Learning to share the joys of UX research in local government
A presentation this week revealed we have a lot of work to do if we want to spread the gospel of human-centered design, UX research, and more
On Thursday, September 12 about 30 local government professionals from across Franklin County gathered to learn more about our “One Franklin County” project and some basic User Experience (UX) concepts. And the attendees taught us as much as we taught them. (Maybe more.)
Invited to present on our countywide website overhaul project—intended to unify 40+ sites and refocus all content around public-facing services rather than agency identities—Sarah Gray prepped a combination presentation to address both a concrete project outline and the underlying ideas powering our Government Experience (GX) work.
The presentation was a team effort:
Juan Torres, CIO for the Franklin County Commissioners, and a member of the “steering committee” for the One Franklin County project. Juan has been part of the project since we started thinking about it in 2022. He opened the session and kept engagement with the multi-agency audience going.
Caitlyn Coughlin, GX Concourse Product Owner. Caitlyn ran the slide deck and provided some real-time user journey mapping with audience input.
Sarah Gray, GX Concourse Manager. Sarah was the lead presenter and covered both the outline of the One Franklin County project and the baseline human-centered design and UX research concepts.
What we covered
With only 50 minutes in a room of 30 people, we couldn’t cover a lot, especially when some content depended on direct audience engagement. Nevertheless, we buzzed through 2 major areas:
An overview of the One Franklin County project and its goals
collapse 40+ websites into a single, unified site
refocus all content around public-facing services, not agency identities
build human-centered design, plain language, and UX research capacity in a centralized shared-services team while supporting a robust community-of-practice model to engage agencies with internal digital capacity
PLUS: A sneak preview of the proposed design for the new countywide home page, set for launch in early 2025
An introduction to two key UX research concepts, with interactive discussion
User Personas
User Journey Mapping
Audience reception and what we learned
The presentation was well-received, with active participation from the assembled group from across multiple county agencies.
We discovered two key things from this group:
Our project is unknown to the general employee population. One Franklin County has engaged perhaps 100-150 people in the last year or so, but there are 6,000 employees across the county. With very little launched to the public eye (so far), and all the old websites remaining online, few employees know this work is in progress.
Ideas around user experience (UX), user research, journey mapping, user personas, human-centered design, plain language writing, service design and so forth are new to most employees in most agencies—by a long shot. Most had never heard the terms at all. (Which is common across the country, really.) But the ideas were very well-received. Attendees self-selected to attend an all-day internal professional development conference, so these were some of the most-engaged public servants in the county. This was an ideal audience for us—the folks most willing pick up ideas to boost public service and trust.
What we need to do next
To make One Franklin County a success in the long run, we have to address the two deficiencies we discovered. We need awareness of the project and its goals to spread across the county. But more importantly, and more impactfully, we can only achieve our Government Experience (GX) mission if we spread the core concepts of human-centered design to every agency.
Project Awareness
Clearly we have some marketing to do around the project itself. Sarah is ramping up to make periodic presentations with county leaders. And with the public site launch for the first 14 agencies in the first half of next year (and the shutdown of their old sites) we’re on a trajectory to getting a lot more attention.
And we may need more buttons.
GX awareness
Following the presentation one of the attendees caught me and asked where she could learn more about these human-centered design concepts. She felt our presentation was only just starting to address how to use these ideas and she instinctively recognized there was a lot more to learn.
To date, however, we’ve never even attempted to teach these concepts or consult with our partner agencies on how to apply them to their practices, with or without websites. We don’t have a “class” ready to go.
In the moment I advised there were plenty of resources online that talk about these ideas and give examples. But that’s cold comfort for someone that’s warming up to the ideas, wants to learn more, and wants to spread the ideas further. I didn’t have something to hand them, nor something to invite them to attend.
What our most-engaged public servants need is a “101” course they can take with their colleagues. Civilla offers something like this to get folks started. And the Beeck Center has countless resources. And there’s my new favorite: the annual Code for America Summit. But none of these are in Franklin County. None of them can be responsive to our specific needs. And people need support post-training, too.
A new goal for the GX Foundry?
I am loathe to assign myself and my team more work. But… if the shoe fits…
I think we have to address the lack of GX training for local government practitioners and leaders ourselves. We appear to need a three-pronged model to begin to lead this change. I’m not sure how we’ll have the time to do it, but we’ll start with the ideas now and maybe we can find the resources over time.
Teach : Develop a GX concepts “101” class
While there are places to learn core concepts of Government Experience (the government-focused instance of User Experience), they are not yet gathered in one place, and to make the concepts stick, students need some personal interaction and practice. We love what Civilla has done, for example. We love the resources from Beeck, 18F, USDS, USDR, and others. But our partners need a personalized introduction and local context.
I suspect we need to develop a class that introduces some key concepts and teaches them with some hands-on exercises:
User Experience (UX) and the government twist on it, GX
plain language writing
The course format could point to external resources in a self-paced training model. But it does feel like students should come together for some practice and knowledge-sharing in the real-world, too.
Consult : Engage agencies directly to apply GX concepts
Like so many things people learn, students may need help applying what they’ve learned, perhaps in a small pilot project. That’s a great way to take book learning and turn it into real knowledge. But even getting a pilot project going can be daunting. We probably need to help.
Post-training we should engage with each agency / student and discuss ways to apply the new concepts to a service they provide. We have a variety of folks that can engage in this process, including our Partner Experience team, our Business Analysts, and different GX disciplines.
Best case, we find something small, concrete, and visible to analyze and potentially change, sharing results across the agency, building support for more GX work.
Evangelize : Connect partners to resources and each other
While the training and consulting will expose students to GX concepts and get them some hands-on experience, it doesn’t scale well if our team has to own the entire GX ecosystem and all engagements. We need students and former students to both connect to national resources and groups and to one another. We need a Community of Practice.
We’ve already started this with our Voice of the County (VoCo) group, which is focused on our public-facing web properties and services. But this would go wider. Anyone that consistently wants to apply (and re-apply) human-centered design principles and practices will need support.
They should attend the annual Code for America Summit (and we could advocate for that expenditure). They should be provided updates about new resources and examples from the national players. They should hear what other teams are doing across the county and cheerlead those efforts openly.
For now, we’ll talk internally about how to attack these issues. despite having very full plates already. I don’t think we can just brush this under the rug.
We cannot be the only Government Experience team in our local government. We need supporters and cheeleaders. We need participants, too. We need our GX concepts to filter into the agencies to ensure they are building and evolving services that build trust with the public. With 6,000 people out there, the notion that we can make an impact with just 14 folks is nonsensical. We need force multipliers. We just have to craft them ourselves.
Learning out loud~ its so importanrt. Thanks, John and team !
Got a comment from a UX expert on LinkedIn that was a nice addition to our list of things to learn and to teach... https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ashleyobrienmn_learning-to-share-the-joys-of-ux-research-activity-7241625070022860802-cBnZ
The core of the comment: "I would add content strategy and systems thinking to operationalize research and take extra precaution with novel changes to the system."