--- id: "workshop:by-the-people-for-the-people-with-the-people-design-for-government" type: "InnovateUS workshop" title: "By the People, For the People, With the People – Design for Government" url: "https://innovate-us.org/by-the-people-for-the-people-with-the-people-design-for-government" date: "2025-10-22" duration: "60 minutes" instructors: ["Amira Boland"] recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACTsaHltKqg" transcript: "automatic, from the recording" source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)" licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org" --- # By the People, For the People, With the People – Design for Government InnovateUS workshop · 22 October 2025 · 60 minutes A mom with a new baby need not figure out that health coverage comes from the Center for Medicaid Services; cash assistance comes from the Administration for Children and Families; food assistance comes from Agriculture; medical leave is protected by the Department of Labor. A disaster survivor should not tell the government 80% of the same information on five different forms.  In the United States, our government is the result of more than 200 years of different appropriations committees, levels, agencies, bureaus, even IT shops – and is one of the most complex service delivery organizations in the world. Now more than ever, at critical moments in peoples’ lives, we have to demonstrate the very basic tenant a democracy requires: that government is accountable to and responsive to the needs of its people.  This workshop will focus on how improving customer experience can do that, and how to navigate the complexity of delivering services in the public sector.  We will mix learning the theory of and applied methods from the social and behavioral sciences, public management and administrative burden, agile technology development, human centered design, service + system design, and experimental design and evidence building. ## Learning goals - Learn how we can better orient around well-defined outcomes to know whether or not policies and programs are working - Learn what “design” is and a basic framework for applying to improve the way we develop policies, programs, services, and products – and fix the implementation of existing ones - Gain insights from the social and behavioral sciences, like common cognitive biases ## Speakers - **Amira Boland**, Chief of Staff, New America New Practice Lab Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACTsaHltKqg ## Transcript Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. **Amira Boland** [0:00](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=0) Thanks for having me. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for making time to be here and your interest in this topic. As Jess said, I used to be at the federal government. I left last summer. I was quite tired. I also felt like I'd been working at the 30,000 foot level for a while and was excited to work more directly with state governments who provide a lot of the benefits in this country. I'm actually now working. I'll be speaking about this kind of work that we did at the federal level, but I'm now with a team that provides free technical assistance teams to states. We really focus on programs that serve families with kids under six. I'm grateful for you all for being here. I'm sure many of you all are familiar with pieces of this type of methodology, but the piece that we've really tried to develop over the last couple of years, particularly at the federal level, is this more integrated approach and service design approach to how we deliver government for people that works for the people that it's meant to be served. [1:14](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=74) A thing that our team tried to constantly do, which is very easy to do once you are working in government, it's easy to become disconnected with the actual people that you serve. Whether it was holding 30 minutes each month on our calendars to go try and play with a form, try and apply for a benefit, navigate a service, try and find a piece of information on a website, call a call center, pick up a couple of numbers that were on our government website, see if they worked, what happened when you called. We tried to always bring the voice of the customer into the conversations that we are having. And so even just to start this presentation, I'm going to do that. Let me figure out how it works. Okay. I wish I had support when I was pregnant in order to understand what all the programs mean. I still don't know all the things that are available to me. This was a mother that we interviewed in Virginia, I believe. There's a cliff that so many of our families are standing on. [2:14](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=134) They are staring down at the edge, and one small thing could be just enough to throw them over. This was actually a state employee who served, was a case worker for SNAP. That's the difficult part about transitioning out. No one in the military has transitioned out, so there isn't someone that can explain how to do it. Twice we actually ran a cross-agency life experience project on the transition from active duty service to civilian life. So many times you have service members that have actually never been on the job market before because they went straight from their high school into basic training and into service. And so it's quite daunting. Maybe they've lived on base in military housing or things like that, and so for the first time they're looking for an apartment and setting up a utility bill and looking for a job. This person shared, I've already lost everything. Haven't I shown you enough to show you I'm deserving? Do you not trust what I'm saying? [3:18](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=198) We did some interviews with people that had recently survived the Texas hurricanes a couple of years ago, and one of the things we did was mapping across five different assistance forms, the emergency housing assistance, individual assistance that comes from FEMA, the disaster assistance that comes from the Small Business Administration, DSNAP or disaster food assistance, and then of course like social service organizations also have different assistance options available to people. 