Joe Lanman - Designer
Public Sector Services
1. Training
Better services start with the people making and delivering them.
Take training for example, we used to have great quality courses covering core skills like user centred design, prototyping, how to understand power and privilege.
2. Improve collaboration
Conway’s Law says “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”. So to provide good services, we have to have ways of collaborating effectively across different teams and departments.
3. Rethink assessments
Service assessments are crucial to maintaining consistent, high quality services. I’ve taken part in many, both as a team and panel member.
The current structure is to have an assessment for each stage. They are intense - packed into a few hours of presentation and questions.
I think a better structure would be more like an ongoing relationship between the team and experienced, trained assessors. That way the team would get ongoing input and the panel would be working with them towards a shared goal - a great service.
4. Engage with societal needs
Designing for user needs has been a great step forward, but I think we need to add societal, collective needs. How does a service affect people who arent using it directly? What about its affect on the environment or wider society?
We’ve always needed to have policy people working in the team - but this would really cement that need as policy may need to change as the team finds out more about the service, its users and wider impact.