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Public design needs to become institutionalized

Last week I was in Edinburgh at the Design Research Society conference. DRS is the largest international conference in the field of design research. And this time, there was also a special track dedicated to public design—my area of focus—that ran throughout the week.

I was there myself to present my paper on human-centered design in government. But I also attended a lot of other presentations, and I really enjoyed seeing what others were doing.

In no time at all, you’ll form a little group with other PhD students and researchers, and you’ll even have dinner with them after the presentations. Usually, I’m sitting alone at my desk working, so I don’t really get to see what other PhD students are working on. This time, there were researchers from Erasmus, Eindhoven, the VU, and, of course, a whole bunch from Delft.

In this blog post, I’ll share a brief overview of what I took away from the presentations.

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Public design seeks legitimacy

At a conference like this, an enormous number of papers are presented, so you quickly start looking for the ones that interest you most. My own research focuses on how human-centered design can be embedded in government as a method for creating services that benefit people.

That was also the topic of the paper I presented myself: “From Lab to Line: Mechanisms for Anchoring Human-Centered Design in Public Policy and Service Development.” I’ll be posting an easy-to-read summary on this blog soon. If you can’t wait, you can download it here.

I soon noticed a pattern in what I was taking away from the other presentations. They were all really about the same question: How can design gain legitimacy in the public sector?

So: Who is actually allowed to design here, on whose behalf, based on what, and how does that relate to policy, politics, institutions, and democratic decision-making?

The government operates within the framework of public values, political decisions, laws, implementing agencies with their own systems, lines of accountability, and people who cannot always choose whether or not to use a service. That is what makes public design interesting, but also complicated.

While in recent years the focus has often been on the differences between design and the civil service, and on how we can help civil servants work in a more “designer-like” way, the discussion now also turned to something else: how design itself must change to fit into the public sector.

Edinburgh – behind the scenes: the irresistible urge to head straight up a mountain as soon as you spot one.

Not another design gathering dust in a drawer

Geert Brinkman and Elke Wennekers from Erasmus Rotterdam presented a paper with the fantastic title: “Not another design that ends up in a drawer.” Their paper explores how designers try to gain legitimacy for the outcomes of their work—not just for the design approach itself, but for what results from it: a proposal, an intervention, a new process, or a new perspective on the problem. They identified various mechanisms designers use to achieve this. For example, by making something conceivable or by aligning with the language and values that people in the organization are already familiar with.

Designers sometimes think that the quality of their insights is enough on its own. “Look, this is what citizens are experiencing.” But in a public organization, such insights need to be put into practice somewhere. With a manager. In a policy process. In a decision-making chain. In a budget. In a team that will eventually have to implement it.

So a good design is not automatically a legitimate design. You must be able to explain why this design aligns with the organization’s mission, the law, the political mandate, and the people who will be working with it.

Viewing Design Through a Policy Lens

Another paper they wrote, together with Jotte de Koning and Arwin van Buuren, was about how to apply policy models to design. I thought that was an interesting twist. We often do it the other way around. We try to explain to policymakers what design is. Then we bring up “designerly ways of knowing,” double diamonds, reframing, co-creation, iteration, abduction, and prototypes. Using words like these often creates a sense of distance. It quickly turns into: “We designers are here to explain how the public sector needs to change.”

Elke explained that policymaking itself is also a form of design. You try to transform an existing situation into a desired one. You weigh values. You devise tools. You try to influence behavior, organizations, and systems. You work with uncertainty. You make choices without knowing everything for certain.

In the paper, they use perspectives from public administration to examine systemic design: rational, political, cultural, and institutional. This sheds light on why design sometimes clashes in policy contexts. For example, something must be substantiated and justifiable, align with interests and power dynamics, be meaningful to the groups involved, and fit within countries’ routines, rules, and existing ways of working.

Edinburgh – Behind the Scenes: We did it!

That evening, over dinner, we also talked about “silent design”: design that happens without anyone actually calling it design. I see that a lot in my own practice, too. Policymakers, implementers, and lawyers are constantly designing. They create regulations, forms, work processes, exceptions, consultation structures, service counters, letters, and dashboards. They just don’t usually call it “design.”

I previously wrote a blog post here titled “Silent Designers and Fluid Team Boundaries ” about how I see this concept of “silent design” reflected in my case study.

In short: sometimes designers don’t need to explain what design is more thoroughly, but rather need to better understand what policy is.

So what exactly does design contribute?