80% of the information across five forms was the same information. And so people were having to recount everything that they'd lost over and over again. A really key moment in people's lives in the United States is approaching 65, right? Between 62 and onwards, you're starting to think about when you start to claim your retirement benefits from the Social Security Administration. At 65, you become eligible for Medicare, and during that time period, you just have tons of Medicare brokers and financial advisors reaching out to you. [4:21](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=261) And this senior worker told us, you can't figure out who to trust. It's too much. So I just wanted to pause and ask, are there common themes that you see across these five quotes? Does that resonate with some of your own experiences with government or helping a family member? Yeah, I'm seeing some people share. Yes. Now, obviously, I think everyone here is here because we believe in government's ability to serve people in these moments in their lives and not to confuse them. And it was really exciting because in 2021, President Biden signed an executive order on transforming customer experience and improving service delivery to rebuild trust. And when he was making his remarks at the signing of that executive order, he went off script a little, as he often did, and told a story about when he was first working out in his Senate offices and trying to make sure that folks could navigate the services that they needed and the help that they needed. [5:25](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=325) And he had this amazing quote that really summed up, I think, a theme across all of those quotes, which is you shouldn't have to know how to know. So often when you're navigating critical supports at these moments in people's lives that are often high stress, right, people aren't often excited to be interacting with government. Sometimes it's really exciting. Sometimes someone's turning 18 and registering to vote or applying for federal student aid as they think about going to college. But oftentimes it's a really stressful moment, right? You've just lost everything in a disaster. Maybe you've just had a child and you're worried about making ends meet. But you often have to know, like, there's all this tacit knowledge that people have of like, oh, if you show up at the office at eight on a Tuesday, then you'll get in. Or if you call this number between this time and you get that call center rep, she's really helpful. But that is not that is not the way that that government should work. And it's not going to help rebuild trust in our institutions. And so, you know, I think this is a fundamental belief that that is not unique to the last administration. [6:30](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=390) It's been something for a year, you know, a whole theory of change that we have to prove that democracy still works, that our government still works and can deliver for our people. And so much of the frustration with our government institutions is that when people show up and need government to work, it doesn't work for them. And right. And that erodes their trust in our institutions and and really overall in democracy. And so, you know, a lot when I first started out in my job, you know, I came into the federal government in 2015. I thought, like, oh, I'll just go for six months. And 10 years later, I was like, oh, wow, that was a ride. But you just get so. And I'm sure many of you in public service also know that you can get. The mission is just addictive and there's just so much work to be done. And you see that the potential for impact is higher than any other industry you could work in. And so, you know, when I was first starting out and doing this and talking about, like, we need to improve trust in government. Sometimes people sort of rolled their eyes and thought, like, oh, it's such a nice. Oh, whatever. No trust in government. Why is that important? You know, that's just soft and fluffy over there. [7:32](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=452) And I think part of it of, you know, really recognizing that if people do not trust the institutions of government, the outcomes we hope to see in society will not come true. The ability of government to operate is reliant upon people trusting that when they provide information, it will be kept safe. That if they go through a process to apply for something fair and adjudication will occur and they will receive a benefit if they are entitled to it. And then even just things that we do like and like the census. Right. The census could never be run exclusively by the government. The census works because we have more than 400,000 private social sector organizations that get on board and help advocate for people to help take the census. Right. Because they know that that data is worthwhile to them and they want it to be good data. Right. Or if we want people to, you know, drive towards a public health outcome of, you know, resiliency among the population, people need to trust the vaccine guidance that we're putting out there. Right. [8:33](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=513) And so just underscoring that it's not like a nice to have for people to trust government. And so anything that we can do as civil servants in our everyday jobs to help increase that trust is absolutely critical. And we shall be thinking about how that's connected to our work. And so as we think about this, like erosion of trust over time, people have these everyday, you know, events in their life where they can they interact with services all around them. Right. And if I update my address in the Amazon app, I can expect to receive a package even later that day to that address that I've updated. Right. Whereas in the case of the Veterans Health Administration, you would call, update your address with VHA, and then you had to wait two weeks until the data got batched for you to fill a prescription in the state or the location that you were. And, you know, most people who need medicine can't wait two weeks. Right. For that data batch. And so, you know, while people expect that government maybe, you know, has a lot more that it's trying to manage and is working to serve everyone and they may have slightly lower expectations than their Amazon interaction over decades are, you know, where we have delivered is even further below what that like gap of grace that people are willing to give us. [9:50](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=590) And so over time, what we've seen is that, you know, trust is a very noisy measure. Right. It's reliant upon whether or not someone voted for the president. It's reliant upon whether or not people feel like their potholes are being filled fast enough. It's reliant upon whether or not they like their school board. But what we do see is that there have been overall trust in government drops when we've seen failures of government to deliver. And, you know, one of the most recent ones in our kind of decade of work here is on healthcare.gov. Right. That was a huge technical launch, a huge new service of government. And it failed spectacularly when it started. And so people were like, wait, what do you mean you're telling me that government should have, you know, a health insurance plan? You can't even launch a Web site. Right. And so there's been a ton of work over a number of years to try and rebuild from that and kind of recognize that this new approach of service design and agile development and things like that can help us do a better job. And so why has that happened over years? You guys might be familiar with