The Rise of the Citizen Experience
Why The Future of Citizen Engagement Is All About The Experience.
Since 1996, the Center for Digital Government and Government Technology magazine have run a popular awards program called the Best of Web. Launched in the pioneer days of the web, we created the program to inspire and benchmark state and local governments embrace of the Internet — something that became known as the e-government movement.
Today, 20 years later, governments have clearly made big strides in leveraging technology to enhance the relationship between agencies and citizens. In addition to a ubiquitous government web presence, public agencies have developed award-winning social media programs, hired civic engagement coordinators, built custom apps and more. Clearly tech-powered citizen and civic engagement has become a big deal.
Yet as far as this field has come, there remains a long way to go. So in an effort to focus on what we see as the next generation of government service, we have launched our first ever Government Experience Awards — to help benchmark and evolve the experience of government.
Why Focus on Experience
The problem with focusing on civic engagement alone is that we tend to quantify success based on the channels we are on and by evaluating how many Twitter followers, Facebook likes or website visitors we have. Likes, followers and page views are important metrics, but they miss the real opportunity to change the underlying government and citizen relationship. What if that Twitter feed or Facebook follower is not the most effective experience to reach our citizens? These are hard questions we must be able to ask ourselves and adapt accordingly. It is time to evolve our focus in government from civic engagement to the citizen experience.
The Citizen Experience
Citizen Experience — The interactions between government and citizens across multiple channels that create mutual value.
Every day, millions of us will browse Facebook’s newsfeed, select a movie to watch online or order a product — what is hidden under the surface of these experiences is that they are all built around us, and that level of customization is beginning to affect the government experience. A few years ago, Paul W. Taylor and I began researching these interactions and came to the realization that citizen experiences with private sector technologies are actually shaping their expectations for government service delivery. It’s actually the same dynamics that fueled the spread of e-government on the Internet (where everyone needed a website), now applied to an exponentially changing technology and behavior landscape online.
Today, government agencies don’t just need a website — they need to be available at City Hall; through the Amazon Echo; on a responsive website; and through a kiosk in a grocery store — they need to be available everywhere at any time.
Building the Experience
There are tons of great resources for building user experience available online, but building an experience in government is unique and takes a new perspective. In the first-ever Government Experience Academy, we released a new experience model for government agencies to leverage for citizen-centered design.
First, you will notice the model starts with the end user (citizen, business or employees) in the middle — this is a critical paradigm shift of focus. Now, let’s break down the other layers in their respective orders:
Experience Layer — This is a layer of abstraction for the application or service typically in the form of an experience ‘channel’. It could be a third-party app, social media page, kiosk or even the city’s website.
Application/Service Layer — This is the layer where your application or service resides (i.e., an online utility bill payment). Today, this is what the end-users have to try to find when browsing your website.
Infrastructure/Data Layer — This is the infrastructure and data layer (i.e., System of Record), where the experience and transactions are performed.
Below is how these layers connect if I were to ask Amazon’s Alexa if I have paid my taxes yet (unfortunately, this functionality isn’t real yet). The important thing to note here is that my experience with government abstracts the actual service layer — I can just ask with my voice. This, my friends, is the future.
Designing For the Experience
Designing for the citizen experience also requires a new way to look at user-design specific to government, we call this the Government Experience Model, and it can be applied to online and offline projects.
Now, let’s break down each step of this process:
- Customer (Re)Definition: As a starting point, you must identify who your customer(s) are (i.e., businesses, citizens, nonprofits) and define their unique attributes. Each time you go through an experience loop, you must reevaluate who your customers are and validate or reassess their attributes. Free Tool: Buyer Persona Canvas
- Landscape & Process Analysis: During this phase ,you must analyze the landscape and processes associated with your customer (defined in the previous step). You want to identify the current ways that your customers (or potential customers) access your agency’s services online and offline. After completing this process, you will need to evaluate the wider landscape to see how other agencies and even private sector companies are structuring similar processes. Free Tool: Government Experience Process Canvas
- Problem Definition: During this phase, you must identify process gaps (i.e., problems) through user testing & feedback collection, data analysis, and process mapping. Free Tool: IDEO Design Challenge Framing
- Solution Identification & Testing: During this phase, you will identify potential solutions to address the problem and enhance the user experience. Free Tool: Business Model Canvas
- Implementation or Queuing: Before implementation, it is critical to pilot, A/B test, and evaluate potential solutions to gain a better understanding of their overall impacts. Once you have enough data to validate your solution and its ability to solve the initial problem identified, it is time to plan your implementation to all your users through your experience roadmap. Free Tool: Trello
- Measurement & Adaptation: The last phase is centered around measuring your solution and its impact on the original problem or gap that was identified. It is important to have enough data on the initial problem in order to evaluate and measure a solution’s effectiveness. Free Tool: Google Analytics
It’s important to remember that these steps make up an ongoing process called an experience loop — that should be continuously repeated to maximize value.
Where We Go From Here
Shifting your focus to experience is not an overnight task. It requires rethinking and retraining your organization to design around your end user needs in all things — not just technology. At our first annual Government Experience Awards, we were inspired to see many agencies that have already developed robust strategies around user experience and we hope this new methodology will accelerate their momentum. For agencies just beginning the process, regardless of your agency size or function, remember this is a collective journey we are all on in government; we cannot wait to see what you are able to accomplish when you begin designing for the experience.