Amy Hyewon Lee from the UK presented a paper on how to understand the role of design in policymaking. This is an important question, because design is increasingly being used in policy contexts, but it remains difficult to demonstrate exactly what benefits it brings.

I recognize that, too. Sometimes you can point to a design approach that has brought about a change, but it’s almost never as simple as saying, “This one workshop made this policy better.” That’s not how policy works. And neither does design, for that matter.

Policy-making is messy. There are multiple influences at play simultaneously. Political timing. Media attention. Budget. Legislation. Organizations that may or may not go along with the changes. People who leave. People who keep pushing. A study that suddenly comes at just the right time. A prototype that suddenly shifts the conversation.

That is why Amy emphasizes the distinction between attribution and contribution. It’s not a matter of saying, “Design caused this.” Rather, it’s a matter of asking, “Where and how did design contribute?”

That’s a much better question. It takes design out of the realm of “just another fun method” and places it at the heart of the question of how policy is developed. Design then becomes a way to organize knowledge, collaboration, coherence, and change.

Public design needs to become more public

This theme also came up in other presentations. Saskia Pouwels from Eindhoven, for example, demonstrated (in a beautifully animated presentation) how citizen participation can get bogged down by project logic: there’s a schedule, a deadline, and a specific point in time by which “input” must be gathered, whereas people, communities, and democratic processes don’t always operate on a project timeline. My own paper, on the other hand, focused on how human-centered design can become part of the day-to-day operations of government organizations, moving beyond innovation labs and temporary projects.

Edinburgh—behind the scenes: there I was, standing in that little room.

In Edinburgh, I noticed that public design is shifting as a result. Design methods and a “designerly” approach remain relevant, but the conversation is broadening. It’s less and less about how to do design in the public sector, and more about how design should relate to legitimacy, policy, power, and democratic processes. I think that’s cool.

Because if designers in the public sector want to be taken seriously, we must do more than just demonstrate that we can work with empathy, creativity, and an iterative approach. We must also understand what public organizations are built on. Why legitimacy matters. Why political decisions are sometimes already made. Why implementation can’t simply deviate from the plan. Why accountability is necessary. And why “putting the user first” isn’t automatically the same as public value.

So perhaps the next step for public design isn’t for the public sector to learn to speak more like designers, but for designers to become bureaucrats—as we so elegantly put it in government circles.

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From the consequences of gas extraction to preventing debt: tips for the new Minister of Social Affairs

I even found a picture with both of us in it, lol

It’s funny when you follow a government official from one issue to the next. In this case, I’m talking about Hans Vijlbrief, the “Groningen guy” and now the new Minister of Social Affairs. It’s especially nice when a government official like that acknowledges that his views have changed, and he brings that new way of thinking and working to other issues—especially when you’re in the midst of writing your dissertation on that very approach.

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Five years ago, I worked for the National Ombudsman and investigated the consequences of natural gas extraction. Our recommendation to the cabinet at the time was to appoint a separate minister to address the problems in Groningen. That minister turned out to be Vijlbrief.

Right from the start, he decided to hold monthly office hours in Groningen. At the ministry, they thought this was a crazy and unsafe idea, he writes in his book about that time. Still, he pressed on, and in the months that followed, he spoke with many people who were dealing with damage to their homes and the need to reinforce them.

After leaving my position at the Ombudsman’s office, I volunteered at the Groninger Gasberaad. There, I saw firsthand how these discussions helped build trust in Groningen. This allowed Vijlbrief to gauge public reaction to policy ideas at an early stage among the people who would be directly affected by them.

Listening to the soft voice

Around that time, I shifted my focus to the debt sector myself; I began my doctoral research in late 2022. As a case study, I then spent 2.5 years working with the Clustering Rijksincasso (CRI) partnership, which has been part of Vijlbrief’s portfolio since this week. At CRI, I investigated how the government can design policies and services with a human-centered approach: involving users, thoroughly understanding the context in which the services are used, devising solutions iteratively, and then testing those solutions with the people who will actually use them. As you can see, there’s an overlap with what Vijlbrief was experimenting with in Groningen.

In his book, Vijlbrief writes about his motto, “listening to the soft voice,” noting that he “has been changed as a person and as a politician by Groningen” and that “that lesson has broader applications.” Amen, brother. In my research, I see how listening to people can be made the standard approach for policy and public services within the government.

So, for him—and all the new ministers and state secretaries—here are 5 insights from my research to help them get off to a flying start in the coming cabinet term.

First: What is human-centered design?

Human-centered design is an approach to work in which you create something from the perspective of the people who will use it. Their experiences, needs, and context are not the end goal but rather the starting point for decision-making.