this, too. [10:53](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=653) But, you know, for so long, we've often been really focused on policy. Right. Passing that beautiful law, signing that gorgeous executive order, having the great moment with the picture and the pens and all of that. Right. People are really excited about the policy. But what's the point of that policy if it doesn't get implemented? Right. And this is the unsexy work that I think many of us are really, you know, deep in every day. And, you know, I often joke that people love S.P.T., which stands for sexy policy time with my team. I used to have everyone look at their calendars and say, like, what is an S.P.T. meeting? Sometimes it's fun. Right. Sometimes you can get really exciting things launched or done by having a really great room with table tents and a famous speaker and, you know, kind of a sexy meeting. Right. And so but we can't be over indexed towards that. And implementation is really where the rubber meets the road. And I think that this is something that isn't like hopefully can remain a nonpolitical kind of not even bipartisan, but nonpartisan line of effort. [12:01](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=721) And we have seen over time all the way back in the very first Bush administration, there was the first ever customer service week, which was an executive order that that president signed all the way through the Clinton administration into Obama, where, of course, the HealthCare.gov event happened and not really spurred this creation of the United States Digital Service and other groups like the Presidential Innovation Fellows and the formation of the Technology Transformation Service all the way through the first Trump administration, which is when I actually first took on the role of a customer experience lead. And we kind of created this formalized effort around customer experience. And I think one important change here that you'll see is that we used to say customer service and now we're saying customer experience. And I wondered if anyone wanted to volunteer in the chat, maybe what their what what they think the difference is between customer service and customer experience, because people will use them interchangeably. I'm just looking to see if folks have have ideas on the difference between customer service and customer experience. [13:07](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=787) One is something you provide. Yeah. The feeling. Great. You know, I often say, like, customer service is helping someone fix a problem. Customer service is something you provide when someone needs help. They may call a call center, they may walk up to a desk, you know, but customer service is just an interaction when there's an issue. Right. Customer experience is the overall approach of thinking about someone's lifetime of interactions with a brand, with an organization, their collective experiences across services. It's really thinking about what they're thinking, feeling, doing, how are their needs being met. And so you kind of see that we've had this maturation from just calling it customer service to actually thinking more holistically about customer experience. And so we'll talk through some of the approaches that we use as we think about customer experience. And the good thing here is that even with it being a noisy measure, even with there being so many things rolled into whether or not people trust government, we can see that if we deliver people's own experience heavily impacts whether or not they trust government. [14:22](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=862) At the end of the day, if we get what we need, we trust that the institution is working. And so you can kind of see how in 2021, that's when the executive order was signed, we started to claw our way back up. If you look over here at this graph, you can see that, you know, there's multiple different indices here kind of looking at American customer satisfaction. Forrester here on the right was sort of looking at in 2018, that's actually when my team started, we started to make some gains, there is a bit of a COVID dip. And one thing that's really interesting, if you look at this top right here, the overall customer satisfaction. Satisfaction across industries, so not even just with government, but even like luxury auto, like Lexus, or banking, or airlines, or whatever. Across the United States since 2021, American satisfaction with services, we are grumpier. We are not happy with the services we are getting. However, in those same years and the same methodology, you see that we either gained or did not dip in a statistically significant way, which actually seems to indicate that we were making such good gains that we absorbed a lot of that negativity that people were having as a whole across the country in satisfaction with their services. [15:39](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=939) And then, of course, we have individual projects and efforts and services that we've really worked to improve, like at the VA in particular, that have shown that we've had measurable increases in trust in government through a focus on service delivery. So, it's a hopeful story, much to be done, but a lot of progress has been made. And so, getting into the nitty-gritty of how we do that, right? One thing that I hope everyone asks when they are working on a problem is, has anyone solved this before? And so, when you think about, like, if our problem in government has been a lack of focus on implementation, where is there really good implementation? And, of course, the kind of answer to that is the private sector, right? And when we look at companies in particular that we say are design-led or design-driven and really have a high focus on customer experience and customer interactions, we see that, you know, there's, again, a number of different indices here, but, you know, they look at a portfolio of companies that they've ranked as high maturity on the kind of design capacity and see that these companies are outperforming their peers, right, and they're doing better. [16:42](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1002) And they're not just selling more product. They don't just have increased revenues, but they actually have increased returns to shareholders. So, one point that I like to make with this, particularly in government, is that it's not just about spending more money. It's not just about, like, getting more customers. It's actually that when you start to take this design approach, you're not only looking at the front end of what the customer is experiencing, but you're very quickly starting to interact with what the employees are experiencing or what your own internal processes are. And that's where you often find a lot of tweaks and process improvements that can result in cost savings, right? So, these companies that take design approaches, they're not just pushing more product. They're actually increasing