Designing Government: How Can Agencies Achieve Service Excellence
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By Rhiana Dabboussy
What comes to mind when thinking about government services in the past? Many would probably grimace at the thought of clunky systems, mundane processes and long wait times. However, now, more than ever, Government is human-centred, innovative, and grounded in end-to-end experiences and big-picture thinking. Government design has come a long way.
During his session at Rosenfeld’s Civic Design Conference, Maish Nichani explores how governments can build a service-oriented culture through a service-excellence mindset, using Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower as a prime example of how to achieve this goal.
Nichani details four factors that have shaped the service-excellence mindset:
Finding the narrative
Narrative shapes identity and inspires action. It guides the design process and can lead to impactful choices that have the power to better the lives of many.
Narrative design is where function and storytelling meet. It places users’ functional and emotional goals equally at the centre of service design, creating holistic customer-centric solutions.
Singapore is an example of a nation built entirely using an overarching narrative, where its citizens’ wants, needs, and feelings are considered in the design and delivery of services.
As Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in 2018: “Nothing we have today is natural, or happened by itself. Somebody thought about it, made it happen.” This is reflected throughout Singapore’s government products, services, buildings and infrastructure.
Orchestrating experiences
Designing products and services that are able to address users’ specific wants and needs is what orchestrating experiences is all about.
Designing a congruent journey involves understanding user needs, aligning visual and interactive elements, and anticipating potential pain points. By skillfully arranging these components, designers can guide users through a narrative that engages and informs.
Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower offers us a real life example of the practical steps that can be taken to orchestrate user experiences. Back in 2013, it edited over 2000 pages of online content to make its services more accessible and user friendly.
It did this by:
- Making pages findable, by ensuring that SEO scores responded to searches
- Creating self-assessment tools to help users undertake checks so that they could find out ahead of time whether they were eligible for services or supports
- Creating ‘at a glance’ pages to improve UX and clearly articulate different parts of a process
- Writing pages as ‘equal pages’, by writing every page as page one
- Focusing on guiding the user to accomplish a particular task at the end of each page
- Updating physical service centres to make them more efficient, comfortable and accessible
Democratising design
Democratising design aims to make design tools and knowledge more inclusive and widespread. It breaks down barriers which enables a broader and more diverse community to engage in the creative process.
This approach emphasises user-friendly interfaces, open-source software, and collaborative platforms, empowering individuals with varying levels of expertise to participate in design activities.
For example, in 2013, Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower amended the content on its website relating to maternity leave. Previously, if a mother wanted to find out their eligibility for maternity leave, they were presented with thousands of pages of dense and wordy content.
This meant that users’ only recourse was to call the call centre for answers. The process was mundane and complicated.
To rectify this, the Ministry changed its approach from a production mindset (that is, the way it thought content should be written and published) to a consumption mindset (as in, ‘I need to help the user get the job done’).
It did this by:
- Creating a calculator based on input data that would produce a maternity plan for each particular user
- Writing content in plain English
- Providing answers, not descriptions
- Giving only what users needed to know at that point in time
Playing the infinite game
Playing the infinite game involves adopting a strategic mindset focused on long-term sustainability and continuous adaptation.
Unlike finite games with defined rules and endpoints (for example, football), the infinite game acknowledges that there are no winners or losers and that the landscape is ever-evolving.
Governments playing the infinite game prioritise values, purpose, and resilience. They cultivate a culture of innovation, learning, and flexibility, embracing change as a constant. Practically, when designing services, this might look like:
- Swapping control for prioritisation
- Embracing evolution over revolution
- Emphasising process over projects
- Using anchors to counterbalance reaction
- Sneaking in governance at the grass roots
- Creating a learning loop
So, what have we learned? Service excellence in government is a commitment to providing efficient, accessible, and user-centric public services.
It involves a dedication to transparency, accountability, and responsiveness to meet the diverse needs of the public. Achieving service excellence requires streamlined processes, modern technology, and a focus on continuous improvement.
It’s heartening to see this happening. And, as we move further into a digital economy, it will be fascinating to see the creative ways in which governments across the globe focus on service excellence when building products and services.
