Summary
If we seek to build effective, trustworthy public institutions, we must look for opportunities to affect change with design in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. It’s important to focus on designing great customer experiences. But equally as important and perhaps less visible are the experiences of government employees with heavy workloads and scarce resources, internal systems, processes and data sources, as well as infrastructure and platforms that are prerequisites for building great products. These factors shape the ability of institutions to effectively do their work. And they are areas ripe for design. Public servants and civic technologists have an important role in restoring trust in our institutions. By building services that provide equitable access to benefits, seamless transactions, and streamlined user experiences, we have an opportunity to strengthen confidence in our government’s ability to serve people’s needs. Drawing from nearly a decade of experience supporting digital services—from rebuilding HealthCare.gov to launching integrated benefits programs nationwide– attendees will learn how Nava practices design within critical, yet often unseen scenarios, enabling the government to deliver transformational digital services to millions of people across the country.
Key Insights
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Human-centered design is essential for improving not just public-facing services but backstage government operations.
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Improving developer experience requires designers to deeply understand technically adept users and their workflows.
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Policy prototyping helps translate abstract policies into tangible user experiences that reveal implementation challenges.
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Enterprise operations benefit from service design approaches that surface organizational silos and enable strategic interventions.
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Including design and research expertise in large-scale technical assessments ensures meaningful and actionable insights.
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Demonstration projects focus on learning and innovation rather than production readiness, requiring diverse design methods and collaboration.
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Automation decision support for government staff must balance efficiency gains with sensitivity to human decision-making processes.
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Design work backstage can feel ambiguous but benefits greatly from collaboration and clear baselines for impact.
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Government leaders should explicitly value design expertise and tightly integrate design with product management to turn insights into action.
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Trust in government services is earned incrementally through a whole ecosystem of interconnected backstage and front-end experiences.
Notable Quotes
"Public institutions continually earn trust by quickly and effectively responding to people's needs."
"Human-centered design is key to how we can help rebuild that trust."
"Designing developer experience starts with understanding the users and their contexts, especially when they're technically adept."
"Prototypes are low stakes tools to spark conversations and uncover new insights from people affected by policies."
"Enterprise operations is a ripe context for service design because it involves broad systems and multiple teams."
"Including design expertise in technical assessments brings rigor and ensures the research produces desired outcomes."
"Demonstration projects enable innovation and learning through making within a low risk context."
"Automated decision support needs to reduce labor while keeping the final decision in the hands of human staff."
"Design without implementation is just theory; insights must be integrated into roadmaps and action."
"The plumbing of government is unseen work that makes front-end experiences possible and determines overall trust."
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