their internal efficiency and being more profitable. And so, this was, like, a really important moment in the customer experience executive order because we actually included this language up here on the right, which is that when the American public interacts with their government, they should get a simple, seamless, and secure customer experience that's on par with top consumer experiences. So, this is the first time we had a policy of the United States government that people should, yes, government is different, and yes, we have our own kind of design constraints, but people should get the type of experience that they have come to expect in every other service interaction in their life when they come to interact with government. [17:56](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1076) And the other thing I just want to kind of note here is that we picked the word simple, seamless, and secure. You all may be familiar or maybe have done other trainings on Pam Hurd and Don Moynihan's work on administrative burden, or if you're a behavioral scientist nerd like me, you know that Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein have talked a lot about nudging and sludge. In the private sector, we talk about friction, right, like customer friction. You want to minimize friction. And so, then in the federal government, we talked about simple and seamless. So, all of these terms really mean the same thing, but just so you're kind of aware of like what other schools of thoughts and publications, what kind of words they use to talk about some similar topics. And so, one of the great things about government is that we don't actually get to decide, like Apple does, that our target customer is someone that can afford to buy or finance a $1,000 phone, right? We design for the people that don't have a phone. We design for the people that just learned English yesterday. We design for the people that don't have broadband. [18:56](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1136) We design for people that can't see. We design for people who can't hear. So, these are the different types of customers that we have. We design for all. And actually, that can, you know, we often say as designers that the best design happens within constraints. And you actually see that government has really innovated in the way that it designs services and products. There was a huge push in the 70s around logo design and a unigrid system that the National Park Service uses that many other companies use today for all of their branding, you know, those types of practices. So, all to say that like really good things can come out of designing in hard scenarios. And so, when we think about design, what does that mean? Oftentimes, people's minds go straight to like visual design, right? Like, oh, let's make something look prettier. But that's sort of the most basic level of complexity when we think about design work, right? So, that's actual visual kind of artifact design. Then we get into physical products and things like that, right? Like those are actual things that you can touch and feel or get, right? [20:00](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1200) And then interactions is, again, increasing the complexity. That's how you navigate a process to get to a product. And then finally, at the most like complex level, you have system designer, looking at a whole ecosystem. And so, I'll walk through a couple of different examples at each of these levels. And a piece of this that I think is really important is that sometimes, again, like you will never, I mean, hopefully, maybe you will, but I know that particularly working in the public sector, you're never going to have all of the money or resources or talent that you need, right? But just the thing to be aware of, of the different disciplinary areas of expertise as you're building a team or taking on a problem and thinking about who are the right types of people or skill sets or capacities that I could go find in various different ways, whether it's through a contractor, a hire, or a university, or a civic tech organization, or something in your network. You know, there are different disciplines that are all very important. There's not one that's more important. I think there was like, you know, some tension around even in early USDS days of like whether engineering was more important than product, was more important than design. [21:05](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1265) They're all important. You need all of them on the team and you need them at different degrees at different moments. But if we think about behavioral scientists and they bring like this background of like what types of cognitive biases do we all have and how do we embed evaluation into what we're learning? People that know, really know product and service design, people that know content. How do you structure words on a page? How do you design headers? How much, what's the right reading level for different audiences? You know, all the way to technical human factors engineering as you're thinking about physical space and how do you design a cockpit so that if someone needs to reach for a button, it's in the right intuitive place, right? So all of these are important disciplines to think about as you build your team. Okay. So thinking about the most basic form as we've talked about in visual design, this and content design, this was an effort that our team got brought into. Many of you all may remember the Flint water crisis, still, you know, issues today and lead in children's water. But we were, you know, working in, you know, the federal government had, President Obama had declared a state of emergency, which then opened up federal support to come in and help respond in Michigan. [22:17](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1337) There was huge levels of distrust of their, you know, governor's office, the local government, of the state EPA. And we were really trying to make sure that people could understand what was water, where could they get safe water and what did they need to do? And there was some trust in the community because as we know from behavioral science, the messenger really matters. There was some trust from the, with the national EPA. And so actually a great decision was made to have this flyer, this thing that was going to go out door to door, have EPA branding on it. Because that's a, that's a decision to like, what is a logo that people trust? But as I looked at this form, you can, or this flyer, you can't read this, but that's not the point. The point is, is that you see a huge block of text here, right? And then you see an important tips list and every kind of everything sort of seems like jumbled together and everything is the same and equal importance. Well, one thing, one of the first activities I did was try to understand who is my customer, who are the people in the Flint community that we are trying to share this information with and found that it