Writing an academic article on government services is very different from writing a blog. I have noticed that by now. I just sent the draft of my second article to my supervisor and it feels great.
While writing, I had a lot of help from other researchers who shared on Instagram, Youtube or on their blog how they go about it. So I do something in return of course.
In this blog, I show my writing process, how I prepare and what tools I use.
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A different ball game
I am not writing a book, blog or newspaper article, but a scholarly article. This is a very functional text and very different from what I am used to. You always write for your reader, and in this case my reader wants to know as quickly as possible, “what knowledge is in this piece and can I use it for my research?” There are rules associated with writing a scientific paper, which may also vary by research field.
For example, articles have a set structure: introduction, research question and aim, method, findings, discussion and conclusion. This took a lot of getting used to at first. If I shared a nice anecdote in the discussion, my promoters mercilessly moved it to the findings, or worse, deleted it completely from the article. If I gave even a small hint of the findings and what you could do with them, it was moved to the discussion. But as I plow through many articles myself, I am grateful for that logical format.
Notes ready, tapping away
In April 2023, based on the data that 7 years of blogging gave me, I wrote an empirical article. Now I’m working on a conceptual piece. I now have a little more freedom to shape the article, but that also makes it immediately more difficult. The argument for my conceptual framework determines the structure of the article, so that argument must be excellent.
I use two articles as a guide for how to build such a conceptual piece. I make a theoretical synthesis of concepts found in the fields of design, services and public administration (Jaakkola, 2020). I bring these concepts together like an architect building a house (MacInnis, 2011).
Building arguments
PhD research is actually an education: with every step you take, you must first learn how to take it. So I took two courses to help me with writing.
Philosophy of Science at Erasmus University. I learned what makes a good argument and how to check that the structure is sound. We had to analyze others’ texts and dissect them completely.
Creative tools for scientific writing. For example, how to create overview for yourself, how to extract the main message from a paragraph and write towards it, and how to draw the reader into a text and hold their attention. And also: how to avoid writing those scientific sentences that seem like monstrosities. So that, even though it contains a lot of knowledge, it is also a bit of fun to read your article.
My writing process
After all this preparation, nothing stopped me from keeping my fingers on the keyboard. In January, I had three weeks, nonstop. I had also lost my voice, so I really couldn’t plan anything else.
During the second course, I wrote the introduction to the article, describing the research question, the purpose of the article and the approach to arriving at answers. This introduction covered about 500 words and I discussed it at length with my supervisors. After some scraping, I also sent it to Servsig, a service conference in June. It would be nice if I could give a presentation about the article there; I’ll hear about that later in the spring.
I had already done a lot of reading and made notes. As a library for scientific articles, I use Zotero, which is also useful for keeping track of references while writing. I read through all my notes again. I then created a visual outline in Miro with the main arguments and figures I was going to use, as well as the flow from one point to another.
Expanded Miro board with all figures
So the real writing began quite functionally. I started with the main research questions and built the answer step by step in blocks. I added the main sources.
Then I worked out the blocks point by point. Each sentence I placed on a separate line with a number in front of it. The sentences were short and staccato. The important thing was that the argument was clear, and if it was, I marked the most important line. That was the point I was trying to make. I shuffled back and forth some more, looking critically to see if all the sentences were building toward that conclusion. And then I moved on to the next block.
I want to publish in an English-language journal, but I don’t really think in English yet. So I started in Dutch and translated sentences into English when I was satisfied with the structure. I used Deepl as a translation assistant to help me.
Making beautiful sentences
Now it was time to do what I used to call writing: make beautiful sentences. I removed the numbers and wrote the sentences together. Some sentences I added together. Other sentences I worked out and became as many as three sentences. I divided the information into paragraphs and again marked the main message for each paragraph, building toward the conclusion of the entire block. The sentences were much less staccato, but carried full-blown information. And of course I added all the references of the sources I relied on.
For editing, I used Edit.gpt. Mainly for English grammar, but also to improve overall flow. Some adaptations I adopted, others I did not. Then I checked that the sentences ran smoothly and were not too long. I did this by reading the text aloud.
When that was all done, I moved on to the next block. After completing all the blocks within a segment, I read through everything a few times. I watched the transitions from one point to another. I checked that all the research questions were answered and that the whole thing invited further reading.
And so last month I wrote a whopping 8,000 words.
8,000 words later
This writing is very different from typing a blog. At first, I had to get used to it tremendously. And it required an awful lot of discipline. With a blog, I usually wait for inspiration, but writing an article went step by step. In December, I resolved to take one step every day, or say, 300 words, so that I would have a draft ready by the end of January. And it succeeded. Even on days without inspiration.
Now what I wrote goes “into the mix. That means receiving feedback from my promoters. They will ask a lot of questions about the argument and rearrange things again. Some of the blocks also need better elaboration, but after 8,000 words I had a toasty brain. I am very curious to see what they come back with.
And about the content itself, because I understand that you are also extremely curious about that, there will be a blog later too :).
References
Jaakkola, E. (2020). Designing conceptual articles: Four approaches. AMS Review, 10(1-2), 18-26.
MacInnis, D. J. (2011). A framework for conceptual contributions in marketing. Journal of Marketing, 75(4), 136-154.
Around the turn of the year, I usually write a review of the past year. And this year, of course, it is about my doctoral research.
The 2022 retrospective blog was about how I set up my research on government services that are good for (the) people. Since this year, I have been sharing an update every month with a nice group of readers on how things are going behind the scenes. That actually makes writing this blog more difficult, because I have so much material now. Death by data is what they call it at the university. All right, let’s get to work!
Would you also like an update in your mailbox every month about my research? Then subscribe to my newsletter (in Dutch).
On a beer mat
Every doctoral research project begins with an exploration of what we already know, to build on that. In the spring, I devised a strategy for this with my supervisors. The best strategy should fit on a beer mat, but a napkin will do as well.
The research strategy on a napkin
The plan is to do a theoretical exploration as well as a practical exploration. That last one is bonus. I already have a lot of practical experience which happens to be neatly documented on this blog. A shame to do nothing with that. These two explorations reinforce each other and together form the basis for further research.
In March, we saw that there was a very interesting conference in the fall that my practical experiences fit perfectly with. Only the deadline was already in April! It may be that I learned how to write a scientific paper in four weeks then, and I actually still need to recover a bit from it. But it worked and the article was also accepted. In October I presented it in Milan and, of course, I wrote a nice little blog for you about the results: trusting the process is not enough. ✅
The writing process
Then the theory
I did/do need more than four weeks for that. And this is an understatement. Wow, how hard I find this. Fortunately, I really like reading and writing, but it’s really different from what I’m used to.
In May, I took a course in Philosophy of Science for PhD students. I learned things that my sister was already learning during her undergraduate degree in college, but with a backhround of an applied college student, it was new to me. The question “what is knowledge?” was central, and the course helped me immensely to read texts more critically and to better substantiate my own arguments.
I wrote several blogs about these first steps in science:
Over the summer, my promotor Maaike Kleinsmann and I spent three days visiting Karlstad University, where Jasper van Kuijk, co-supervisor lives and works. Here we decided to adjust our strategy for theoretical exploration. We cut it into two parts.
Part 1: because my research is actually in three fields, the literature I want to use is also scattered (and a lot!). We are first going to make some good working definitions and properly conceptualize the phenomenon we are studying, government services, from those disciplines. I use this research framework:
From three disciplines, I zoom in on “my” phenomenon.
Part 2: then from that inner circle we are going to do a good search for everything that has been explored before me. I’m going to look at different sources:
case study research on improving government services,
research about the practices of officials who create and deliver government services, and
so-called “practitioner self-reports,” you know, those idiots from practice who keep a blog about their work ;). But also organizations that once shared a blog, a case study in their annual report, etc. They are not scientific sources (yet), we call it gray literature, but there is valuable info in them that I would like to have included.