It means that you don’t just check whether a service is legally sound or technically functional, but also examine how policy plays out in everyday life. You make assumptions explicit, involve users early and repeatedly, explore tensions between rules and reality, and iteratively adapt solutions based on what you learn.

Human-centered design, in theory

In my research, I use the ISO standard for human-centered design. It outlines six principles, which I have previously discussed in detail on this blog, along with examples from my research:

How I Conducted My Research

At CRI, I worked for 2.5 years as an action researcher, collaborating with various teams that developed services for citizens with payment arrears, such as “Mijn Betaaloverzicht” and the “Betalingsregeling Rijk.” I observed how they gathered feedback from the field, used it to address collection and debt recovery services, and established partnerships with other organizations in the chain. I saw how they realized they needed a new mandate, funding, and policy. So, as a researcher, I followed them from implementation to policy, delved into political communication alongside them, and even interviewed a member of parliament.

I was allowed to observe everything and kept a detailed journal. The research could be (and still can be) followed through my monthly newsletter, in which I transparently reflected on every step.

Then there is the implicit question that Vijlbrief asked himself in his book: How can his lessons from Groningen be applied more broadly? Or, as I would like to phrase it in my dissertation: How can you design with people in mind within a complex political-administrative system?

1. Make it the norm to engage users

At the ministry, they initially thought it was a very unwise idea for Vijlbrief to hold office hours in Groningen. Can you really guarantee safety? What if, by listening and showing people things, you end up raising their expectations? In government, we find it very nerve-wracking to just strike up a conversation with people. As a user researcher working on my PhD, I’ve run into this myself many times.

But if we don’t talk to people, we have no idea what they need, and we can’t create something that meets those needs either.

In my research, I noticed that it was standard practice for the Mijn Betaaloverzicht team to meet with potential users every 3 weeks and publish their feedback openly. Mijn Betaaloverzicht is a digital application that allows citizens to view their payment arrears in a single overview and will become available to an initial group of users in 2026. Testing with real people is part of a regular work routine and makes it second nature to base decisions on user insights.

To make this the norm, there are two things you can do as a minister.

  • Talk to the target audience yourself and ask your employees to actively seek out feedback and pass it on to you. After all, if the minister asks for it, everyone will spring into action.
  • Give people the authority and freedom to adjust processes so that it doesn’t stop at occasional feedback. More on that in the third point.

2. Establish a mandate for usage preferences

Knowing what people need is important, but that doesn’t mean you can just act on that knowledge. To do so, implementing organizations need a mandate. And no one is better suited to secure that mandate than a government official.

You’ve already sent your people out into the field; now what they learn there needs to have an impact on policy. Compile the insights, back them up with data, and then bring them into the political conversation yourself: in the Cabinet, in a letter to Parliament, and in debates. Then give the implementing agencies a formal mandate (and funding) to act on the basis of those insights.

Here’s an example: as the CJIB began handling more and more debt collection cases on behalf of other organizations, they noticed that some citizens had overlapping debts. Someone might have both a health insurance payment in arrears and a traffic fine or an overdue student loan. This overlap could cause people to fall further and further behind.

To gain a better understanding of this, the CJIB asked the CBS to use data from service providers to assess the extent of this problem, which resulted in this dashboard. By making the overlap so clear, the minister at the time was able to put the issue on the agenda, and a political mandate to address this problem was inevitable. That worked out well, because the CJIB, DUO, and CAK were actually already prepared with a first version of a joint payment plan, for which they needed a mandate to offer it to citizens.

3. Take small steps

An iterative approach is essential if you want policies and services to align with users’ lived experiences. You only know if something works once you test it, and through testing, you often discover things you need to do differently. An iterative approach is therefore also uncertain. You don’t know in advance what something will be like when it’s finished. You take a first small step, and then immediately make adjustments. What if you already said “A” in a letter to Parliament, and now, after a round of testing, it turns out that “B” is actually better? This uncertainty makes it difficult for many policymakers to “steer” the process.

It works well if you agree in advance that uncertainty is okay and that everything doesn’t have to be finalized all at once. In my research, I found that—especially in projects involving policy changes—progress often stalled during lengthy coordination rounds. To keep the momentum going, the team working on the joint payment scheme scheduled a fixed annual meeting for policy updates at a certain point. This allowed them to take a step forward each year, created space to systematically incorporate user insights, and enabled the program to be expanded each year to include more and more organizations and citizens.

Don’t expect major “big bang” moments. Embrace the process of taking small steps. In fact, get actively involved and adopt an iterative approach to politics as well.

