5 CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF EFFECTIVE HUMANCENTERED DESIGN IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR OPENING LINES Source: https://www.americancityandcounty.com/, Allison Torpey and Rose Barcklow, First Published Jan 24th, 2025 A growing number of government agencies are looking to leverage human-centered design (HCD) principles to improve services for their constituents, increase awareness of those services and give people the tools to access them. In today’s rapidly evolving public sector, city, county and state officials face growing challenges. Complex regulations, heightened constituent expectations and limited resources—in terms of staffing as well as dollars— demand innovative solutions. Leaders are dealing with technical debt—outdated systems, quick fixes and patchwork upgrades—as well as policy debt, with layers of policies and regulations having accumulated over decades. Constituents have been conditioned by the private sector to expect highquality, user-friendly applications and programs, but limited capacity and a lack of consideration for the user experience hinders leaders’ ability to deliver on those expectations. Constituents are left facing a complex, disjointed experience that makes it hard to engage with government officials. Employees and case workers struggle with manual and time-consuming processes with limited guidance, while IT tries to maintain different technologies and infrastructure with siloed data and inconsistent processes. Amid these challenges, a growing number of government agencies are looking to leverage human-centered design (HCD) principles to improve services for their constituents, increase awareness of those services and give people the tools to access them. They’re harnessing the approach to equip teams with a holistic view of their constituents and proactively share information and track the status of referrals with community partners. Effective HCD starts with a focus on creating solutions that deeply understand and address the needs, behaviors, and experiences of the people they are designed for. By understanding and empathizing with users, agencies can create services that are intuitive, accessible and tailored to the specific needs of their diverse constituent base. THE APPROACH INCLUDES FIVE KEY PHASES: • Prepare: Understanding the biases and assumptions of those creating, developing and implementing services to ensure that insights gathered aren’t influenced by preconceived notions. • Discover: Engaging with constituents to understand their needs, challenges and contexts • Define: Synthesizing the information gathered during the discovery phase and collaboratively defining the opportunities at hand. • Develop: Generating and iterating on ideas, encouraging collaborative and divergent thinking while keeping feasibility and desirability in mind. • Deliver: Iterating and refining prototypes based on user feedback, ensuring that the final service effectively meets constituents’ needs. But while HCD plays a critical role in identifying constituents’ unmet needs, how to design services or 11 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 12, ISSUE 01
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTI5MjAx