Talk Companion | How to Serve a Nation by Mithula Naik
Presented on June 7, 2019 at UXRConf 2019 in Toronto, Canada.
Watch the full talk on YouTube here. Want to listen audio-only? Find this talk on Apple Podcasts here and Spotify here.
Talk Overview ✨
Most researchers work in the private sector, but if you've used government services lately, you know quite well that the public sector is in dire need of our skills as well.
Mithula Naik, who heads up research for the Canadian Digital Service, outlines her approach to pushing for positive change in government services as a research leader.
Key Takeaways 🔑
1. Adopt a Persistent and Inclusive Approach to Research
Effective UX research, especially in complex environments like government, requires a constant, gentle, and polite resistance to the status quo. This means regularly engaging with users, particularly those who are vulnerable or marginalized, to ensure that their needs are understood and addressed in the design process.
2. Champion Human-Centered Design in Policy and Service Delivery
Senior UX researchers should advocate for human-centered design principles not only in product teams but also in policy-making processes. This involves bridging the gap between front-line service delivery insights and policy decisions, ensuring that services are iteratively designed based on real user experiences.
3. Empower Cross-Functional Teams to Foster Innovation
Building multidisciplinary teams that include communication, IT, operations, and UX professionals can break down silos and drive innovation. By empowering these teams to participate in research and design, organizations can create more effective and responsive services.
4. Focus on Ethical and Inclusive Research Practices
Conducting research with vulnerable populations, such as veterans or low-income individuals, requires a highly ethical approach. Senior researchers should lead efforts to create clear, ethical research processes that include diverse voices and ensure that the findings are applied to improve services for all users.
5. Resist the One-Size-Fits-All Mentality
In large and diverse populations, a one-size-fits-all approach to service design is often ineffective. Senior UX researchers should advocate for tailored solutions that account for the unique needs of different user groups, ensuring that services are accessible, equitable, and effective for everyone.
Transcript, Per ChatGPT 🤖
Imagine a nation that listens to its population. Not just parts of it, but all of it. A nation that not only listens, but understands and incorporates the needs and feedback of people. Sound like your job? As design researchers, we do this work every day.
We come to the table with open ears, open minds, and open hearts. But how do we use our skills to serve an entire nation? How do we use our voices and our expertise to influence change in such large and complex places? Today, I'm gonna talk to you about how a small group of researchers, much like yourselves, found their voices and used them to influence change. And in finding their voices, they helped the government listen to the voices of Canadians.
Having a voice is an important thing. It's the basic fabric of a democracy. But what if that voice isn't being heard? What if it's being blocked out? When I think of their voice, I think of the elderly gentleman I met in Vancouver.
We'll call him Sam. Sam is a permanent resident of Canada on his way to getting his citizenship. While on a visit to his home country back in Asia, he received a very confusing and wordy email from the Department of Immigration. Now, he'd been expecting a letter from email for a long time to appear for an appointment for his citizenship. While he spoke English, it wasn't his first language, and his reading levels weren't high.
So when he saw this email with the date on it, he panicked because he thought it was about his citizenship appointment. So he tried contacting the department, the call center, to let them know that he wasn't in Canada to postpone the interview date. But he simply couldn't get through to them. So what did he do instead? He flew back to Vancouver and visited the immigration office anyway.
And when he got there, he learned that the appointment wasn't an interview date after all. It was a notification for something else. The agent had to send him back empty handed. I was standing right there behind the agent, listening to Sam tell his story on one of my research trips. This man flew 15 hours across the world because the information he received wasn't clear, and he couldn't contact the department about a vitally important government service.
Is this a one off case? Unfortunately, it's not. Every year, Canada processes over 26,000,000 visas and travel authorizations to tourists, students, and new Canadians. Every day, the immigration call center alone receives nearly 25,000 calls, and around 8,000 of those are complex case files, which means they're applications that'll take longer than normal processing timelines. And immigration receives a large number, nearly 60,000 access to information and privacy requests every year, which are largely from people who are requesting updates on their immigration status.
The fact that immigration alone receives so many calls and privacy requests tell us that even if a majority may indicate that they're satisfied on a survey, a substantial number are facing difficulty with the system. In many ways, understanding what's really going on demands an in-depth qualitative approach. And this isn't unique to the Department of Immigration. The government offers hundreds of services to Canadians and visitors to Canada. Now, as I'm sure any one of you would have firsthand experience, there's room for improvement.