I realized that small, tangible results were more effective than long-term plans. Small steps were easier to “align” with the overall strategy, provided room for practical testing, and made the next step seem logical, because: this is how we do it now. The same mechanism worked politically as well: through letters to the Stas or the House of Representatives, operational steps also became political realities.

This is learning by doing. By linking each step to what has been proven to work in practice, you continually renew your mandate. Members of Parliament cannot see what happens within the government, but they can see what actually reaches people at home. Once a small step has been taken, you can build on it, as was the case with the expansion of MijnBetaaloverzicht to more government agencies through the Kat/Kathmann motion. This is a next step the team can tackle.

4. Make decisions based on the citizen’s overall experience

In Groningen, the case file consisted of an administrative tangle involving two ministries, multiple implementing agencies, national and local government, and all sorts of other parties that were entangled in and around the issue. It’s no different for people in debt. There are now sometimes multiple government agencies competing with one another to collect debt from the same person. This often only makes people’s problems worse, as I saw when I spent a day shadowing a bailiff.

The goal of the “Clustering Rijksincasso” program is for creditors to simplify this tangled web into a single, clear relationship between citizens and the government. Each citizen is one person and has one wallet.

1 government – 1 service – 1 government collection

To break down this fragmentation, we must design with the user’s entire experience in mind. This requires collaboration across legislative frameworks, funding streams, and lines of accountability. Tools such as the CBS dashboard help make the shared problem visible and unite decision-makers around a single vision. But the larger the scale, the more demanding the coordination and political maintenance required to maintain coherence.

Take the citizens’ overall experience as your starting point and make decisions that span different domains. Choose organizational structures that can orchestrate this design process like a conductor.

I find it very promising that Vijlbrief has taken on “separate” policy issues such as the right to exist, purchasing power, poverty, and debt.

5. Implement changes directly in the production line

We often set up new ways of working as separate projects so that the core operations remain protected. In the public sector, we can’t afford to follow the tech bro motto “go fast and break things.” That’s why we often feel the need to ensure that innovation and change are completely safe before we implement them.

In my research, I found that combining these approaches works well. Safe lab settings provide room for exploration, citizen engagement, and generating new ideas. But this lab setting shouldn’t be too safe or isolated, because then it won’t reach the public. To achieve that, you have to work as closely as possible to the front lines: to translate results into policy, systems, and (political) accountability. And so that citizens can actually apply for a new program or, for example, view their payment statement on their phone.

People-centered design requires innovative settings that aren’t too safe and policy implementation processes that aren’t too rigid. Create space for learning within the process to bring about change in small steps.

Continue reading?

This summer, the first of two academic articles using the Rijksincasso clustering project as a case study will be published, in which I will share the insights mentioned above in detail, among other things. If you’d like to receive it in your email (along with the accessible summary) as soon as it’s published, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Other recommended reading:

  • Hans Vijlbrief (2024). The People of Groningen Were Always Right, Prometheus Publishing.
  • Trust alone is not enough. Summary of the first article from my PhD thesis on eight years of practical experience in public service. Topics include the student loan system, the CoronaMelder app, and how civil servants make well-considered decisions.
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How Services Add Value

When is a service valuable? For example, if someone can apply for, change, or cancel a benefit without getting stuck, then we’re doing it right. Find the right button. Complete the application. Money in the account. That’s valuable, right?

In conversations with former students when I worked at DUO, I sometimes noticed something strange. People didn’t just want to talk about their student debt and how to manage it through the portal; they also wanted to talk about their mortgage and whether they’d be able to buy a house “later on.” My immediate reaction back then was: I understand, but that’s not our area of expertise. That’s not part of our service.

I’m currently conducting scientific research on how to create valuable government services. I now view it differently. A while back, I conducted a survey among the readers of my newsletter. I asked them to tell me about one recent service they had used and what benefits it provided them. Their responses clearly reveal the various layers of value that services provide—or, conversely, undermine.

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A stack of value

“I recently switched health insurance plans. I wanted to save money and found one that was cheaper. Switching was very easy; everything was clear. With the money I’m saving, I can now do fun things, and I’m still well insured in case something happens.”

As you can see, this service has a multi-faceted impact. The switch itself was a positive experience. And the results were positive: more money left over and good insurance coverage.

But that’s not always how it works. A service can provide value to you in the here and now, but come at a cost to society. And vice versa: some services are difficult, but so important that people struggle through them anyway, so they can still create value for themselves. (It’s a shame we put them through that, but oh well.)