was actually primarily immigrant community. [23:26](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1406) So non-native English speakers and low level of education completion. So average reading level of around fourth grade. Right. And so is this flyer going to be helpful and useful to people in that community? Probably not. But God bless government. We always want to give you all of the information. Right. It explained how filters worked and what's NSF certified and all of that. But that doesn't matter to a mom who's trying to get safe water for her kids. And so in the span of an hour, we tried to cut down the content just to how could someone look at this flyer and get the information that they need? I can identify in this population group and then I see like, oh, I need bottled water. Whereas like this thing is totally OK with a filter that goes on to my sink. And then we tried to structure the list into time of like, what do you need to do every morning? What do you need to do every week? What do you need to do every month and structure the information in that way? And on the back, we put a map with where you could get safe water. Right. Like locations that had free bottled water. So all to say, sometimes in government, the inclination is to share comprehensive information to people with good reason. Right. [24:32](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1472) But a lot of times when we're thinking about trying to get people information quickly or take an action, you can strip it down to just the basics. So going up, that was like one end of the spectrum on visual design. At the totally other end of the spectrum, 10 years later, we got the opportunity to do some serious system design. Right. And this is really looking at what is a moment in someone's life and irrespective of what government agency level of government delivers a service, how do we show up and serve them in that moment in a way that works for them? And so we actually went through a really formal process where we had people at the White House deciding on prioritizing this type of work and being open to what came out of true discovery sprints where we canvassed the country and spoke to more than 500 people in states, tribes, territories all across the nation. And so I'll share one of those moments with you that we were able to work on was having a child in early childhood. [25:33](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1533) And I don't know if anyone on this call, I'm sure many of you have kids. I don't know. How would you describe that first year of life? Easy? Hard? One of the most complicated moments in your life? No sleep? Yeah. No sleep. And we're notoriously zombie mode. Yeah. We're notoriously bad decision makers as humans when we're tired and bad at remembering things. And so one thing that we were actually trying to show here was imagine that you are a low income mother or family that just had a child. Imagine you are managing all of the things that come with a new baby and you're managing these six work streams in addition. And each of them have different application periods, different renewal periods, different timing considerations for each of your children. And really the point being here is we quickly tried to visualize, oh, it's really hard to have a child and be living in poverty and having to navigate multiple enrollment processes at the same time. [26:39](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1599) And so one of the things that also came up as we were canvassing the country was asking parents what some of their biggest concerns were. And it was crazy. One thing that just continued to come up again and again and again was the cost of diapers and the cost of just going home in that first month and feeling overwhelmed with the things that you needed to meet the needs of your child. And so that was a thing that we come running back to the White House with our insights and the cost of diapers was nowhere on anyone's priority policy agenda. That was not a core component of the Biden-Harris administration maternal health strategy. But it was something that we heard directly from people they cared about. And so among many other things, but that was just one note of where the thing, if you go in with these preconceived policy solutions, you may be missing out on the thing that's top of mind for the people that you're actually trying to serve. So after we did all of that research, we started a whole co-design process of looking at how could we tackle some of the priority pain points that we had heard from families across the country. [27:49](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1669) And so one of those that I'll focus on was this newborn supply kit pilot. And it was one of those really interesting things as we think about system design. The number of people that said, well, the government's never going to pay for diapers. And I was like, I know. Huggies wants to pay for diapers. Pampers wants to pay for diapers. If you think about your delivery system is more than your single agency or your single silo, it starts to open up a whole new set of opportunities. And if you think about how do you mobilize the social sector, how do you mobilize the private sector? How can you get this sort of tri-sector alignment between incentives? Pampers wants to build good loyalty relationships with their customers. And so how might we work with community organizations that are on the ground delivering and responding to their people's needs with private sector entities that can bring resources, with the federal government that has really good data on maternal vulnerability and maternal mortality and infant mortality of where those communities that we know from kind of an outcome perspective really need extra support. [28:54](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1734) And so we piloted this concept of a newborn supply kit. We got a social sector partner that works as baby to baby. That's an incredible program across the country that helps provide diapers primarily to folks. But then we did some research with families and really found other types of needs that they have. Diaper cream, pumping supplies, breast pads, like all of these things. Right. And kind of created a maternal piece of this kit. Right. And our theory of change was never we are going to solve poverty with a newborn supply kit. It was in a moment when people are really stressed out, how can the government show up and meet an immediate need that they have and build trust? And so we worked with community providers that actually could deliver the kit in a hospital to a family. And so they're having an immediate need of like, oh, my God, I have a baby now. I need diapers. I need all of these things. And give them, you know, we even had onesies in there, everything the child needed for the first month of life. [29:55](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1795) So that in two weeks when they're at home and they think, oh, I