To collect all this, I am going to collaborate with master students. And with you of course, you’ll later hear how. But wait, this is 2024 already, I’m doing a retrospective.
An official GO
In October, I had the 12-month meeting, as we call it in Delft. After the first year, you will present the progress of the first year and show the potential of your research to a committee of the university and an external expert.
It was a super fun conversation, with critical questions about the project and at the end a unanimous recommendation to move forward ✅.
In November and December, I worked on the conceptual framework on government services, and gave a series of presentations at my employer: the Executive Agency of Education (DUO). In fact, I was facilitatied to do this research last year by DUO, and I thought that was really special 🧡.
As an advisor, I thought about how DUO can grow from implementer to service organization. I helped with a number of concrete projects such as how we can set up checks of the move-out scholarship differently. And I ended the year with a workshop on my research for the board and tactical management. I also gave a super short summary at our employee event that you can read back here: Executor and Service Provider.
Working openly
Then I would like to say something about “working in the open” in this study. If you have been reading my blog for some time, you know that I share a lot. I find that super fun and it also helps me think.
I noticed last year that the time lines in science are much longer than in practice. Often I was pondering what to write next, because yes, you spend weeks and months on the same thing. Also, you don’t want to give away too many of your insights on your blog if they still need to be in a scholarly article. But I also don’t want to be a gatekeeper of interesting insights, because that’s exactly what we need in government.
Reading views!
I find it a tricky area of tension at times but I have built it up like this now:
This blog for short thoughts and to elaborate on something a bit more so that I can ask for feedback from you on it. And of course it will be on the blog as soon as I can share something that is finished.
The newsletter, where I can ask you questions even more easily, share loose snippets and communicate about the progress.
My second brain in Notion, parts of which are public and which I share through my newsletter. And parts of which are also nicely not public because it’s not finished yet, I’m free to think there and because occasionally what it says is also just crap.
I find working openly more difficult than when I started blogging. That’s because this is the most difficult project I’ve done so far and I am therefore insecure to share intermediate steps that could also fail. And because there are many more people reading along. Sometimes I miss the time when I was still messing around in a corner of the Internet without anyone noticing and caring.
But by working openly, I also learn a lot from you. Last year, more than ever, I received feedback from you on how certain things are going in your organizations, questions that are prevalent and insights from the field as well as from other scholars (hello, new audience). This is very useful for my research, so I will continue this approach in 2024 ✅.
How it continues, well, you’ll have to follow my newsletter for that or wait patiently for another blog to come online.
Are government organizations such as the Executive Agency of Education an executor or a service provider? In this blog, I argue that we are both. And that we must learn to connect those two roles.
Last week the directorate at the Executive Agency of Education (DUO) where I work, for those in the know the Directorate of Education Followers, organized an event for employees to explore these kinds of questions. It was a super fun program and I got to talk about my research. In this blog, I share the short speech I gave during the morning program. And of course I was on a stage during this speech so you have to imagine while reading that I was also walking left and right across that stage during the speech.
Imagine a line.
We start here on the left side. This is the side of the collective. On the far right, there on the other side, is the individual.
What the collective finds valuable is not always the same as what an individual finds valuable. There is tension between them.
The side of the collective
Here on the left is where the conversation among politicians takes place. Political parties, together with the cabinet, legislate how we envision society. We just voted again, then we all had a say in how we are represented as a collective. Here it is conceived that we want to keep education accessible. But that it should also not be too expensive. At the time, the majority of the House of Representatives thought the loan system for student finance was a good idea. And last year, the majority of the House of Representatives felt that the basic scholarship should be brought back after all.
Those adjustments are translated into laws and into policies, by ministries. For example, at our ministry, of Education. And those laws and those policies must then be brought to the citizens.
We do that. DUO.
If you look at it that way, it is simple to say: we execute laws. We are an executor.
The side of the individual
Let’s go to that other side. The right side. This is the side of the individual. For example, a student. Who comes from a particular home, with parents, brothers and sisters. Has a certain background, culture, atmosphere at home, at school, a certain upbringing. She chooses a study. Art Academy in Utrecht, or sports at Alphacollege, here in Groningen. Perhaps she is studying law in Leiden.
In any case, what we know for almost certain is that she is applying for student finance. On duo.nl, logging in with DigiD, she wants the supplementary grant as well. After a year also the move-out scholarship, because she is moving out of the house.
We actually think of these types of students as citizen service numbers.They go smoothly through our systems.They arrange their own student finance, their loan, change their travel entitlement. We rarely speak to them, maybe if they call once. But they only do that when the shit hits the fan. And sometimes not even then.
I have been your colleague for 10 years. In recent years, I worked as a user researcher, investigating how students perceive us. A few years ago, I made a photo series of colleagues. I explored how we make our choices and how to be a compasstionate civil servant in the process. Now for a year I have been doing scientific research together with Delft University of Technology on how to make government services that are good for (the) people.
The value of student finance
Scientific research says about organizations like DUO that we are a service organization. A service provider.
Student finance is a service. Something that allows a student to create value. What is that value anyway? I would say to develop yourself as a person. Leaving home. Travel. Discovering life and discovering your place in it. Education is super important in this. That’s the goal. And that is our mission: to enable this development.
But scientific research also says that such a service organization must then organize itself from the outside in. So all the way around it should be: focused on the user, on the student on that right side. Continually listening and asking: how valuable does the student find our services? What can we improve?
The organization must then be set up with clear accountability over these experiences. Customer experiences then are not a catch-all or nice-to-haves. No golden taps but they are the starting point. Actually even before policy, and even before ICT changes. Indeed, those policies and ICT changes stem from increasing “customer value.
Government organizations have two outsides
But you can’t quite compare government to an average service organization. Because we have that flow from the left too, remember. That is also an outside. And that outside flows very strongly in our organization. That’s how we’re actually set up now, focused on that left outside to execute legislation. And rightly so, because the collective is also the citizen.
You probably recognize those flows. We are all in the middle of it. You might be a little closer to the collective stream. Or you might, on the contrary, experience more that individual side. It depends on where you are in the organization.
But the tension between that collective, what the law requires, and the individual, how it works out for that one student… We all feel that tension.
That is the big task for the coming time.
How can we translate what the collective finds valuable, in our democracy, into individual experiences that students also find valuable?
How should we deal with that tension? It poses difficult questions:
What does this mean for how we offer the student finance? Should applying for student loans from DUO be easy or difficult? Super accessible, because there should be no barriers to arranging anything with the government, or difficult, because the loan results in student debt and thus an unlucky generation?
How are we supposed to check if someone is misusing the student finance? For example, with the move-out scholarship? We verify on misuse in the interest of the collective. But can this verifying process also be a valuable experience for the individual, or are we really just harming them with the way we do it?
How should we measure for customer satisfaction? For that, is wait time at the customer contact center really the most important KPI or should we have more qualitative measurements?
Do we actually have a really good overview of the entire student experience? And does that flow get enough space in our organzation at all?
And if you see something as a staff member that is not going well with a student, or a group of students, can you go against the flow?
Do you dare?
Needed: Compassionate civil servants
In my photo series, I interviewed colleagues about how they are as a compassionate civil servant. And also, why sometimes they can’t be one. You can view the photos and stories at debegripvolleambtenaar.nl.
I want to highlight this one from Mirjam. She was an account manager when I photographed her. She’s actually pretty close to that collective side in her work.
Portrait of Mirjam from the photo series The compassionate civil servant
Mirjam says, “DUO needs to be a connector.” At the ministry, at the collective side, stand for the student. As a kind of ambassador. This is possible only if that flow of the individual flows strongly in the organization.
“And at the student standing firm for policy.” So showing that collective flow here on the right.
Then you might think, pff, that will be chaos. We just have to embrace that chaos. And helping each other with that.
For that, we need to learn new things.
It starts with seeing both streams as equal. And to have our role in focus. Executor and also service provider. And especially connector of those two roles.
