The Biden administration released its Executive Order on Customer Experience in late 2021, calling on agencies to prioritize human-centered design (HCD) when shaping digital services provided by the government. Coforma has been directly involved in supporting agencies’ responses to this call to action through a range of contracts with partners like Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Department of Health and Human Services. As more government agencies begin to incorporate human-centered design into their contract proposals, we’ve observed different levels of experience with HCD practices and the common language that goes with it.
Because we aim to share knowledge that empowers others to improve their own practices and impact, we seek not only to deliver the desired end results, but also provide our partners with a shared understanding of our practices—and notably, HCD—to help inform their future decision-making processes around procurement and product development.
In one recent project, we helped a government agency seeking to understand the customer experience in navigating and receiving a specific set of government services. But before we could apply our HCD methodologies to help them better understand what their users needed and how they could improve their experience, we first needed to establish a common understanding of what HCD is and how it would guide our approach.
Knowing that each government partner we work with has a different level of experience with HCD practices, we started this work by developing a common language and uniting the team around shared goals and agreed upon processes. This serves as a foundation to our work with the myriad system users and stakeholders we encounter during the project.
Develop a Common Language
We provide time at the beginning of any project to ensure common terminology has agreed-upon meanings across teams, stakeholders, and users so we can establish clear plans, processes, and expectations. In this particular project, that meant not just defining project and technical terms, but also terms and processes related to HCD. Here are some of the ways we achieved this:
Identifying commonly used terms and processes and what they mean for different teams, stakeholders, and users;
Creating definitions in non-expert terms to facilitate everyone’s shared understanding; and
Documenting language in a shared resource and treating this as a living document, adding to it when needed and referring to it frequently to train the team and answer questions.
Unite the Team
Some government agencies, including our partner in this project, have had less exposure to the processes that comprise a HCD practice. This work involved multiple stakeholders and owners that all had the same interest in improving customer experiences, but came at it from different backgrounds. To account for differences in familiarity with HCD practices, we sought consistent and effective ways to build trust and familiarity with our approach every step of the way.
Aim for alignment. We prioritized alignment with stakeholders and subject-matter experts at every stage of the project, focusing on understanding the existing system and its place in the government benefits application ecosystem. Their technical expertise helped us understand what was buildable and how we could shape our user-centered recommendations into actionable fixes and features for the future.
Commit to regular reporting, with context and process points. In all projects, we establish norms around how we interact and communicate. Part of this is defining a communication cadence at the beginning of the project so that everyone is clear about how and when information will be provided. This practice helps to build trust with stakeholders and partners.
Communicate upstream. Decision makers are also essential members of the team and should be both heard and held accountable. We advocated to regularly share our research findings with executive stakeholders. By keeping them up to date on how we arrived at our conclusions, we built a holistic view of the project and people’s needs.
When everyone understands the goals of HCD, we have the ability to be responsive to user needs and feedback for a service. As a result of our engagement, this government agency will be able to use insights about their customers’ needs and their shared understanding of HCD to enable future improvements.
As a leader in the HCD for civic tech space, we work with numerous agencies on products and projects that center the user experience of the communities served by our partners. Connect with us to learn more about how our approach centers people’s needs throughout the design, development, and delivery process.
Disclaimer: This content was published independently of the government agency whose work is described. This content does not constitute or imply an endorsement by that agency or the United States Government of the product, process, or service, or its producer or provider. The perspectives presented here, or in any linked content or documents, do not necessarily state or reflect those of any government agency or the United States Government.