texts, I was constantly thinking about my research question. So I paid attention to whether participants told how they made services. What processes are there and what steps do they consist of? Each step is given a code. Do they use design methods, and which of these are human-centered? Everything I encountered was given a code. What are they running into? And what exactly helps them? You get the point: a code!

This is what that looks like: a piece of interview with multiple codes.

In addition, I also coded a lot “en vivo. This means that you use the literal words of the participant as code. You do this when you want to stay as close to the data as possible. The reason I do this is that for designers outside government, government is often a closed world with its own language. To apply design in a public bureaucratic environment, we also need a common language. That’s why I don’t want to “translate” myself already while coding, but use the language of the government itself.

Examples of this type of en vivo codes that can be very instructive for designers:

  • An individual administrative decision: this is a term from the General Administrative Law Act. It is an official legal decision that an organization has a legal mandate to make. For example, the decision that you are not entitled to an allowance and must pay it back. You can object and appeal against a decision. These are measures of legal protection for citizens. Such a decision is a core part of a government service.
  • A front portal: a type of meeting in which decisions are prepared by officials. There can be all sorts of different types of front portals. Sometimes a decision has to go through several tables and therefore through several front portals to those tables. Especially if different organizations have to decide something.
  • the Minister’s bag: every weekend the minister is given the so-called weekend bag with memos for information or with something that needs to be decided. For civil servants, this bag represents a kind of deadline you work toward.

These en vivo codes can be combined to form a category, for example, a category describing how government decision-making works when you redesign services. Or a category on the legal aspects of service delivery. Some codes can also belong to both categories. This is something I’m going to work out over the rest of the summer. Then in a codebook, I’ll keep track of what main categories I have and what their definitions are. This will also allow me to start with a preliminary answer to my 2 questions: how do these organizations make a service together, and what helps and hinders them in designing it human-centered?

So how to proceed?

In early September, I will first discuss all the insights with the participants who participated. In qualitative research, this is called the member check. This is a crucial step in action research because you are working with participants in their own context. Do they recognize my preliminary answers? Do they have additions? Have I overlooked anything? At the same time, this is also an intervention because we reflect together on our way of working. This influences how the research will proceed. What do they see as the next step? We also discuss this together.

Are you also curious about the first insights? On September 12 in The Hague, I get to talk a little about my research at an event hosted by PONT with Kustaw Bessems of the podcast Stuurloos. You can sign up here!

Continue reading?

  • Coghlan, D. (2019). Doing Action Research in Your Own Organization. Sage.
  • Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. Sage.
  • Saldaña, J. (2021). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage.
  • Small, M. L., Calarco, J. M. (2022). Qualitative literacy: A guide to evaluating ethnographic and interview research. Univ of California Press.
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A day with a court bailiff

Photo by Margaret Polinder on Unsplash

A few years ago, someone close to me called “what should you do if a bailiff comes by?” I didn’t know that at the time. Only on the third page while stress-googling I came upon a link to the Ombudsman with what you can do and ask. And what to actually expect.

This week I accompanied Hans van Dijk, court bailiff at GGN Zwolle for a day and saw the other side. The CJIB arranged this for me in my neighborhood. In this blog what I experienced and learned.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

I did not take pictures during the day. For this blog, I use photos of random doors from photo site Unsplash with the search prompt door AND dutch.

What the day looked like

A quarter to 9 I stood along the highway, first some coffee. What exactly are we going to do today? Hans showed a bin full of colored folders in the car. In each folder a letter or official document that we we’re going to personally drop by someone’s house. Sometimes it was an announcement and sometimes it was to seize someone’s property or salary. On top was an iPad with an app opened with more background information about the file behind the letter. For example with communication between the debtor and GGN, and whether more claims were also known.

We went driving, crisscrossing the city. Between visits, I was explained what the different types of letters mean and what Hans experiences as a judicial officer. I told about my research and we thought about how government services could be better for the people we visited.

Photo by Quaid Lagan on Unsplash

On one of the first addresses we gave someone a huge scare. The partner was not at home. That’s what the letter was actually for. The debt was huge. “I don’t know anything about that, how is this possible?” Leaving the letter, we had contact later in the day via a call. “Come up with a good proposal on how you could pay this off. Think about it for a while.” And also, “Do you have help to deal with this?” “No, I’m actually trying to piece it back together myself.”

“We don’t talk about money in the Netherlands,” the conversation between us in the car continued. “Also the other way around, if you ask someone ‘how much do you make?’ we always say ‘not enough’ and make a joke.”