Want to know more?
On this blog, I think out loud how we can make government services that are good for people. I am researching this together with Delft University of Technology and public service organizations such as DUO.
Student finance is a service, and its value is in the classroom. In this blog, I explain what this means for a different way of working in government.
In the Dutch government we are all currently working to improve our services. That is super of course, but how do you know if you are getting better at it?
For the Executive Agency of Education, I looked up some maturity models to measure this growth. You helped me with this by sending all kinds of tips through this post on LinkedIn. In this blog, an overview of some models that will help you measure your growth, and some tips on how to use them.
Do you want to follow my research on how to design government services that are good for people? Then subscribe to my newsletter (in Dutch).
Goal: be a good service provider
The first question to answer is: what do you actually want to know/measure? There are all kinds of models to measure organizational growth, and also to measure growth toward a human-centered service organization. But what is the end goal? What do you want to be in the end?
A good service provider delivers a good service. That sounds logical, but it means that you only have a chance to become a good service provider if you therefore make your service better.
There are all kinds of standards for good services. For example, the ISO standard for service excellence. The Dutch government has developed a vision of what citizens should expect from government services. And otherwise, you can always consult what the National Ombudsman thinks is decent.
A proven approach to making good services is human-centered design. This blog is full of it. In the jargon, you quickly end up with terms such as human centered design (HCD), user experience (UX), customer experience (XC), and design for excellent services (DfES). Again, you will find ISO standards for this, as well as all kinds of maturity models to develop in this.
What the all the models say
MacDonald et al (2021) collected 21 such models to see what is the common denominator of all these approaches to measuring UX capability in your organization. They also conducted a literature review and interviewed UX experts. They list 6 components in which to grow as an organization, which are common to many models:
People: how are teams structured, how does management function, what skills do employees have, and how is career development organized?
Resources: what are models for funding of UX work, what is the infrastructure in the organization, and what standards are used?
Practices and processes: how is user experience incorporated into the way of working, how is planning and prioritizing done in the organization, what UX methods are used and what activities take place?
Organizational literacy: how well does management understand the perspective of users, is there strategic support, how are user insights shared in the organization, are employees involved in UX activities?
Organizational decision-making: are user insights guiding strategic decisions (or not), who is responsible for decisions that affect users, is there user ambassadorship in the organization and at what level?
Benefits: are products and services getting better, is the same true of processes and, of course, is user satisfaction going up?
Models: an inventory
Ahead, then, a list of models as well.
The UXCAF model of MacDonald et al (2021), as described above.
The ISO 24082 standard for service excellence. ISO also provides standards for designing (ISO 23592) and measuring (ISO 23686) service excellence. In the standard, they distinguish 4 levels, with the highest level being excellent services.
The Nielsen Norman Group’s UX maturity model. Jakob Nielsen has published several academic articles and books on UX and UX maturity. For your convenience, here is the starting point on the NN Group website about the UX maturity model he developed. The UX Academy has developed workshop materials for the NN model to use in a group session.
The CXPA maturity model is based on Forrester Research’s CX framework. It is used by a number of Dutch government organizations, including members of User Central’s CX community. Both the framework and the growth model have been adopted by the international CX Professionals Association (CXPA) and made a standard with CXPA certification.
User Central published this maturity scan a few years ago. They are now facilitating the CX community that is further developing the CXPA model.
Service Design Maturity Model by Koos, published in The Service Design Network (an international network of service designers).
I myself wrote a framework for a standard for professional listening based on internal organizational research at the National Ombudsman. Not yet further validated, but this research provides input for my doctoral research.
Such a list is nice, but how do you choose one?
The above models have similarities and differences. Of course, the list of models in circulation is much longer than I am sharing here on this blog. So how do you choose what to use in your organization? Does the model measure what you want to know?
Does the model measure what you want to know?
Does it reflect the competencies you want to work on as an organization? It makes no sense to use a model that measures something other than what you want to know. There is some nuance between the models. Some focus more on data-driven work, are commercial and find marketing aspects important, or focus more on culture in the organization. I would choose a model that starts with the quality of your service and “peels off the onion” from there. I got that onion metaphor from Jasper van Kuijk who presents it this way in his dissertation Managing Product Usability (2010).
At what organizational level do you want to use it?
Individually, by team, by executive unit or at the highest organizational level? Most models include growth from operational to tactical and strategic level, but it is nevertheless good to consider where and how you want to use the model. On the NN-Group website you can see how to use the model by team or as an organization. Then again, the ISO standard, for example, looks only at the organizational level.
Is it a scientific model or also practically applicable?
You want a model that is well validated (preferably scientifically) but also convenient to use in the organization. In the LinkedIn post I saw some beautifully designed models in workshop format, but with little validation. At the same time, the article by MacDonald et al (2021) may be a bit difficult to digest if you are handing it out in your team. The CXPA/Forrester model is super useful in practice (and there are many parties offering this model to implement in the organization) but it has not yet been scientifically validated, for what I can see. The NN Group is my favorite in this area. Nice scan to fill in, there are background articles with explanations, and Nielsen and Norman are scientific giants who published their first UX bibles back in the early 1980s.
Are the criteria per level clear?
Is it clear what each maturity step entails and how to get there? The government also doesn’t always have the same amount of “doing power” to act and grow, so it needs to be super clear what each step means. The models in my list score fine on this.
Is it applicable to the context of government?
The government is not a commercial service provider and we do not have customers with choice. Government service organizations are guided by democratic input through the House of Representatives or the City Council in addition to the experiences of citizens as users. Most models are not made specifically for the government sector and do not take this dynamic into account. This is the conclusion of my first scientific publication that I wrote this blog about the other day. And so to which I can now give Klip-Veltman et al (2023) as a source – what’s up!
Some models are very specifically commercial, and have included in the maturity model commercial dynamics, such as marketing strategies. Even though most elements from these models seem applicable to the government context with a little creativity, a more fundamental risk lurks. Unconsciously, you are taking on dynamics that do not (should not) fit the character of government. My advice would be to choose the least commercial model possible.
How to use: internally or externally focused?
Numbers and rankings always do well, because managers obviously don’t want to dangle at the bottom of the list. There is nothing wrong with this externally focused approach, but I find the internal approach even more valuable. This is the time to be allowed to stare at your own reflection in the mirror! To first, as an organization, properly understand what maturity in good service actually means, how to get there and what steps your organization needs to take. Then after that you can…
Do you want to benchmark with other organizations?
Then it may pay to choose the same model as other (government) service organizations. The question, though, is what do you get out of it? What does it really benefit you to know whether you are doing better or worse than, say, the Tax Office? It’s like learning in class: nice to get a passing grade, but the qualitative feedback is much more helpful. How can you improve?
And if you’re all about exchange, are you actively exchanging knowledge and experience with other organizations and how does this help your growth?
Final Opinion
With the above criteria as a guide, you can’t really make a wrong choice, I think. Especially if you see a maturity model not as a goal but as a tool. Tools are not cast in concrete, you use them and when you have outgrown them, or the coat doesn’t quite fit after all, you can choose another one. Above all, do so!
The goal is not to be compliant with a maturity model. The goal is to grow: to improve your services so that people can find their way around the government and achieve their goals. That is a process and it is never finished.
Want to follow my research on how to make government services that are good for people? Then subscribe to my newsletter (in Dutch).
Continue reading
MacDonald, C. M., Sosebee, J., & Srp, A. (2022). A Framework for Assessing Organizational User Experience (UX) Capacity. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 38(11), 1064-1080.
ISO. (2021). ISO 24082 –Service excellence – Designing excellent service to achieve outstanding customer experience. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.
Klip-Veltman, M., van Kuijk, J., and Kleinsmann, M.(2023). More than the process, exploring themes in Dutch public service design practice through embedded research, in De Sainz Molestina, D., Galluzzo, L., Rizzo, F., Spallazzo, D. (eds.), IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design, October 9-13, Milan, Italy.
Van Kuijk, J. I. (2010). Managing Product usability: How companies deal with usability in the development of electronic consumer products. Delft University of Technology, Delft.
A well-known saying among designers is trust the process. Indeed, since I started working in government 10 years ago, as a designer of (digital) government services for citizens, I have often heard and said that you have to trust the process. In this blog, I tell you why that’s not enough when it comes to government services.
This blog is a summary of my first scientific article “More than the process: exploring themes in Dutch public service practice through embedded research. This article was published at IASDR2023 and you can download it here. Want to follow my research on government services that are good for people? Then subscribe to my newsletter (in Dutch).
About government services
In many Western democratic countries, the state’s job is to provide health care, education, safety and social security. We do this by translating laws and policies into public services. The classic image of a government service is an official with a stamp behind a counter, but today services are increasingly digitized. This has significantly changed the government as an organization and the interaction with government (Bovens & Zouridis, 2002).
Public service organizations are in in the lead of connecting government (and its laws and policies) with citizens (with their own needs). A public service organization can be 100% government or even completely commercial, or something in between. My research focuses on service organizations that are truly government: government service organizations.
I do my research in the Netherlands. Here we use the word “the implementation” to refer to these organizations, but for a few years now there has been a change. After years of austerity and a few service scandals, the call for more human touch is sounding loudly. This leads to all kinds of change programs to government service organizations within these organizations.
A proven way for delivering human-centered (public) services is to design them human-centered. With the rise of digital services, human-centered design practices have emerged in many government organizations worldwide. But applying this new competence is not without struggle. So write, for example, Bason (2010), Clarke (2020), Downe (2020) and Greenway & Terrett (2018).
What is human-centered design?
Human-centered design is a field that goes back decades. There are now even ISO standards for service excellence (ISO, 2021) and how to design it (ISO, 2019). An important part of this is the service user’s experience. To what extent can users use the service effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily?
There are all kinds of design models for making good services. The common denominator: a combination of divergent and convergent thinking, an iterative way of working and involving users in the design process.
Seven years of blogging in the mix
In 2017, I wrote my first blog about my work to create human-centered services in government. In the archive you will now find a long list of blogs.
Together with my promoters Maaike Kleinsmann and Jasper van Kuijk, I took a close look at all these blogs. We wondered what we can learn from all these practical experiences. What dynamics do we see that affect how government services are made?
Our research design looked like this schematically:
Schematic research design
We divided all the blogs into four projects that followed each other (in part). I will go through them one by one.
Project 1: setting up a UX research practice at DUO
I wrote the first blog about my work at the Executive Agency of Education (DUO) in 2017, and when I left the team in 2021, I created a summary of all 98 blogs up to that point: the structure of research.
I noticed that the impact of user research remained low. In fact, the process was often finished by the time the user research was done, the website was pretty much done, the system could not be changed, and policy always took precedence.
User research did not fit the way development teams worked. There was no overarching direction on user feedback and no tools such as customer journeys to give development teams guidance. To change this bottom-up was a considerable undertaking, and it was not a priority to better structure the governance of this.
You can see the position of the UX research team in the context of the organization in this drawing:
Schematic representation of the organization’s structure and positioning of the UX research team.
Delivering services that meet user needs required taking users’ perspectives into account much earlier in the process, I noticed. Thus was born the next project.
Project 2: The compassionate civil servant
This was the research project for my master’s degree on the role of empathy for citizens among digital government creators, also at DUO. I previously shared the results of this research on debegripvolleambtenaar.nl and you can read the work in progress in detail in the archives of this blog (2018 – 2020).
I used photography to reflect with colleagues. This is how it went:
I had four key insights:
Participants do not know where citizen responsibility ends and government responsibility begins. As a result, they encounter dilemmas they do not know how to deal with. For example, should a loan for young students be very accessible online or contain hurdles?
Participants do not experience space for their own humanity. They should be neutral and simply implement the law, but go through all sorts of things that impact them: reorganizations, political changes, unclear communication and their own insecurity. Reflective conversations lag behind as a result.
Participants do not have an overview of how citizens experience the service and therefore do not know their part in it. Processes and responsibilities are divided. Each one does his piece and passes the relay baton to the next without knowing exactly how it will proceed.
Participants do not have the skills or feel the freedom to act on feedback from citizens. As a civil servant, you work for the minister and it quickly becomes political, they think. The hierarchy goes from top to bottom: the ministry together with parliament makes the law; the execution executes.
These four insights come into play at different points in the law-to-counter relay, as you can see in this drawing:
Schematic overview of where the four insights impact the law-to-counter relay.
Project 3: the CoronaMelder app
For the app, I did part of the user research at the Ministry of Health. You can read back all the blogs via the tag coronamelder.
I chose the corona app as a counter example of how it can be done. The design and development team came together in a special way, using the Covid crisis conditions to engage users at each iteration. This successful way of working was confirmed by the Dutch ICT Review Advisory Board (2022), among others.
But success shines less when you look at the app not in isolation, but as an interaction point in the entire service, namely source and contact investigation. Responsibilities to combat the coronavirus were divided between the ministry and regional health organizations (RHOs). The dynamics between these organizations led to a less effective app, and this in turn impacted the overall service.
So even though there is a lot of design freedom and users are well involved from the beginning, that does not necessarily make for a successful service. We need more. Apps and services are part of a larger eco-system, as this drawing shows:
Schematic representation of the relationship between the ministry, the 26 RHOs, the user and the design team.
Project 4: A month from my own relationship with the government
I explored that larger eco-system by keeping track of my own interactions with the government on a large map for a month and mapped the government’s side of it as well. This project was the starting point for my doctoral research. You can go through the map yourself on this Miro board.
Fairly simplified schematic representation of my own relationship with government.
I learned that laws and services for government are always bulk and collective in nature. For citizens, it is always personal. The total of the interaction adds up, as does stress, and citizens soon lose track. After all, you must be a total nerd to want/be able to make such a map :).
The lack of oversight makes it difficult for citizens to manage their relationship with government (Keizer, et al, 2019). Government service organizations do not take this into account because each organization has its own processes, structures and financial flows. There is no overarching responsibility of the entire relationship with the citizen.
The specific dynamics of government services
What can we learn from these government service projects?
There is tension between collective and individual values. What constitutes public value is defined and discussed by political parties, in public debate and in parliament. Project 2 and 4 show that it is left to the government service organization to translate that collective value into individual experiences, without having the skills or guidelines to do so.
Government services should be inclusive for all. Not every citizen has the same ability to manage their relationship with government. Commercial organizations also want to be inclusive, but the government has a monopoly. If you don’t manage as a citizen, you have nowhere else to go. Designing for inclusion means involving a wide variety of users in the design process, but as project 1 shows, this is not standard practice. Fortunately, Project 3 shows how this can be done.
A top-down, hierarchical culture hinders focus on the user. Government organizations operate in a political context (with political reckoning). Read: you work for the minister and less for citizens. Project 1 shows that UX insights were only allowed at the operational level and did not influence strategic decisions of the organization. These dynamics are further explained in project 2. Project 3 shows, because of the team composition and nature of the Covid crisis, that this political culture played a smaller role.
User feedback competes with policy implementation and ICT changes. Changes around policy and ICT are invariably prioritized higher than citizens’ experience with service delivery. In project 1, you see little room for user feedback in the way the organization works. This is further encouraged by the focus on the legal aspect of policy, as shown in Project 2. Project 3 shows precisely that with the right capabilities and priorities, user feedback can play an essential role in how a team works.
Government service providers are part of a larger services eco-system. Organizations are part of an interplay of policy departments and other service providers, some of which have even been privatized. In project 4, you see how each organization makes its own translation of the law (or parts of it) into services and takes no responsibility for the impact of it all on citizens. The culture behind this is explained in Project 2. In Project 3, you can see this in the dynamics between the ministry and the RHOs.