need help. How do I get to them? My first appointment, or we need food. How do I navigate that snack thing? They have someone that they trust and can go back to to ask for more help. And in that kit, we had connections to local organizations that could help them navigate those more robust and substantive supports. So all that to say, that was sort of a service design process that we iterated on. We actually did multiple rounds of what the contents of the kits were to really understand what did people most value and what do people most need. And again, saw that we were able to increase trust, not only among all of the participants, but particularly in hard to reach and Spanish speaking populations that came in having a more distrustful perspective on government. A way to talk about this that's really exciting too, is that through that pilot and actually trying to work the process and understand different policy levers, we've now seen it get adopted and scaled. They've swapped out the HH National, HHS logo, because now New York State's actually giving these kits to moms and working with other partners in the state to increase the reach of it. And it's not just a blue state thing. We are also seeing the pilots in Arkansas and Louisiana scale. And actually, if and when the federal government gets appropriations packages, there's actually language in both the House and Senate versions scaling the program nationally. So, okay, you're not a designer. How do you get started on this process? What do you do? [31:29](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1889) It's actually not that complicated. Even if you aren't great at graphic design, you can be a designer, right? I love this quote by Herbert Simon, who's kind of the father of modern design theory. He says, everybody designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. And so, this is where we kind of can step through a process very high speed. We won't have tons of time today, but happy to share resources and follow up with people if you have questions. So, we'll start with this very first step, which is you need to define why you exist. And this can actually be quite hard for folks in government. They actually forget, like, what's the statutory intent of my office? What is the actual thing happening in someone's life for why they may be, you know, interacting with me or doing, you know, coming to me? We go through a step of customer, what we call customer segmentation in the private sector, really looking at, like, who are the different groups of people that are having that occasion in their life or why they might be interacting with you. Start to build out what's the process, the service by which they navigate through to get to that product or service or offering that you have. Then we can do a sort of bottleneck analysis where we look at, like, what are those points along that process where, you know, behavioral bottlenecks, cognitive biases may be at play, where we see that friction, where we see learning costs or psychological costs, environmental factors that might influence how someone goes through a process. We need to understand really good measures across different types of measures. So, there's operational measures, there's performance measures, there's experience measures, there's impact measures. [33:10](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=1990) How do we start to really understand whether or not our service is, quote, working? And then start to think about how could you actually start to test whether or not the thing that you are doing is having an impact or making it better, right? Okay. So, these are the six steps we're going to go through quickly. On the kind of, like, what your service is. Now, this is, like, a federal example, but I'm sure this makes this, I know that this is true at also, like, the state and the local level as well. In the federal government, we have appropriations committees, we have things that we call federal subaccounts and program activities, there's the federal program inventory. That is how we, the government, think about ourselves. People in the public couldn't care less. They have moments in their lives. I'm thinking about retiring. My identity was stolen. I'm taking over. I'm inheriting my grandparents' farm. And in those moments in their life, they need to navigate through multiple different processes to get what they need, right? And these are the services. And government, actually, as a whole, has been quite poor at defining what services we offer, right? But this is how people hold us accountable. This is the customer experience that they're having, right? And so, how can we do a better job knowing these lanes and knowing that sometimes these service lanes are going to go outside your span of control, right? These are going to go, you know, someone navigating, inheriting their farm is going to have tax implications that they're doing with their Department of Revenue at the state and the federal level through the farm services agencies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture with their bank and the crop insurance that they get, right? So, you have to think about, from the customer perspective, who are all the different parties and processes that they're interacting with? So, we actually did a Mad Libs activity, right? Where we said, like, this is a verb, this is a noun. And we brought together all of the high-impact service providers. So, these are the parts of government that, you know, the list has changed from year to year, but this was us really trying to do a rigorous exercise of, like, what are the parts of our government at the federal [35:14](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2114) level? You could do this within your own department. You could do this within your own agency, wherever you are. What are the parts of our, you know, organization that have a high volume of transactions at every year that serve a large percentage of our residents in their lives at some moment, or have an outsized impact on the lives of the people that they serve? The Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example, doesn't have a high volume of transactions every year, doesn't have a, you know, doesn't serve a large percentage of the American public, but for the people that they serve, it's really freaking important, right? And so, they were one of our high-impact service providers. So, anyways. So, we walked them through this process, right? We brought all these folks together and said, okay, what is the why? What's the occasion in someone's life for why they're interacting with you? Let's define it. Then hop over here to the offering or objective. What is the thing that they need? Do they need to file their taxes? Do they need to be compliant with the tax policy in the United States? Do they need to securely get through a border? Do they need a passport? Do they need a flu shot? What is the thing that they are actually trying to