This article is written by Ellie Haden, digital business analyst for London Borough of Barking and Dagenham

User-centred design is about making services suit the customer first, rather than what is convenient for a business or an institution.

With many services going online — a change accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic — public servants have an opportunity to make services more intuitive for citizens.

Because of their growing ubiquity, the bar is set high for online services across the board. This sets the bar even higher for government services. It’s no secret that companies such as Amazon and Google spend huge amounts of time (and money) on customer experience and user research. Yet, this doesn't stop citizens making like-for-like comparisons with government services whenever their user experience encounters friction.

User-centred design is therefore crucial, but it is about more than just accessibility or smart presentation in a user-friendly language (though neither should be dismissed or underestimated). Public servants must understand that user-centred design is first and foremost about human behaviours.

Launching the basics of a service, rather than all its functionalities at once, means you can use feedback from customers as you go along. Until customers are using a service, you can only assume what they’ll do, which in itself is risky.

Once you have your feedback, you can then make changes to a service based on real customer testimony, rather than what you assume the customer wants. Going the latter route forces behaviours on users, which by contrast is generally considered bad user experience.

Many government services and teams, central and local, give customers the option to set up an account online, usually to make payments. This is the case for employment taxes (processed through Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs in the UK), or local tax accounts.

One team I’ve come across found an issue with customers putting their full name in the ‘First name’ field, and their partner's full name as the answer to ‘Surname’. They tried to change the language to ‘Last name’ and then to ‘Family name’ to stop this happening, but a few customers continued to do this. Why?

The issue was not the customer not understanding the terminology. Rather, it was that only one person from that household could be on the account to begin with.

Some couples wanted both names on there, as they were both living in the same household. They didn’t want one or the other person to be liable, nor for one to discuss their account without the other present.

The team hadn’t considered this, as they only required the details of one person who they could bill/charge. This issue of the customer’s behaviour arose out of their user needs; the need, in other words, to enter themselves into the system as co-owners/tenants of the property. This had been overlooked.

Create seamless services

As alluded to above, good user experiences are generally frictionless.

For example, someone might type their postcode as: ‘AB12 3CD’, or just as easily type: ‘AB123CD’. If an online form limits the field to only seven digits (so as to avoid customers entering a wrong postcode), then people who put a space before the last three digits will be given an error message.

Some may point out that you could simply programme an automatic text to pop up and advise the customer of this quirk. Perhaps, but in reality, when you’re completing your contact details (be it for council tax, booking a holiday, or making an Amazon purchase), you’re not interested in reading the fine print. You’re on autopilot, just as you are when you go to write your postcode down in ink. That is why auto-fill on our phones and laptops is such a blessing, because it’s even more intuitive than we are on autopilot. Auto-fill just knows. That's its beauty.

So, to underscore the point, if you press ‘Submit’ and find an error in the postcode due to an extra space, this is unnecessary friction. It makes the customer feel as though they've failed a basic task, or are being held hostage to a glitch in an already bureaucratic system.

Designing a great system is not about understanding what a customer is capable of. It's about understanding what they do naturally, and building around that.

How to recognise customer behaviour

Website analytics are really helpful to see how customers are navigating your content and can help your team improve customer experience. For example, if your content has no visits, it might not be needed.

Checking with back office staff who review completed online forms can also give you customer insight. They might tell you that customers aren’t giving all the details you ask for. Guidance text might therefore be required beneath a certain set of questions. This will mean back office staff don’t have to contact the customer to obtain missing details.

You can test the service yourself using dummy data/a test script so you can see for yourself what customers are experiencing. This shouldn’t replace testing your service with real customers. It’s important to get qualitative data from people who are more likely using your service to understand how usable it is.

You'll get more actionable insights from the above than any survey that asks users to rate your service from 1-5 ever will.

Here are five key takeaways from this article:

  1. Before trying to change user behaviour, make sure you fully understand what their needs are and why they are behaving in a certain way
  2. We can learn through user research why customers behave in a certain way and design around that
  3. The best way to get customers to use online services is to make them easy to use so they naturally gravitate to this channel
  4. Design services around what the customer needs, not what is convenient for the businesses
  5. To get real customer insight, customer data and testing with real users is key.

Many public sectors are looking at how their citizens can self-serve online, rather than by the phone, or in person. Designing around users and their natural behaviours is key to getting them to choose and move towards online services.

Otherwise, governments are at risk of putting a lot of time, money and effort into services that just won’t work. — Ellie Haden

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