Two outsides
Comparing the outcomes of the projects with the literature on human centered service design, I certainly see opportunities for more human touch in government service delivery. But this is easier said than done.
The theory about (making) good service is unruly in the practice of government organizations. For example, the political hierarchy contradicts with the first principle of service excellence (ISO; 2021): “manage the organization from the outside in.”
One would then say that we need a 180-degree turnaround in government, but that does not do justice to the democratic nature of government organizations. The challenge for government service organizations, then, is both to manage the organization from the outside in and to be accountable within the democratic context as well, and thus to listen to two outsides. This is what it looks like:
Schematic representation of the service eco-system within which government organizations operate, including the two outsides.
Conclusion
If we want to create truly human-centered government services, we must embrace human-centered design at the strategic level in organizations (Project 1). An organizational culture that enables this is essential for this (Project 2). But even if the organization has the required capabilities (project 3), this does not mean that the entire service is good for people, since government organizations are part of a service eco-system (project 4).
To make service standards and design processes applicable to the context of government service delivery, we need to adapt them to deal with the specific dynamics of government organizations.
When we do this, it will hopefully enable government service organizations to help citizens achieve their goals in life, even if they need different services from different organizations. Government as a whole must work beyond silos, and begin orchestrating the experience of government services for citizens.
What’s next?
Further developing these standards and design processes is, of course, a nice task for me in my doctoral research.
The first thing I want to do in the coming period is to define some concepts further. I use the term government service organization, but the specifics of this can be explored in more depth. I am going to look at it from different perspectives: from the public administration field, the service literature and from the design field. I envision it as a scale that you can start defining from different dimensions:
This fall I am working on this conceptual framework. Then I will create a research design to research in practice how Dutch national government service organizations learn to improve their services.
If you want to know more about this, read on in these blogs about:
Bason, C. (2010). Leading public sector innovation (Vol. 10). Bristol: Policy Press.
Bovens, M., & Zouridis, S. (2002). From street-level to system-level bureaucracies: how information and communication technology is transforming administrative discretion and constitutional control. Public administration review, 62(2), 174-184.
Clarke, A. (2020). Digital government units: what are they, and what do they mean for digital era public management renewal? International Public Management Journal, 23(3), 358-379.
Downe, L. (2020). Good Services: How to design services that work. BIS Publishers.
Greenway, A., Terrett, B., Bracken, M., & Loosemore, T. (2018). Digital transformation at scale: Why the strategy is delivery: Why the strategy is delivery, London Publishing Partnership.
Keizer, A. G., Tiemeijer, W., & Bovens, M. (2019). Why knowing what to do is not enough: A realistic perspective on self-reliance (p. 157). Springer Nature.
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. (2021). ISO 23592 – Service excellence – Principles and model. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.
ISO. (2021). ISO 24082 – Service excellence – Designing excellent service to achieve outstanding customer experience. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.
Adviescollege ICT-toetsing (2022). Evaluatie Ontwikkelproces CoronaMelder. Den Haag, Adviescollege ICT-toetsing.
All 43 references I used in the article can be found here.
If you follow me on Instagram, you will see that for the past few months I have been sharing almost only ‘reading views’. I love reading, I even took a speed reading course when I started my PhD, but reading academic literature (for the first time in your life) and finding structure in what you read, that’s something else.
In this blog, I will give an update on all this reading and a first attempt at that structure, or, what we also call: the fuzzy front-end of research. With reading tips for you of course!
Parallel disciplines
When I started this PhD research, I knew I wanted to look from two disciplines: design and public administration. Later, a third was added: services. Because I keep hopping between areas of research, it sometimes feels a little unsteady for me. Now how does this belong together? From what lens will I now examine? Should I actually choose one or can I combine them? And how do you know when you have everything?
With each discipline, I am in contact with an academic institute.
Design is of course my home base, Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology.
At CTF at Karlstad University, where I regularly work for a week, they know all about services.
And I ‘flirt’ a bit with the USBO (Faculty of Public Administration) of Utrecht University and the Faculty of Administrative Law of the University of Groningen.
I see more and more clearly where these areas overlap. Fortunately, plenty has been written about those crossovers as well.
Drawing of three subject areas combined so you can see how they overlap.
Designing services: service design
This is, of course, a bit of a home game. This blog is full of all kinds of methods, case histories and also a bit of theory on how to design services, how to test them with users, and how to include your organization. In the blog “The Structure of Research”, for example, I summarized 99 blogs about our design research team at the Executive Agency of Education and how we proceeded.
It is a feast of recognition to dive into the literature on this topic. Most of what I learned in practice helps me so reading about it instantly clicks. If you like to brush up on some theoretical background as well, here are a few of my favorites:
Usability engineering by Jakob Nielsen from 1985, classic!
Frame innovation by Kees Dorst, 2015. The first design book I ever read: 5 stars.
The Service Design Network: not a book, but an interactive network with many resources, by founder Birgit Mager.
This is service design by Marc Stickdorn from 2011.
And my favorite book: Good services by Lou Downe from 2019.
Where government and service research overlap
At the Fronteers in Service conference in June, I realized that the services field is quite commercial. It is also a subfield of Marketing, so that makes sense. Still, there is a “public services” branch. In January, I was at CTF to learn more about services, and was put on the trail of public service logic:
as a thought experiment, I then wrote “The value is in the classroom” where I tried out the service-dominant way of thinking on my organization and education services.
An important part of combining these two fields of study is that I properly define what “public service” is. I want to do that by reading more about public value and how it is viewed. Next, I want to look at what government service within the large rubric of public service means. And so I will also have to define what a public service provider is. This is what I will be working on this fall.
Design in government
I discover that there are two major streams here:
policy design: designing policy. For example, what the Danish Design Center like Christian Bason writes about it in 2017’s Leading public design.
service design in government: designing government services. For example, Digital transformation at scale, why the strategy is delivery by Andrew Greenway from 2018 who describes from the UK government how they go about creating (often digital) services.
I find that second movement particularly interesting, but realize that I overlap with policy design and must relate to it. In the Netherlands, policy and implementation/ service delivery is quite separated at the national level, but in other countries (or in our local governments) this is much less the case.
I also enjoy reading about the rise of service teams in government, internationally. And I want to know what they are up against and what has helped them make government services that are good for people. So I also cannot escape delving into organizational dynamics and growth.
But first: what is the next step?
The above exploration and all these reading views will have a place in my second article. With this conceptual piece, I will give the rest of my research a good framework, I will have some working definitions which help me be clear and unambiguous, and all of that together can later nicely be the second chapter of the dissertation.
The sun was shining, I was in one of my favorite cities (Maastricht) and had breakfast with Limburg pie every morning. Last week was Frontiers in Service 2023. My first academic conference. Four days, with a day especially for PhD candidates, dedicated to the most current research on services.
In this blog, I share what I learned from this conference for my own research on public services that are good for people, in my case study on Dutch national public service providers. I do so in the form of 4 reasons why it is a smart idea as a beginning researcher to attend conferences right from the start of your PhD.
Reason 1: get a good overview quickly
The service field is actually not my own domain. I do research from the Technical University of Delft, Industrial Design Engineering. Design is my home base, and I do research on how to design services in government. My research connects three disciplines: design, services and public administration. To fully understand the services part, I went to Frontiers and regularly visit CTF, Karlstad University’s service research center. (I wrote this blog about my first visit at CTF.)
Through conversations at CTF, I stumbled into the service field. From there I looked for a route like a snowball finding its way. Of course, I read the classics, for example, on service-dominant logic. I practiced how to apply this way of thinking in my research context by writing the blog the value is in the classroom.
A conference highlights the most current state of a research field. One look at the program and you see how much there is. The services field is much larger than I thought!
I found out that public services are a niche here, and government services may be the niche within the niche.