And we believe improvement is essential because the stakes are so high. Government services are literally life changing and affect millions of people every year. Filing a tax return, applying for a passport, being processed at the border, and these are just to name a few. Now, for a lot of us, we're privileged enough not to have our lives deeply impacted if a government service doesn't work well. Given the fact that we get to order our favorite food, hop into a fancy car or book hotels with just the tap of a button, a poorly designed government service is at worst an inconvenience.
But that's not true for everybody. That's not true for low income Canadians who depend on benefits to buy their groceries, for veterans who are suffering from mental and physical disabilities, and for newcomers such as refugees who are settling in their new lives in Canada. What's an inconvenience for many can be a catastrophe for the people who need these services the most. Because for these people, government services aren't options. They're a lifeline.
The challenge for government is more than just delivering services. It's seeing the impact that policies can have on the people experiencing poor service delivery on the front lines. So traditionally, policy teams based in Ottawa and Gatineau shape how services are delivered to people all around the country. Rarely have service delivery teams been able to share their insights and observations about how people are experiencing these services in the front lines back to headquarters in Ottawa. So the way these services are developed is one directional, policy led, and not iterative.
But today, this is recognized as a problem by many, from both policy and service delivery teams. These are public servants who care deeply and sincerely about making government work for people, and they're committed to change. Part of this change means creating ways for an emerging culture of experimentation and trying new approaches to champion the voices of people. And this is where design research comes in. Back in 2015, when I joined government as a design researcher, I was pretty much a team of 1.
A lot of people didn't know what I did. I didn't even have a job title or description that reflected the way I worked. And there were real barriers to the way I needed to work. For example, there was no clear process letting me know how to interview people using government services. In fact, I was discouraged from doing it.
But slowly, I found out I wasn't the only one going through this. There were others, Small pockets of people, bureaucracy hackers, IT reformers, call them what you will. These were public servants who had been quietly and tirelessly pushing the needle to create a change from within government. I joined one group of these reformers, And in 2017, we received funding to create a new plan to help government improve how it delivers services with the creation of the Canadian Digital Service. CDS works we call ourselves CDS, Canadian Digital Service, by partnering with federal departments to deliver simple and easy to use services for immigrants, for veterans, for the elderly, for everybody using government services, using the approaches of human centered design and agile development.
2017, we look like this. Our research team was me. Fast forward to 2019, this is what we look like. Meet 70 plus members of the Canadian Digital Service, and we're still growing. We now have a dedicated team of researchers.
We're nearly 10 of us. We're bilingual mixed methods distributed team that's creating a practice and a rigorous research foundation. And yes, we're called design researchers with official titles and job descriptions. So how did we go from hardly any design research in the public service to now seeing quality research? We got here using an approach that I'd like to call constant, gentle, polite resistance.
This approach is a resistance against some of the attitudes, mindsets, and practices that currently limit the value of design research in the public service. Our efforts is at resisting business as usual, to create instead an approach that's a research approach that's intentional, inclusive, and iterative. Okay. Let's break down how using constant, gentle, polite resistance can help the public service serve people better. Constant resistance.
This challenges the belief that research is only done at the start and it's a one time thing. We believe that the public service must regularly conduct research with people using government services. For our research community, our resistance is about making sure that the entire product team, not just researchers, are regularly attending research activities, and that all our product decisions, from content to development, are based on real needs. We do this in 2 ways. 1st, by getting out of Ottawa and Gatineau.
We carry our usability kits and our research backpacks to travel across the country to area offices and service centers where people are actually using government services. And second, by ensuring that every product team member, regardless if you were a product manager or a developer, came to observe research at least every 6 weeks. Let's walk through this using my work with the Department of Veterans Affairs Canada, or we call them VAC in short, as an example. VACC has an important mission, honoring the contributions and the sacrifices made by veterans and expressing Canada's gratitude to them. There's an estimated 650,000 veterans in Canada.
However, fewer than 20% are currently being served by VAC. If a veteran wants to find out what benefits they may be eligible for, they might have to follow a process shared in this map. We were given a 2 hour walk through by the veterans ombudsman's office to understand this web of benefits. Imagine how difficult it must be for veterans in their homes. So as researchers, we looked at the data, and we spent a good amount of time with back staff, and we identified that veterans have a low familiarity of the benefits available and that there was a decreased uptake of services.
So we figured out the what, but we didn't figure out why. And from the veteran's point of view, what was going on? So we needed to talk to veterans. But this part wasn't easy. