How Governments Can Design User Centered Service Interactions?
With the surge in digitization across the world with COVID-19, governments have a unique opportunity to design and deploy seamless government service interactions online that are centered around their citizen’s needs.
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- Oct 21, 2020
As the whole world is navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a sudden surge in the digitization of services in various industries across the globe. Governments across the world also had to adapt quickly to this new normal and swiftly figure out the digital delivery of their most accessed services.
Most government portals are heavily focussed on showcasing their programs and day-to-day operations till date. This along with the administrative layers across government agencies further enabled the scattering of the available online services across many websites and platforms. Of course, it certainly varies by jurisdiction, but more often than not, residents of a given city must visit disparate websites to find digital services. For example, this could entail visiting one site to pay a utility bill; another to check on the status of a business license; another to handle property taxes; and so on.
Residents often go to these portals to get a very specific job done for them and even with the best government websites, it’s often far too complex and highly time consuming to find and use the service you need.
Creating a User Centered Platform
Most of the platforms created have been heavily inclined on the feature sets they offer rather than the acutely focussing on the outcomes. In specific, the outcomes their residents or citizens want to get by using that given platform.
To create a platform that is outcome focussed around the user’s intentions, it is relevant to refer to a useful framework called “Jobs to Be Done”. It is a framework for better understanding customer behavior. Just like other online platforms we use on a daily basis for personal and business purposes, governments need to take a user centric approach which is enabling its residents to successfully get their jobs done through their digital experiences.
To put this in perspective for government services, what is needed is a single platform which enables its residents to get their jobs done and communicate with them on the specific services in a seamless way. Designing such a platform would also free them from precious human resource time, which can then be used to deliver personalized experience for those who aren’t able to navigate their platforms.
A Service Focussed Approach
Using a user centered and service first approach, a startup called Papergov is working to consolidate digital services and information across all government agencies on one easy-to-search platform. They launched last year in the United States which has more than 90,000 local government agencies and have serviced half a million users till date.
An interesting aspect to their offering is the Community Forum around these services, which makes it seamless for governments to give real-time updates and engage with their residents in the context of the services. It is a much focussed and personalized social interaction for both the parties & helps to constructively improve the services.
Their vision is to create a platform that enables governments to seamlessly enable their citizens to navigate through all services no matter whichever channel they choose (be it websites or apps or chatbots etc.)!