Different layers

I cover more aspects in my PhD research, but for this blog post, I’ll highlight a few of them with some examples.

1. How you experience it

Was it a good experience, or not? Were you able to achieve the goal for which you used the service? Once you’ve struggled your way through a form, you may have technically checked off your task, but you’re also pretty annoyed.

“I still had to contact the city. This online form felt like an unnecessary detour because a real person probably could have told me this in less than 5 minutes.”

Testing screens online with users.

This first layer is the direct interaction between the organization and the service user. When this interaction doesn’t go well, it directly affects your perception of that organization. This is usually the standard UX (user experience) that we focus on in the public sector—and the one over which you, as a designer, have the most direct influence.

2. How you can use it in your life

Look, ultimately, it’s all about how a service fits into your life. Nobody buys a new washing machine just to look at it. No, you want clean clothes!

“I participated in the breast cancer screening program. I received an invitation in the mail along with an informational brochure, and I made an appointment online at a nearby location. After the appointment, I received the results in writing.” Of course, my goal was to prevent myself from getting breast cancer.”

In academia, this layer is also referred to as “value-in-use.” And “use” here does not mean using a portal or service counter, but rather using the service in your daily life. Using the child care subsidy so you can work, using student aid to pay your tuition or rent, or not just applying for a permit, but looking out the window of your new dormer with a cup of coffee in hand.

This is where the government really needs to deliver. It’s great if your website is user-friendly, but ultimately, it’s all about delivering on your promises.

3. What You’ll Learn for the Future

Some services teach you a few tricks for next time. Your ability to handle certain tasks on your own later on—like filing your tax return—improves. You now know how it works. For services you only use once—like when you apply for a permit for a dormer window once every 10 years—this isn’t necessarily needed.

But consider young people who have their first experience with a government office at DUO (student financial aid) or the RDW (driver’s license) and learn there how interacting with the government actually works.

Colleagues at DUO reflect on the connection they have with students.

4. How it affects the people around you

You may be the one who arranged everything and actually uses the service. The benefits usually extend beyond just yourself. Often, financial assistance you can receive from the government applies to your entire household. Or conversely, if your daughter can set up a payment plan for a debt, that also gives you, as a parent, peace of mind.

“My father-in-law passed away, and I had to report it. Fortunately, the process was straightforward, even though he was abroad when it happened. This saved our whole family a lot of hassle during a difficult time.”

During last year’s flood, a quay in Valkenburg collapsed and has now been temporarily repaired by the Water Board. The building on the right is vacant, and its facade is still leaning dangerously downward.

The value that a service can provide can also help your neighbors, the entire street or neighborhood, or another group you belong to. Consider the response to the floods in Limburg in 2021, which I wrote about earlier. There are several streets here where, at almost every address, someone is filling out all kinds of forms or on the phone with government agencies. They’ve all been through something together, and one person’s experience with government services (and the results!) influences the experience of others.

5. How it contributes to society

Of course, this is what many policy officials are concerned with. This is being debated in parliament and local council chambers. What kind of society do we want to be?

“I went for a blood test to find out if I can have another round of chemo tomorrow. My value to society… Oh, that’s a tough one. I’m costing society a lot of money with this treatment. But it does give me a better chance of getting better and, hopefully, being able to do useful things for society for many years to come?”

And that’s exactly right—access to medical care and a healthy population are, of course, a one-on-one social value!

Connected Layers

Of course, these aspects are not separate from one another. Accessible education requires that young people be able to afford school—and thus, for example, be able to apply for individual student financial aid. And every young person who attends school is one more person who, when added to the rest, contributes to a society where talents are put to good use.

But the difficult question is: how do you design for all those layers? Policy usually focuses on the group and the broader goals for society. And when designing interactions—such as service counters and forms—you typically do so by testing with “the user.”

How do you ensure that what we think is “good for people” actually gets created and also proves to be good for people in practice? Both for individuals and for the group?

And that brings me to two questions:

  • What layers of meaning does your work actually explore?
  • And how far do you think your influence and responsibility extend?

Want to read more?

  • I explored this concept of value earlier in the blog post: ” The Value Is in the Classroom.“
  • This article describes some of the value dimensions I used in my research: Osborne, S. P., Nasi, G., & Powell, M. (2021). Beyond Co-production: Value Creation and Public Services. Public Administration, 99(4), 641–657.
  • I wrote an initial guide on how to design for that entire experience—and thus its various layers of value—in the blog post: “Start with Your Target Audience’s Entire Experience.”
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Recap 2025

Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash

I’ve been writing a year-in-review post every December, and for three years in a row now, it’s been about my PhD research on government services that benefit people.