Entering through a side door
Frontiers in service is a conference that deals with services, including the creation and delivery of services in the broadest sense. The keynotes focused on the child care benefit scandal in the Netherlands and Starbucks’ new service concepts in Asia. We saw experimental examples of VR glasses in education and service robots in healthcare. Nearly 250 studies were presented in 60 sub-sessions. View the entire program here.
I discovered that “transformative service research” is very hot right now and, as a separate research topic, even has its own acronym: TSR. From my own reading nook, I had not yet come across this. This is something I will be looking up more about in the near future.
Reason 2: free advice
If at the beginning you still nervously walk with your coffee to a table where no one is standing, by the end of the conference you know that you can join a busy table. Indeed, that is a very good idea. After your name and your university, you drop that you have only just started your PhD and it immediately starts raining tips from the seniors at the table. They ask questions, talk about their own early days and give advice on writing good articles for top journals. That they sometimes contradict each other we will never let them know of course.
Coffee and tips
This free advice makes sense because the purpose of a conference is to exchange knowledge. Everyone seeks each other out and talks about each other’s research. Rarely have I received such good (and critical) questions about my research: what I want to contribute to it, how I want to approach it and more.
In line for the ice cream truck, for example, I was engaged in a discussion about what public value is with Jakob Trischler (whose articles I have read before). Is that really well defined yet (we thought not) and does public value actually have a place within the marketing-dominated world of service research? I’ll have vanilla with raspberry in a cone, please.
Extra helpful was the advice of Mike Brady, Professor of Marketing at Florida State University and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Service Research (JSR). In a small ask-me-anything session, he talked at length about JSR’s editorial process and how to write and submit your first articles to top journals as a young researcher. Those were a lot of useful tips.
Reason 3: practice pitching and learn from others
Most people gave presentations themselves; I was there as a consumer. If my paper will be accepted, I may present at a design conference this fall. During Frontiers, I was able to watch how others show their work. What are the codes, the unwritten rules? How do others structure their presentation? How do they deal with critical questions?
Very interesting presentation by Koskela-Huotari et all (2023) on systemic dynamics in (un)sustainable behavior
Yet I could not consume alone.
Regularly, someone asked what my research is about. I am now over six months in and exactly at that stage when you start doubting everything. My rehearsed pitch “I’m doing research on how to design government services that are good for people” is starting to come out slicker and slicker, but by now I’m having doubts about the definition of government services, about what is design, what is good and what are people really??!
That’s okay. By telling what you do and why it is relevant over and over again, you learn to put it into words better and better. After the fifth pitch (and because of the questions I received), I subconsciously adjusted the pitch a bit. By the fourth day, the insecurity was gone and I surprised myself how much better I could explain what I want to do.
I am still on “how to make government services that are good for people” haha. But also on how important it is to properly define that “public value. Maybe I can do that by just delving more into the public administrative side: the principles of good governance and the Rule of Law of course! The radars are already turning at full speed again.
Session on thinking from ecosystems in service research
Reason 4: meet nice people in a new city
As an external PhD candidate, I am not at the university much. I live in Groningen, which is 3+ hours by train to Delft. My supervisors live in Delft and Karlstad, so most of my research happens online, from home or from my research context, in the Dutch government. I don’t know that many other PhD candidates to exchange experiences and joke around with. However, this can be done at a conference (Della and Mike, I see you), especially if a special Doctoral Consortium for PhD candidates is organized.
Maastricht is a super fun city is and the University of Maastricht knows how to organize a cool conference. Attending a multi-day conference is also getting away from the grind, from behind your desk, and getting new inspiration. Rent a bike, have breakfast on a terrace, take your new friends into town. I even got to row on the Maas River with the Maastricht rowing team.
Rowing on the Maas River
In short: many new experiences bring new questions to delve into in the coming time. The next conference will hopefully be IASDR2023 in October. But first, in August, I am going to CTF in Sweden again :).
Want to follow my research on Dutch government services? You can! Through my newsletter (in Dutch) or follow this blog via my Linkedin.
References and reading tips
Koskela-Huotari, K., Svärd, K., Williams, H., Trischler, J., & Wikström, F. (2023). Drivers and Hinderers of (Un) Sustainable Service: A Systems View. Journal of Service Research, 10946705231176071.
Jakob Trischler & Jessica Westman Trischler (2022). Design for experience – a public service design approach in the age of digitalization. Public Management Review, 24:8, 1251-1270.
This page lists all the books and articles I use in my research.
Yesterday I attended a session on Health in Groningen: a special government for vulnerable citizens. The afternoon was organized on behalf of the Province of Groningen, and I got to kick off the conversation with a short speech together with Albert Jan Kruiter. Albert Jan began and talked about the breakthrough method and why it was needed for the roughly 20% of our population who, despite (or perhaps because of) interference from many institutions, are no longer getting out of trouble.
You can read my speech below; I am posting it in full.
‘Build the right thing, build the thing right,’ is a well-known saying in the design world (Buxton, 2010).
But what is the right thing, and how can we make it right?
Besides the regular patchwork of social security benefits, which Albert Jan just spoke excellently about, Groningen has another coarsely knitted plaid on top: the earthquake problems.
Recently, the Cabinet announced 50 measures to address these problems. In which I like that they see, now more than before, what is going wrong. But even in these 50 measures, what we also heard in Albert Jan’s story continues to shine through: no integrated approach to the whole problem, rather: something here, and something there. The problems are taken apart in the analysis, and then solved separately, but what they forget is that with residents it can never be taken apart.
What is still missing is an overall picture of what, for example, a household in an average Groningen locality can now expect, especially for the group that has the most damage. I won’t go into detail about the various components of schemes, or the issues themselves: I look around and see that the public here is extremely knowledgeable about what is going on in our region.
What gives me hope is that those measures do include a Social and Economic Agenda, which hopefully we do start to set up in an integrated way. That could be a start for building the right thing.
But even when we build the right thing, I still worry. For will the right thing also be rightly build? That concern about “building the thing right” is something I want to explore with you today.
Is the right thing rightly build?
I think of a lady in Appingedam whom I visited two years ago. She bought an extra bookcase for all her administration.
Imagine it.
A billy bookcase especially for all your earthquake stuff.
Screenshot from ikea.co.uk showing the billy bookcase
Let’s look at 1 paper from such a closet I take a letter I received myself.
I want to start by saying that this is a fine arrangement that many people in Groningen are grateful for. Apart from that lack of integrality, this is really a bit of “build the right thing”: the €4000 grant for sustainability at the SNN. I applied for it myself last year for the windows at the back of my house.
A few weeks ago, I received an email that I fell into the sample. I had not heard anything about it for over a year by then. I had to show that the windows were actually installed. No problem, I looked out through them, proof enough.
Screenshot of email that my project fell into the sample for review.
But here is the thing… I had asked my contractor at the time to do a new quote for the windows because the quote I had, which was actually an invoice and it said all kinds of things more that he had done to our house, that quote was not accepted by the system. It did not have the right things on it, including the right date for the application period, nor the exact description of the job. So I got a nice new quote that met all the conditions perfectly and arranged the application with that. Nothing wrong, I thought.
But now with that sample I also had to send the invoice, of which I had no separate one at all. The invoice was even a few months in the past in terms of date. The proof of payment, a statement from my bank, was also months before the offer date and belonged to that earlier invoice. By the way, it was also a different amount than was on that new quote. Had I faked it now?
Well, I uploaded everything. By the way, there was no way to upload before and after pictures, it was purely for administration. Fortunately, there was a field near it where I could put something of a note and well, here’s to hoping.
I worried
I was talking to friends about it. I whined to my husband about it. I got angry. Because I had modified that whole quote in the first place because the reality that was there did not fit the application system. I thought up – obviously with my eyes peering at the ceiling in the dark – an angry speech for how none of this could be my fault and I wouldn’t have to pay back that grant. I cannot deny that some of that angry speech is now in this speech.