We drove down a street: “This is where I’ve passed by every house a few times.” We got out and walked to the address on the letter. A traffic fine that had now risen to 3x the amount. “For these kids, it’s normal for the bailiff to come by. They grow up with this, it’s hard to do it differently themselves then later.”

What does seizure and settling means

In a short time, I learned a new jargon. When a claim reaches the bailiff, it has already come a long way.

For example, a claim for not paying your health insurance. Suppose you skip one or more months. There can be all sorts of reasons for this. Then first the insurer will send you a reminder or demand letter. When you fall 6 months behind, a signal goes to CAK and you become a so-called “defaulter. This also moves the debt from a private insurer to the government. At CAK, your health care premium goes up. You can make an arrangement here that you pay off the debt and go back to your own health insurance company and pay the normal premium again.

If you don’t, CAK will check if your employer can pay the premium directly to them. If all that fails, they transfer the claim to the CJIB. This is the government collection agency and they will send you letters again to try to collect the debt. Up to this point, it’s all called “the amicable phase.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

If CJIB is also unsuccessful, the claim goes to a court bailiff. Who first brings a letter to announce that a restraining order is coming. Two days later, the bailiff may come by with the restraining order. This is called “signifying. After 2 days of still not paying, the bailiff may seize things you don’t need.

You can still “settle” then. That involves agreeing on a way to pay. The bailiff then looks at the amount of debt and the latest repayment date. But they also look at your situation. Do you manage to repay sooner so you can get rid of it sooner? This is also in the creditor’s interest. If all that is not a tenable situation, because other claims are also coming your way, they will work with you to see what is possible. Sometimes they even advises the creditor to waive the (entire) claim.

If the bailiff is unable to reach a settlement or an agreement cannot be made, they can also seize your income from your employer. This is called “third party seizure. When multiple creditors want to do this, the bailiff who seized first takes coordination for how the money is divided between them.

These double seizures are quite complicated. In an earlier blog, I wrote about how stakeholders want to improve the existing situation and how a human-centered design approach can help with this.

For a couple of years now, the bailiff has been making a home visit for public debt first to announce the situation and engage in conversation. Sometimes you can then come to a solution immediately. If this does not happen, the process of service, injunction, seizure and third-party seizure still follows.

A train or river?

When I write it down like this, it seems like a process with a beginning and an end. A kind of train with stations where you could basically get off at any time. As long as you take action and open the door. At any time, in theory, you can pay the whole amount or through an arrangement.

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As we drove from address to address, I realized it was not a train at all. Most of the addresses were repeat visits. “Last year I had to impound his car,” he said. “A few months ago I was here too, but then with the mother.” “He just paid all the debts, but this is another seizure. And I see there’s another claim coming as well, hm, that really should have gone along with this.”

For most people, debt seemed more like a river that just keeps flowing.

Someone opened the door, took the letter: “Yes, all right, I’ll give it to the mcb.” Municipal credit bank. When I met with someone who worked there in my city last week, they said: “We try to help mainly with early warning and coaching, so that people can get a grip on their situation themselves.”

Photo by Ilnur Kalimullin on Unsplash.

The questions I take with me

What services can the government (re)design to reduce or even contain this river? Over lunch, we discussed how, on the one hand, some people have completely lost control of their finances. What do they need?

Some debts felt so meaningless to me, too. A fine with surcharges of which you could have already insured your car three times. Or being months behind in paying off your student debt when you can also use wildcards. You just have to know and be able to arrange it. How can you design for this in your services?

And on the other hand, a complete one-sided focus on individuals is also unjustified. Traffic fines are intended as an incentive for traffic safety. Paying off your student debt is an obligation to society. Paying for your health insurance makes sure we all have access to care. It seems so contradictory at times. I wrote earlier about looking both ways when it comes to government services.

Photo by Antonina Bukowska on Unsplash

A colleague at CJIB said in their interview, “It doesn’t have to be opposite. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. In an enforcement task, you can also be service-oriented. Someone has a right to that.”

If they are not opposites but can complement each other, what does that look like? So what kind of services do you make? Do services earlier in the process, such as an app with debt oversight, help make a dam in the river? Can the government set boundaries in a way that also helps you, the debtor, to hold on to control?

And what does your team and your organization need to do this? That is ultimately my research question. Subscribe to my newsletter to get answers to that in the near future.

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