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I’ve never done such an in-depth analysis before, and I think we can sum up the blog post about 2025 pretty well with this meme. But—spoiler alert—this year ends on a very positive note!

Fun meme
Fun meme

I’ve lost my naivety by now. Doing a PhD is tough—mentally, academically, and sometimes physically, too. But this year, something has changed, thankfully. I’m spending less time searching and more time choosing. I no longer want to do everything; now, I mainly want to finish what I’ve started.

Start of the Year

2025 began with me trying to shake off a mental and analytical hangover from the fall of 2024. I was stuck in my data analysis. Not because I didn’t have enough data—quite the opposite—but because I’d lost track of the big picture. Too many codes, too many layers, too many things that were interesting but didn’t yet help me draw clear conclusions. I had no idea how to proceed, and my spirits sank at the thought of having to go through that enormous mountain of data all over again.

I started the new year with a new coding framework. No longer just data-driven, but also incorporating insights and frameworks from the literature. I applied this right away to the two articles I wanted to write about the field. For one, I used the ISO standard “Human-Centered Design” as a guide. For the other, based on the literature, I created an overview of everything that needs to be coordinated within the government when developing services, as the Clustering Rijksincasso program (my case study) does. I combined this with the phases of the program itself, which I had already identified from the first round of data analysis.

Now that I’m writing this down, I think, okay, this is actually pretty well put together. But it was a huge challenge to get there. And especially to then go through all the diaries, interviews, and documents again using this new analytical framework. Up until the summer, I very disciplined scheduled 2–3 documents each week to code using this new approach. As a result, just before summer, the dataset was neatly prepared for further analysis while I was writing the two articles.

Spring

This spring, Aniek, my fellow PhD student from Delft (who defended her dissertation last week!!), caught the writing bug to finish her papers and dissertation. She’s a year ahead of me, and her writing bug was contagious.

Since I already had more than enough data, I gradually started taking a step back from the day-to-day work. I still contributed to projects, but not on a weekly basis anymore, and I certainly wasn’t writing everything down anymore. (Because then you don’t have to code it either, hey, hey!). I dusted off the conceptual framework we’d started working on back in 2024, but which had been on hold for a while. I wanted to finish writing that one first.

Conceptual articles are a genre of their own: everything has to add up, every term has to fit into place, and there aren’t really any rules or templates for their structure. Before the summer, I managed to get the framework itself and the underlying rationale fairly well defined, but in terms of positioning and structure, it remained too broad and lacked focus.

In hindsight, I think I should have structured the literature review more simply. Developing your own conceptual framework is also ambitious for a PhD, especially when combined with an ongoing 2.5-year ethnographic study in the field. But anyway: once the truck is up to speed, you don’t turn it around halfway across the road.

No loose sheets lying around—everything is organized in booklets and properly numbered

Just before summer, I decided to stop collecting data altogether. I put the collection on hold. Even though some really interesting things were happening, I’d had enough. This brought a lot of peace of mind. Of course, I still helped colleagues out with things from time to time, but I no longer had to be on high alert, wondering if I’d need to use that information for my research. It gave me the space to really start writing after the summer.

Summer

I’d been experiencing some strange physical symptoms for quite some time. But when I was walking through the French mountains during my vacation, completely pain-free, and especially when all the symptoms came back very quickly within two weeks of sitting at my laptop again, I knew enough. I was no longer able to properly release the stress that had built up in my body. I had trained myself to push through for too long out of discipline, to let my mind override my body, or to stay in the right frame of mind: the debt had gotten way out of hand, and by then the bailiff was already at my doorstep. Even as I write this blog, I’m reading again in the 2024 recap: “vacations fall by the wayside.”

Most people I tell this to say, “Yeah, that’s just part of doing a PhD.” But why, exactly? Why do we find it so normal for PhD students to consistently push themselves beyond their limits?

Boundaries

After the summer, I decided I didn’t want to keep going like that. So I’ll aim a little lower—a shorter book—but I don’t want to burn myself out. The dissertation doesn’t have to cover everything I’ll ever want to say about good public services. Above all, it just has to be good enough —and finished.

Here it is, for anyone interested in the table of contents.

Autumn

In the fall, I traveled to Sweden again to work with one of my advisors. There, we took another look at the positioning of the conceptual article. The content remained largely the same, but the structure was simplified. Fewer layers, fewer claims, and a clearer focus. I’ll be working on this further in the coming months, with the tentative goal of submitting it in the spring of 2026. Will I succeed? No idea. We’ll see.

