For 2 days this week, my colleagues working on the civil court claims service conducted on-site research. After launching an eligibility checker for passenger rights some months ago, the designers and user researcher tested the end-to-end journey, including filing a lawsuit and submitting it to the court.
Being in a management role, I don’t get to spend my 2 hours every 6 weeks in #userResearch sessions. 😔 But our teams do so much more! Today and tomorrow, my colleagues Ellen and Kirstin are conducting end-to-end usability sessions on the civil court claims service, incl. components like #eID.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 27, 2024 at 11:50 AM
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The team had previously tested various parts of the journey and iterated quite a bit. Now, it was time to look at the bigger picture and how things work for users from start to finish. That included the federal account ‘BundID’, developed by a Bavarian public sector IT provider. ‘BundID’ integrates with various means for authentification, like an electronic identity (eID) offering to combine physical ID cards and an app such as ‘AusweisApp’, developed by another public sector unit. In addition, it requires a third component, ‘My Justice Mailbox’ (‘Mein Justizpostfach’), created by the same entity.
We had seen users struggling when testing the eID journey previously while working on digital identity until the summer of 2023. We needed to test things in full with even more parts coming together. Hence, each test slot was scheduled for 2 hours, leaving ample time for users to take some detours.
Collaborating on things that matter to all of us
As we at Digital Service are not responsible for those other service components, I contacted the respective designers in those organisations. Luckily, we have built some relationships via our community of practice activities in the past year. All of them got back to us. Some of them could join the remote observation rooms via a streaming link. Others will get specific debriefs for their components tested in the coming days.
Over the past few months, a few designers and user researchers from other federal government agencies have commented on some of these components. But, apparently, they had not contacted the mentioned designers who were working on the components. They might have yet to learn who they are or how to find them. As we do, I wanted us to offer a seat in the observation room so they can participate in the tests that are running anyway. I recognise that not all public sector organisations have as solid user research setups as we have. We have seen designers in a few organisations struggling to test regularly.
Going further, I would like us to coordinate tests of common service components across the sector. We all have limited time and resources and, hence, should combine our efforts wherever we can. We should all be working towards the same goal anyway: working together to create good user experiences with government services across the sector.
Documenting our evolving peer review format
The blog post about our peer reviews—penned about 2 weeks ago—got published this week. It’s a thorough account of how the format has evolved since we last wrote about how we are proving we are trying to meet the Service Standard.
The blog post references all 5 reviews conducted and links to the 3 we have published so far. The remaining 2 will be published in the coming weeks. Transformation manager Lene, and I spent various hours rewrote and editing the report for the first external offering reviewed. We plan to share it with the team at the federal environment agency on Monday.
Building a cross-public sector community over the past few years was vital to finding colleagues in other organisations to respond to our requests and become peer reviewers. Designers from @itzbund.bsky.social, Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund and in-house consultancy PD became the first peers.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 30, 2024 at 1:31 PM
With the blog post, we also published a guide on how to run peer reviews. Lacking a better place, we put the how-to with complementary templates on OpenCoDE. It’s easy and quick to edit, even though GitLab on OpenCoDE has worse usability.
I want us to keep iterating the guidance and merge it with the Service Manual once it’s set up again as a web page. Of course, I would love to see other public sector colleagues adopt the format in their organisations and take it further. But I recognise that it requires some boldness. At least, we share what we have created again and let others participate in our iterative and open approach to assessing service quality.
Discussing holistic service design with fellow designers
For community gathering number 6, about 30 designers and design-minded folks came together. They were curious about ‘holistic service design’, which is either always too early or always too late to discuss. Some people will feel overwhelmed as they cannot even make sufficient progress in improving a transactional service. Others can feel like they have been wasting their time linking up various things much earlier.
In the 2 hours after lunch, I gave a brief overview of how I look at it and referenced an article about designing services holistically. Even though it’s 6 years old, nothing of it has aged. Little has happened still. Then, a colleague from the city-state of Hamburg shared how they have built up service design capability in the senate chancellery in the past few years. Apparently, much has happened there since I wrote the conclusion of my MBA thesis on Hamburg’s user-centred design maturity in late 2018.
In our cross-government #NextCommunity on user-centred design, we discuss holistic #ServiceDesign today. We are delighted to hear from Hamburg’s Digital First team about how they have built up service design capability and started shaping services from a user’s point of view.
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 26, 2024 at 1:43 PM
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Afterwards, my colleague Marie gave a brief overview of their whole-service thinking for parental benefits, followed by questions and plenty of discussions. For most people in the discussion rounds, holistic service thinking seemed far-fetched and aspirational. Maybe another long-considered blog post titled ‘Building products, developing services’ should be fast-tracked to clarify and energise some colleagues in other public sector organisations.
Still needing more robust data points, Maria and I highlighted the user-centred design survey we are running again. When we first peeked at the data a few days ago, the score might have improved slightly. The survey is based on the English UCD maturity survey edition set up by Clara and Kara some years ago. In early December, I would like us to analyse the data and write a short report on the state of design in the German government.
By the end of the week, I finally managed to create a repo for the community documentation. Living on OpenCoDE as well, we now have a space for all content and documents from the community gatherings. In one document, I collected all topics and session descriptions and started uploading slide decks from the talks to a folder, too.
What’s next
My goal for this year is to publish 7 pieces. I am standing at 6 – including articles, papers and blog posts. There are 2 or 3 blog posts I very much want to get done and out in the coming weeks.
In week #120, I made a list of 5 priority texts. Only 2 of them are written and published. I want to talk about content design and describe our disciplines. We also need to give another update on the international community.
Kara and I briefly talked on Friday and have plenty of ideas for 2025. We had better get them written down to create some public accountability, which never harms.
Next week, I’ll miss my colleagues Julian and Paul’s talk at FormFest on Wednesday evening. I participated in their rehearsal run this week, and their talk, ‘Triangle of success: involving the right parties into the form design process,’ is nicely coming together. It will be recorded and published on YouTube soon after the event.
Rehearsal hour for next week’s #FormFest talk ‘Triangle of success: involving the right parties into the form design process’. My @digitalservice.bund.de colleagues @paulpistorius.bsky.social & Julian are on track for a fab talk on bringing policy, operations and users into the form design process
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 26, 2024 at 6:29 PM
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On the same evening, my colleague Charlotte and my Public Service Lab collaborator Katrin will speak at a public sector edition of Service Design Drinks.
In case you’re in #Berlin, join my @digitalservice.bund.de colleague Charlotte Vorbeck for next week’s #ServiceDesign Drinks on 4 Dec. You’ll get a #PublicDesign special edition with thought-leading talks at CityLAB’s gorgeous space. 🎟️ Get your free ticket while they last #DesignSky #GovDesign
— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com) November 25, 2024 at 2:04 PM
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I will also try to get their talks recorded so more people can listen to them.
For 2 days next week, I will be joining an extensive DIN institute session. It will likely be the last big review for the specification we are producing. After missing the first in-person session, there is now a heading I need to get changed. As we are a few rounds into the process, I need a compelling case and clear arguments.