And then I got an email that the application had been completed.
Screenshot of email with notification that the grant has been “established.
Okay … completed what?
Good or bad? Can I keep it, should I give it back?
I could not see it clearly in the portal except that the case was “fixed”. I was hoping for a who’s-the-mole green or red screen, or something of a sign, but after some clicking through, I found this letter and read that I was indeed getting a grant. After which I drew the conclusion that this was the end of it.
Screenshot of SNN portal showing the overview page of my file.
Now you may be thinking this is not a good example.
Because it all worked out. It turned out to be a storm in a teacup; besides, I’m not a vulnerable citizen at all, right? I am smart, I have studied, I have a partner who listens patiently to my whining, I have a house, in the city of all places, so I shouldn’t say anything, and I can even cope financially if I had to pay it back.
But still… this feeling I had, like I was stupid and didn’t get it. That instant stress that I was being peeved anyway, and that I was thinking all the time ‘what would they want to hear’ and trying to write the application towards that…
As if there are two realities
A paper one that I had to mold myself to and put in the application so I checked the right boxes and got the grant. And the real reality, that of my windows that I can look at while uploading the documents. And which are actually now of double instead of single glass. But whose administration – as it had gone – did not fit perfectly into the application process, even though the arrangement was intended for exactly these windows.
That feeling is what philosopher David Graeber (2015) calls the “stupidity of bureaucracy. That feeling that bureaucracy makes you stupid. That you think “this is on me.
As a designer, I have learned, “it’s never the user’s fault. It is never down to the user, processes and systems must serve the human, the user, and never the other way around! Build the right thing, and build the thing right
Back to the folder. This is 1 paper.
I could have taken a much harder example from residents in Groningen. I could have chosen defense papers. Intimidating letters from the country’s attorney. Lingering email exchanges with the NCG about house reinforcement. Or with the municipality about the community center. Or the icing on the cake: everyone remembers those lines for the €10000 grant on Jan. 2, 2021.
Apart from the fact that all these separate arrangements are not the right thing, they are also poorly made
Letters that are not clear. Portals where you have to search for what you need to know. Application forms where you feel stupid and have to empathize with what they would want to hear. Or that are just clumsy because you read while filling out the form that your attachment should not be larger than 5MB and you don’t know how to convert that right away so you then get kicked out because you have not been active in the portal for too long.
In addition to new individual pots of money, the cabinet response announces a new digital portal and communication ways. There is also investment in earthquake coaches at the same time to stand beside people, Stut-and-support gets an additional grant.
Today we are going to talk about the health of people in Groningen, and the relationship between the government and citizens in this. Special government for vulnerable citizens. I think it’s commendable, I sincerely believe, that the province, and the Groningen National Program are thinking about this. But I can’t help but see the irony in this as well. “The government” – it doesn’t exist, of course, but let’s pretend for a moment that there is such a 1 government – wants to create a nice, good treatment plan to increase the health capacity of vulnerable people.
But let’s also take a look at the patient’s diagnosis.
Imagine how many papers fit in 1 folder. And then how many folders in a Billy bookcase? Then tell me what people in Groningen are getting sick from now?
It’s from this – mostly government-generated, poorly made – billy bureaucracy.
References and reading tips
Buxton, B. (2010). Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Morgan Kaufmann.
Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Melville House.
Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate, 2023. Nij Begun, on the road to recognition, recovery and perspective.
Design in government is gaining momentum in the Netherlands. At implementing organizations, there are more and more design teams and at ministries, service and policy designers are increasingly being hired; the Ministry of Justice and Safety has even started a Makers Collective. External agencies have been setting up design projects with and in public organizations for decades, and the Ministry of Education will soon launch a multi-year program to involve designers in social challenges. Finally, let’s not forget how hot “design thinking” is becoming among managers.
Design in government is hot. But what is what really?
What role do designers have in government? Where in the process do you need what type of design? What does the context of government look like and how does a design approach fit into it? In this blog, a start to form my point of view. To give some insight into what the area looks like, a map to help us have a conversation and explain when we make what contribution. But also maybe as a bit of a provocation, because nothing is more fun than discussing design with designers, ha!
Evolution of the map
The map I see before me does not come out of the blue. In the archives of my blog are all kinds of building blocks and thinking steps I made over the years that led to this map. I’ll explain.
I started an experiment in 2018 in Rotterdam with a yellow rope. I stood on one side, as the government, and asked passersby how they wanted to be connected to me. A simple relationship between two parties.
Me as a public servant seeking connection with citizens.
I built this into a multi-party role-play. I asked students to take position with their classmates, teacher and staff of the Executive Agency of Education (DUO): what role do they themselves, their friends, parents, school, DUO and politics have in the way they deal with student loans. The relationship was no longer a simple dyad.
DUO employees who participated in the experiments all took different positions. That confused me, which made me want to know what role empathy for citizens had for them, in the path from law to counter. I started with this blog and photo-interviewed colleagues to map out the steps. The result: the law-to-counter relay on Debegripvolleambtenaar.nl. I placed the relay in the context of the democratic cycle.
The law-to-counter relay at the Executive Agency of Education
I elaborated further by surveying a month of my own relationship and figuring out how the side of the government was organized, including the making of policies, laws and the collective values underneath. I began my doctoral research with this timeline in this blog.
On that timeline, I often got feedback that the bottom and the top were also connected. And that I missed the whole civil society. When I worked at the National Ombudsman, I learned more about the part where citizens have a say and (want to) influence how we organize society from the view point of their lifeworld. For example, by looking into participation in Groningen for the reinforcement of houses.
The maps and experiments weren’t quite it yet.
So I made a new map
Over the past few weeks, I talked to several people about it including Prof. Mark Bovens of Utrecht University’s Faculty of Public Administration to check if I was on the right path. With the feedback, I adjusted the map.
The map consists of two axes. The horizontal axis has the collective on the left and the individual on the right. The vertical axis has above the system world versus below the lifeworld.
This gives us 4 quadrants, and I’ll go through them with you one by one.
System world / collective
Parlement, together with the Cabinet, devises how society should be. Collective values are enshrined in laws and translated into interventions to realize the collective values (enshrined in policies).
A drawing of the quadrant collective / system world
System world / Individual
Those interventions are implemented and embedded in existing processes and services, by government executive organizations and/or private service providers. For example: the student finance is transferred, the hybrid heat pump installed, as well as the trains that are running. Much of this goes automated or is supported by digital processes, hence the softly buzzing data center.
A drawing of the quadrant system world/ individual
Living world / Individual
Such a service does not stand alone but happens in context. I am applying for a grant for a heat pump for my house where I live with Jasper on a street with neighbors. I have family, friends, I am in a certain stage of life. This all affects the interaction and what else I need, in this case, to make my home more sustainable.
A drawing of the quadrant individual/living world
Living world / collective
Individuals unite. In a sports club or neighborhood association to make your neighborhood finer. People seek each other out around an issue and work together to influence and have a say in how we live together as a collective. Civil society, as well as political parties that run for election to represent the people in democracy.
A drawing of the quadrant lifeworld/ collective
Those are the four quadrants.
The whole map looks like this. Pay particular attention to when it moves from one quadrant to another. Interesting things usually happen there.
Then the design field
Although designers have a shared way of working and mindset, we do not all work on the same things and our approaches are often different. Where you are on the map, the issues are different, your design outcome is different, and so your role and approach may be too.
I sketch my own position on the map…
My own design practice plotted on the map
You see: I spent most of my time in the system-world/individual quadrant.
I first was as a user researcher on the overlap between system world and lifeworld, with the individual. I observed as students used duo.nl. Later, on the project The Compassionate Civil Servant, I walked deep into the caverns of the system world. And at the Legitimate I dove into that buzzing computer.
Richard Buchanan (1992) in his “four orders of design” describes the difference between, for example, user interface design and service design. The latter is much more holistic. So now, with my current research on government services, I am going to zoom out and want to touch more of the other quadrants as well.
