A blog post about our Helsinki conference and other International Design in Government activities is around the corner. I finished writing and editing it this week. Once Kara is back from her annual leave, we can prepare it for publication.
I made new posters for the conference’s post and further promotion. The design follows Stephen’s from our 2018 London conference. The Helsinki conference got a simplified logo, though. It’s the second logo variant I created, following the animation I did for last year’s 24-hour conference.
With the agenda detailing, I will make further edits to the conference website in the coming days. In Friday’s conference organising call, we also mentioned additional printed material, like programme handouts.
Doing all community things at once
Apart from supporting the Helsinki conference, I confirmed all speakers for next Thursday’s call, call number 35. We will discuss ‘designing justice services’.
We will hear from Spain and the United Kingdom, and my colleague Ellen will talk about our work on justice services. It’s timely as we now have two justice services live.
Next Thursday, 22 August, we are running int’l #GovDesign call #35. It’s all about designing justice services. We’ll hear from and see work from colleagues from Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. 🇩🇪🇪🇸🇬🇧 Join the call & our global community if you’re a public servant: international.gov-design.com
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 16, 2024 at 7:55
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We haven’t organised a call for a specific service area in years. We should do that more often, as it brings people and their work together. Last time, when we ran a call on ‘designing employment services,’ the presenters from Finland, Norway, and Sweden were excited and puzzled as their work closely overlapped.
We have plenty of topics and content for each topic to return to monthly calls throughout the remaining months of the year. We better get dates in our calendars and schedule them all. There’s much to share and discuss.
We got the timing a little wrong. On Thursday, we will run the next local meetup right after the international call—with only 30 minutes in between. That’s not ideal, but there is almost no overlap in the audience, so it does not matter—apart from me, as I have to change locations.
The topic is ‘Creating better policies’. I am looking forward to hearing from Rojda about her public legal design work, and my colleagues Mike and Sabrina will discuss the latest development work around digital-ready legislation. If things work out, we will also hear from local Berlin colleagues about their neighbourhood engagement and hyper-local policy work.
As Head of Design, I haven’t done ‘design design’ in years. Instead, I help others do good design work. But sometimes, I have a design itch. Luckily, there is the occasional event poster to do – like this one for next week’s meetup. I’m just glad for such an opportunity.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 15, 2024 at 16:47
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I designed the poster for the event, which always seems like a scary black box to me. I never know when, how, or where the idea for the next poster comes from. This time, I cycled to work and suddenly thought of stacking things, integrating Sherry Arnstein’s ‘Ladder of Citizen Participation’ from 1969. While designing the poster for every meetup is daunting each time, it’s a good way to keep training the underdeveloped graphic design muscle a little.
A few days later, on Tuesday, 3 September, I’m also co-hosting the cross-public sector gathering for user-centred design folk in Germany. The topic will be ‘Designing good forms’. I am curious to hear from our colleagues in Cologne at the city’s innovation office and Bavarian colleagues in Munich about their work on simplified tax forms.
I’m also trying to integrate some Service Standard review work into our NExT user-centred design community and other NExT communities that directly link to standard points. From the work on the British Service Standard and GOVUK Service Manual, I know how vital community work is for standards and guidance. So, I’d be a fool not to build on NExT’s resourceful setup.
Preparing new projects and assembling teams
For years, I’ve described staffing as Tetris on level 9 and a task that never turns into business as usual. It probably can’t and never should. Staffing is about matching people with each other and a piece of work that should fit their skills, experiences, and interests.
That is why, whenever someone asks me if they can work on a specific project that seems like a good fit, I ensure they get to work on that project. I only wish the right projects came along when certain people were available. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
It looks like multiple new projects will start in September. All are interesting for different reasons. They will allow us to venture into new service areas, which I find personally exciting. A broad portfolio of work is what makes Digital Service work continuously refreshing.
At the same time, our two job offers for content design and user research remain open. We made an offer for the first person this week. They agreed verbally and might start as soon as September. These roles are for established teams in the justice and parental benefits space, but I hope the new projects also grow in size so that more diversified user-centred design staffing is possible. New small teams keep starting with a generalist designer. If the budget allows, a user researcher joins. Often, only a bit later, a content designer accompanies them.
Now that user research and content design grow as sub-disciplines, generalist (UX) design doesn’t have to be the default for teams in the future. At least, that is my hope.
There is one pattern in almost every project we do: errors. Wherever we look, we see tremendous inefficiencies. Applicants aren’t told what information or documents to provide, so their application doesn’t go through. It’s neither rejected nor approved. It’s pending, which takes extra time for both parties: caseworkers and users.
Non-fun fact: There are error rates for various government services and related forms far beyond 90%. Government does not ask people to submit the necessary information and documents and then cannot make a decision. Error rate is now a central metric tracked in various of our work streams.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) Aug 13, 2024 at 18:35
It’s not in my top spot yet, but my success metric and performance measurements blog post needs to come in the autumn, and error rates deserve a dedicated section.
Apart from project prep, Kannika and I also prepared the next 2 Service Standard peer reviews. Both are for lighthouse projects of the German government’s digital strategy. If these take place in September and August, we will have assessed 3 out of the 19 lighthouse projects against the standard. We are gaining some momentum currently. At the same time, I remain far behind. I want to complete and submit 2 unpublished and unfinished reports as soon as possible.
What’s next
I need to keep writing. With the Touchpont article and international blog post finished, the peer review report is next.
Beyond those, my current priority list of blog posts and articles is this:
- How content design makes services useful and accessible (German)
- The long slog of public service design (English)
- Principles for digital: connecting Service Standard and digital-ready check (German)
- Cross-discipline leadership for digital delivery (German)
- How Service Standard peer reviews help us design better services (German)
These are terrible working titles. Once I’ve finished the bulk of the writing, I will come up with better, more catchy titles in both English and German.
In the coming days, I will create a refined draft of discipline objectives. I had a session with Stephanie about it this week. In preparation, I revisited the 12 qualities for effective design organisations from ‘Org Design for Design Orgs’ I mentioned in week #49 and linked them to the organisational goals mentioned in week #100.