achieve? [36:20](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2180) And then the service is actually the process of how they get there, right? Applying for federal student aid, accessing primary care, and then parts of that are the different things that help you deliver that service. So, there's the channel, whether it's a website, whether it's on the phone, there's people that help them that provide that customer service, and then there's tools and technologies, your CRM, your data system, whatever it may be to help you do that. The reason this is important is because a lot of times we get confused and we hyper-index to like, we're launching the new website. We fixed the website. That's great. You fixed a channel. You're not offering new value. You don't get credit for launching a new service. You created a new channel by which someone can navigate a service to get to the thing that they need, right? And so, sometimes we get more distracted with the means than the ends. And so, this kind of activity can help us to like, you know, really structure our decision-making about where we make investments. So, let's do this fun example that hopefully can relate, people can relate to. I love McDonald's fries. They're my favorite fries on the market, especially when I was pregnant both times. So, I actually had, we were really lucky. We had a presidential innovation fellow on my team that was actually the head of digital service for McDonald's. So, I know that this is true. These are the customer occasions that McDonald's wants to win. When you have one of these moments in your life, they want you to thank McDonald's. When you need lunch fast, if you want a morning coffee on your way to work or if you're, you know, rewarding your kids for, you know, sitting still during church or something, right? Reward family fun. So, you offer them a service to get what they need, right? The products that they have, coffee, fries, McFlurry, Happy Meal. [38:09](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2289) They offer you a service. You can either order, you can do ordering on demand like at the time you want it or you can do ordering in advance. You're thinking ahead about wanting one of these things right over here. Then, they offer you many channels that you can do that ordering in on demand or ordering in advance. They have a drive-thru menu board. They have the in-store menu board where you walk in and you kind of touch the screen to order something. You can register. You can go straight up to a register at the counter. You can, you know, order on a mobile app. You can order on the website and then they have different, you know, people that help you during that process, okay? Seems simple enough, straightforward, makes sense to people. Okay, let's do it for the Department of Homeland Security now. So, obviously a little bit different. How many folks have flown on a plane? Feel free to raise your hand if you're on camera. Anybody flown on a plane before? Yeah? Okay, great. Yeah, I see some thumbs up. Great. Okay, I need you, I want some folks to participate or just go off mute if you're, if they have that ability. Go off mute. Tell me, what is the product? We're going to focus on the Transportation Security Administration. We'll make it a little bit easier than all of the Department of Homeland Security. What is the product that people are trying to access when they interact with the Transportation Security Administration? Any ideas? [39:42](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2382) Their flights. Their flights, yeah. What's the value that TSA specifically provides to people? Oh, I see some, some safety, security, flight safety. Yeah, you can get, you, the value that they provide is you can get on a plane and feel safe that you're going to get to your destination, right? Okay, what are the different moments in people's life that are happening when they get on a plane? You can go off mute, too. A funeral, a family emergency. Yeah. A vacation. Family vacation, a wedding, a happy occasion, business. Do people think that the people going on a business trip have the same expectations as a family of five going to Disney World, or a 30-year-old woman trying to get back because her mom just had a heart attack? [40:50](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2450) Correct. Those are different customer experiences that you need to design for, right? Okay, so what types of services does the Transportation Security Administration offer to the American public to to deliver a safe traveling experience? Any ideas? Reach out. I'm hearing, yeah. Any other ideas? What about things that go under the plane? Air traffic control. Good, good question. Air traffic, this is like, this is where we get to cross-agency. Air traffic control and that safety element is actually delivered by the Federal Aviation Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation. So the collective security experience is delivered by many agencies. Security checks, ID checks, baggage screening. [41:52](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2512) Yeah, people are getting to many different elements of the travel experience. So just some examples here of how we would kind of structure this exercise for this group. So there may also be a company that's looking to ship their goods, right? And they want to make sure that their products get somewhere safely too. So, all right, you have navigating as a trusted traveler. So that includes pre-check, global entry, clear, right? You can navigate a pre-clearance if you are actually in Canada or Ireland. You can go through, that's like in conjunction with the Customs and Border Protection, you can go through a US border in another country. There's the navigating a typical airport security line. Oftentimes huge service that people don't think about is complying with a secondary clearance. So that's actually a different part of the service experience. You may go through the line, but then you get pulled over for secondary. That's another way that we're developing or we're keeping people safe, right? And then there's multiple channels, right? You can apply for TSA pre-check online. You can apply for TSA pre-check in the airport. [43:00](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2580) You can do a global entry appointment on arrival. So again, it's always like a little bit more complex than you think, but really helpful to structure this because then you start to think about like your different customer segments and how they may differently navigate these services that you offer, right? And at the end of the day, you want to measure performance measures of your service, but you also want to make sure you're measuring the impact and making sure that people are actually getting the value that they are promised and looking to you to deliver. Okay, so we're going to do an activity. I think they shared in the chat, maybe share it again. There is a link to a Google document. Thank you, Jess. If you want to open