And then the provocate bit: maybe you can plot other design disciplines this way as well.
A map of design disciplines in government
Social design on the lower left, policy design of course at the policy side, with an additional zoom in for legal design. On the right, of course, UI design. And that doesn’t even include all kinds of other types .. content design, design thinking, systems design, graphic design, organization design, product design … what else do you have?
Are you a designer, in government? How do you plot yourself? And why? I’d love to hear about it so we can learn together what design in government can look like and what you have to deal with in what place.
References and reading tips
The four orders of design come from Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked problems in design thinking.” Design issues 8.2 (1992): 5-21.
A fine book for understanding the roles of all the players in this cycle is Willink, Tjeenk. “Herman, Thinking Bigger, Doing Smaller.” (2018). Publisher Prometheus, Amsterdam
The poetic “softly buzzing data center” comes from Zouridis, Stavros. “Digital discipline: on ICT, organization, legislation and the automation of dispositions.” (2000).
This page lists all the books and articles I use in my research.
The Social Security Bank in the Netherlands once came up with the term ‘working from purpose’. You are faced with a complicated situation and think “what was ever the purpose behind this?”
Legislation is made from such a social purpose to organize and shape society in a certain way. We make policies for that, such as interventions of something that may or may not be allowed (manifested in permits for example a driver’s license), certain incentives (money you recieve or have to pay) or certain information that may or may not be recorded (in the Netherlands gender may be changed in a passport). Next, implementing organizations are in charge of implementing the policy, and thus are service providers.
In this blog you will find an exploration of what we (should) be talking about when we talk about services in the public sector.
I lean on the literature on service dominant logic (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). I learned about this at Karlstad University and wrote this blog. I also draw on practical experience over the past few years, as you can read in the archives of this blog, and on existing literature on service standards and service design.
As I delved into the literature on service-dominant logic, I frequently thought of that term “purpose”. SD-logic calls it: offering products or services to users so they can create value for themselves. That overarching value is essentially the service. I will explain this with an example that fits the Executive Agency of Education, where I work now.
Value is created in the classroom
I have long thought that in the case of the Law on Student Finance, the goal was met when a student could apply for student finance flawlessly. But it doesn’t.
The goal is to develop yourself. To a large extent, the student must do this themselves, but we can help. I see that ‘we’ very broadly: government, society, we. To learn well and to make something of yourself, you need all kinds of things. I’ll mention a few:
good teachers and thus teacher education, grants for professionals who want to retrain as teachers,
a safe and comfortable classroom and thus a school board that can work with the municipality to achieve fine school locations, and can pay for it,
good teaching materials, which is organized by the school, as well as private parties who write textbooks,
traveling to school, using a student travel product or pupil transportation,
validation of your learning in the form of exams and certified diplomas.
It looks something like this in my head.
Providing these resources so that a student can use them to develop themselves, that is the service.
You already notice: some of these resources are sub-services. For example, an accounting application (a product) that helps a school keep student records (a service) that allows the school to schedule funding from the government (a service) to pay the salaries (another service) of the teachers (also can be seen as a service) who teach (a service) to the students who, if they do their best, learn as a result (hey, we’re here). A sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-service.
Policy should be about value in the classroom, and so should the implementation of it. What does value mean in the classroom: is everyone allowed in that classroom? Can you learn without having breakfast? Does everyone have the financial resources to access the school? Are thinking skills worth as much as doing skills?
I’m making it very big now, sorry.
But I think it’s that big. All those (sub)resources eventually contribute step by step to those big questions. At the Executive Agency of Education, I’ve often heard that those questions “get political very quickly,” and of course we, the implementation should not be involved in politics. Fortunately, that is beginning to change a bit.
Not so easy
Much is known about how to create and deliver services. There are all kinds of standards, principles and processes for it. But they cannot yet be applied 1 to 1 in government.
For example, the government is there for everyone, but can everyone create value for themselves? We know from the well-received WRR-report Knowing is not yet doing (Bovens, 2017) that we tend as a government to overestimate citizens and thus overwhelm them with resources, letters and things to do but lose track of.
In addition, there is tension on value for the collective and for the individual. The student loan system is a good example. Conceived as a cut to keep education affordable, but it led to a mountain of debt among young people in the Netherlands. Perhaps this actually made higher education less accessible. As a service provider, how do you offer such a service? So that students can develop themselves but do not run into sideways problems with their livelihood or future prospects? Should you make the application process for such a loan super easy and accessible, or difficult? I actually don’t know.
Executor or service provider?
The ISO standard on service excellence (ISO, 2021) states as its first principle that “the organization should be managed from the outside in”. Read: user feedback should guide how you create and offer services. That feedback is crucial, and should also be the basis for the policies you make.
In commercial businesses, you see that continuously listening to the target audience leads to new ideas of what resources they can offer so that customers will enjoy a purchase even more. For example: a friend of mine has an electric car with a built-in app that calculates exactly how long you can drive and where on the route you can recharge most conveniently (with good coffee). The company behind it is a car manufacturer, but knows that with apps like this as an extra service, you help the user in his goal: getting from a to b pleasantly and on time. The latter is the actual service.
In government, we don’t think that way yet. We are focused on the commissioning policy departments, and obediently implement what they come up with. Transferring student loans? Okay. Managing diplomas? Sure. Distribute funding to schools? We’re on it.
So we are executors. Being service providers requires something else.
What if: we turn around and look at the classroom. Together with pupils, students and schools, and others in that service eco-system, we figure out what it takes for people to be able to develop themselves, how can we offer that to them in the smartest and finest way collectively so that the intent turns out in the classroom the way we wanted?
I am not a fan of Shell, but they do understand that for a fine car mobility experience, you need to offer services bundled and layered. The fast-charging locations connect to navigation services, there are fresh croissants, they outsource the coffee to Starbucks, all kinds of brands that together form an eco-system around car mobility and interact with each other.
Why not offer services bundled more often when we see and hear from users that they need them together? For example, why can’t you apply for student finance while enrolling in college? Research on the life event “Going to college” shows it belongs together. With both Studielink and MyDUO you log in with DigiD, in fact, the Executive Agency of Education uses the data from Studielink to decide whether you are entitled to student finance. But they are different organizations, with different clients, and we don’t perform under the same orchestrator. Unfortunately.
From arrow to lemniscate
See, with examples like this, it already feels a little less big and a lot more concrete how you can think of, design and offer services with purpose.
“But,” I hear you thinking, “you can’t sit in the policy department’s chair as an executor, can you? If the Executive Agency of Education comes up with the student finance law, wow wow… What about Parliament, which also represents citizens, right?”
True. There is a big difference there between the public sector and the commercial sector. Government organizations need to look both ways, both at the citizen in the classroom and the citizen represented in politics. I still find this quite difficult and am doing considerable reading in the literature as to what this means for service design and delivery.
But I suspect that this strict separation between policy and implementation that we have very strongly in the Netherlands does not help. We should make the process of law to execution from a straight arrow from left to right to a lemniscate, an always continuous 8. Policy and implementation then are not so far apart, because devising and offering resources cannot be thought of in isolation, and certainly not without an understanding of how it plays out “in the classroom”.
I’ve tried it out with the education domain, which is nice and familiar to me. What would this look like around a topic like livelihood security? Around perspective on work, or care and health? And how do these domains overlap? That looks like a fun exercise for public service providers in the near future.
The report on act-ability: Bovens, M., Keizer, A. G., & Tiemeijer, W. (2017). Knowing is not yet doing: a realistic perspective on resilience (No. 97). Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR).
ISO standard on service excellence: ISO. (2021). ISO 23592 – Service excellence – Principles and model. Geneva, Switzerland, International Organization for Standardization.
Article on SD-logic with almost cult status: Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of marketing, 68(1), 1-17.
On this page you will see a list of books and articles I use in my research.
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