By the stove
Writing Attic
Stockholm

And so, the milestone for 2025 was finally reached: the first practice paper was completed, along with Chapter 4 of the dissertation.

Since I had all the data ready again before summer, I was able to make real progress with a new focus and a healthier daily routine. I forced myself to keep it simple. No all-encompassing narrative, no comprehensive theoretical paper, but one clear analysis that’s good enough. This could potentially be expanded into a journal paper later— a nice-to-have—but for now, the most important thing was to finish something and submit it.

I benefited immensely from the work I had done before the summer. Since all the data had already been recoded, the building blocks were in place. Sometimes it seems as if there’s little progress for months on end, and then suddenly everything falls into place. Earlier this year, for example, I wrote a blog series on the principles of people-centered work, mainly to reflect on them myself. I’ve now been able to incorporate those ideas into the article in a much more comprehensive and analytical way.

Looking back

It’s too early to ask whether I would do it again—a PhD. I sincerely believe you have to approach it with a sense of naivety; otherwise, you won’t do it. In the guide for civil servants pursuing a PhD that I wrote this year, I tried to be honest without getting too negative. It really is special that I get to do this research, that it’s so socially relevant, and that I’m given so much freedom.

But: limits, limits, limits. Looking back, I shouldn’t have attempted both an extensive conceptual piece and a 2.5-year ethnographic field study at the same time. Both are enormously challenging in their own right and require completely different research approaches.

2026 will be my last year. I have only one goal: to submit my dissertation to the thesis committee. So don’t call me. Not until 2027. After a loooong vacation.

Categories
How do you do research? Promoklip

More PhDs in government? Yass, please!

Photo by Aliaksei Lepik via Unsplash

Yesterday, people from all over sent me a job posting for a PhD position at the Benefits Service. It felt like I was reading my own job description! I started my PhD research in 2022 as a civil servant, focusing on how the government can create services that benefit people—specifically, in how it collects debt.

I do know other civil servants who are also pursuing a Ph.D., but what makes this position—and, let’s face it, my job—special is that the research isn’t something you do on the side; it’s actually your job in practice. That’s valuable for the government (the ability to drive change and gain new insights), for science (unique access to data), and for the Ph.D. candidate themselves (a unique learning experience).

I’ve been working on my research for three years now. Not through a job posting, but by pitching my own proposal and teaming up with DUO and CJIB. You can read all about it on this blog. I see this as a tremendous opportunity, so here are a few tips for anyone who’s interested in this position—or similar ones in the future.

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Fun meme
Fun meme

A Catalyst for Change

I already noticed this during my master’s research: some issues are difficult to bring up within an organization. Sometimes it’s even impossible to bring them to light. But as soon as an external institution is involved, and you, as a researcher, also have academic obligations, something changes.

It lends legitimacy. You can ask questions that might otherwise be too sensitive. You’re given the space to reflect on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug. And you can bring up topics that are important to citizens but that often don’t receive the highest priority amid the hustle and bustle of daily life. So that academic perspective not only helps you conduct in-depth research but also opens doors.

One of the biggest challenges facing government organizations today is to operate and organize from the citizens’ perspective—and to combine this with democratic processes, deeply ingrained organizational practices, and automation. Science often doesn’t have an answer to this (yet). So it’s really cool for both sides when a researcher is allowed to delve so deeply into an organization and publish scientific findings about it.

But it’s not your typical PhD research

And it’s not just an ordinary job in practice, either.

I find that the hardest part of this combination is balancing my work in the field as an action researcher with my role as a scholar. When I started, I thought I’d be fully immersed in fieldwork and then write about it on Fridays. In reality, it’s the other way around. I spend at least three-quarters of my time reading, writing, analyzing data, taking courses, and drafting my articles. These are all things I don’t need to be physically present at the organization to do. In fact, being there often just distracts me from them.

I often feel guilty toward the team because I should be there more often and help out more—“after all, it is action research”—and there’s so much going on that I feel I could contribute to. At the same time, my role on the team is to conduct scientific research, and I need to have a dissertation ready in a year.

So you’re constantly choosing between acting now and taking a step back to invest in your dissertation for the long term.

Action shot! Featuring beautifully designed teaching materials by my design partner Reinout Tiekstra

By now, I could probably fill three dissertations with what I see and hear at Clustering Rijksincasso, my case study, but even one is complicated enough. The real value lies not in piling up more and more observations and interventions, but in analyzing, interpreting, and publishing patterns and decisions. So it’s not just about the action, but also—and especially—about the research, and both you and the organization have to get used to that.