that up, you can copy the document. So open it up and then you go to file, make a copy. You can save it to your own drive or you can just kind of look at it and kind of take notes on a sheet of paper in front of you. But I'm going to switch to this. Do people see a slide that says activity one, define a service? [44:10](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2650) Yep. Okay, great. So we're going to have you do this for your own place that you work. So I want you to start by defining the moments in people's lives. You're going to start over here on the left. People come to you during a moment in their life. And I should put some numbers on here. And then the second thing I want you to think about is what is the product or offering that you provide? Don't worry about the service at this moment. Just think about this column here on the left. People come to you during a moment in their life and they are doing that. And in that moment in their life, what is the product or result that they are hoping to get from you? So why don't you take a minute? Let's actually, let's spend about three minutes doing I'm going to bring everybody back and share what you've come up with. If you want to put it in the chat, you can do that. Maybe share a moment in people's life, products and services that I offer. I wish I had good elevator music. [45:30](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2730) I'm going to bring everybody back and share what you've come up with. Maybe share a moment in people's life, products and services that I offer. If you want to put it in the chat, you can do that. Maybe share a moment in people's life, products and services that I offer. I wish I had good elevator music. Maybe share a moment in people's life, products and services that I offer. All right. Anyone willing to come off mute and share some initial quick thoughts? [46:39](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2799) Anybody? You can put it in the chat, too, if you don't feel comfortable coming off mute. Yes, I'll be brave. Go for it. Thank you. **Audience** [46:56](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2816) I'm with an organization, a technology company called Open City Labs that works to improve access to government programs. People come often in the context of they're struggling with health needs, complicated health needs. They need to move to nursing care or they're being discharged from a hospital or they're pregnant. They have often social needs like struggling with poverty or their utilities are being shut off. Then the services to recommend the services that and automate, autofill the forms and make that- **Amira Boland** [47:41](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2861) Like a warm referral? **Audience** [47:44](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2864) Not just the referral, but the referral, yes, and then also the, I call it the last mile of required documents and data entry and that kind of thing. **Amira Boland** [47:57](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=2877) Awesome. Thank you, Matt, for being a brave one. In the interest of time, I want to make sure we have time for Q&A, so I'm going to move on, but this is an exercise that I think can be really useful if you pull your team together and even spend an hour walking through it together because you'll often find that people have really different understandings of what you do and what's going on in people's lives. That could be good or it could be a really good moment to clarify how everyone is thinking about the services that your organization is providing and what different things you need to invest in improving that service. Then if you look at the second slide of that worksheet, I have a performance measure exercise. One thing just to quickly hit on and then we'll kind of go straight to questions is we mapped the full farm loan process. There's different kinds of maps. Again, I will share these slides so you'll get these. Different maps have different layers and perspectives in them at different levels of details. All are kind of useful. The mapping exercise is really useful because we thought like, oh, we should just digitize the farm loan process to make it better, but when we really went through the process, we heard from farmers that they really like the process of coming in person and meeting with their loan officer because then they start to learn about the other kinds of things that USDA offers them. The thing that was most frustrating to them is that when they would spend a long time filling out the paper application and then they would get denied because they applied for the wrong type of loan. That was actually a really easy fix. We could create some low fidelity PDFs to just help people get started on the right loan application. Even if it was a paper form, they knew they were doing it for the right type of product. Then we really dove into what does the application process look like and saw that it was an incredibly complex, overly designed series of forms. We actually simplified the process and simplified the [50:02](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=3002) forms first down to one form instead of 10. Can you imagine if we had started originally with the digitization? We would have been digitizing a terrible process and spending more money to digitize more forms when we actually just took the time, helped people get on the right track in the meantime, and then once we simplified, then we digitized this. Then we digitized the one form. All to say a map can be a really useful exercise to help you to prioritize and focus on the right pain points in the right order. Then as I talked about earlier, it's really important to think about these different columns of measures and understanding your current state before you start tweaking and moving stuff because then you can understand if the things you're doing are actually helping and you're getting some ROI from your effort. Just by way of example, these are some of the different types of measures that we thought about for farm loans. I would encourage you when you're starting to look at a service, think of a couple of data points in each of these. Usually your performance and operational data. You have tons of administrative data. That's data that you already have or create as by way of a byproduct of operating that can help you understand different indicator lights of our different types of people getting through at different rates. What are the most common letters or denials reasons? [51:21](https://youtu.be/ACTsaHltKqg?t=3081) Is that maybe a thing to dig into and understand if there's a process improvement that could be made there? I will stop and pause for questions. I know we don't have a lot of time. I'm happy to stay for a couple of minutes. * * * Original page: https://innovate-us.org/by-the-people-for-the-people-with-the-people-design-for-government · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org