They’re also supposed to protect you a little (and you should protect yourself, too)

I have a wonderful manager at DUO (the organization that is my sponsor for the entire four years) who regularly asks how I’m doing —not just about my doctoral research. At the CJIB (where I’m doing research on secondment for two years), I have a supervisor who gives me complete freedom to organize my work myself, in terms of both time and content. At TU Delft, I have two advisors who keep a close eye on me to ensure I fulfill my academic responsibilities and don’t take on too many practical tasks. And at home, I have a wonderful husband who, at some point, asks if I’m coming to dinner, and after dinner, I make sure not to work anymore.

Working with the team

A practice-based Ph.D. sounds dynamic and free, but without clear boundaries, you run the risk of getting overwhelmed by academic ambition, practical data, and the conflicting interests of the organizations involved. It is therefore essential to establish clear agreements from the outset: regarding your role, your academic freedom, and confidentiality (and especially: the waiver of that confidentiality as a civil servant, so that you can actually publish your work).

Such an explicit demarcation is not a bureaucratic detail, but a prerequisite for a doctoral candidate to survive.

Start a journal

In practice, you’re never just a researcher. Sometimes you’re in a meeting as a consultant, sometimes in a workshop as a designer, and sometimes just hanging out with colleagues at the coffee machine. Those roles are valuable, but also tricky: before you know it, you’re seen primarily as a consultant, and your academic side fades into the background. Remember that no matter what role you’re in, you’re always a researcher, too.

So start keeping a journal from day one. Write down what happens, and keep your calendar up to date so you can easily look up specific moments in time. Everything that happens is ✨data✨, and you’ll be glad later on if you record it properly. Don’t write long passages; keep it short and to the point. Record conversations—just be sure to ask for permission first. This goes especially for group conversations—they’re often very interesting.

No loose sheets lying around—everything is organized in booklets and properly numbered

And make sure you can easily find everything right from the start. Otherwise, you’ll soon lose track of what caused what, and what your own influence was, and it’ll all turn into a big mess. It’s bound to happen anyway, and then your calendar and journal will be the guide that leads you blindly back into that data swamp.

More tips for Ph.D. students

Get to know your advisors beforehand. You’ll be working with them for four years, and they’re responsible, along with you, for the success of the project. You’ll want to know in advance whether you click with them. Read some of their work and see if you find what they do and how they work interesting.

If possible, keep your steering group small. The more people and organizations there are, the more interests you’ll have to manage. And you’re the one who has to go back and forth between them, coordinating on working methods and draft articles. Make clear agreements and don’t let it drive you crazy. Take the lead.

Learn to say no. Say no to more data, to contributing ideas to a project, to working at the office when you’d rather be at school or have a quieter desk at home, to lunch meetings (except with friends), to your advisors if other opportunities come up. And say no to yourself if you want more, but remember that less is also enough for a fantastic dissertation.

Don’t tell too many people that you’re going to do this. And definitely don’t start a newsletter or blog where you have to think every month about what to tell your readers, while you’re making zero progress, have no idea how to move forward, and are considering opening a nail salon. Give yourself time to fail and figure out how to move forward. Call your advisors. Or your mom. But above all, don’t start a newsletter.

Tips for Organizations

Don’t view the Ph.D. candidate as a consultant or extra pair of hands, but as a researcher who will truly be of value to you once the dissertation is published. In practice, it’s not quite so black and white—especially in action research, where you learn together through hands-on experience. The Ph.D. candidate brings new insights to the research, and the team can put those insights to use right away. Still, in my experience, it’s very helpful to view the researcher as an added resource, so that the academic goals remain the top priority and aren’t overshadowed. So be sure to give the researcher the space to be away from the field for weeks at a time to process data and write papers.

Despite that exception, make the Ph.D. student a 100% part of the team. Invite them to after-work drinks, the team party, and add them to the department’s contact list. First of all, it’s necessary to be able to conduct research from the inside out and thus gain full access. Colleagues are more open, willing to share information, and include PhD students when this sense of team spirit is present. It improves the research. But it’s also just nice. Without my teammates at CRI, I would have thrown my laptop out the window long ago.

I love these people so much

I hope the government will create many more places like this. There is still so much to explore and learn. And it is precisely by not keeping that knowledge within organizations but sharing it with the scientific community that we can all benefit from it.

Continue reading?

Categories
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.

Categories
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.
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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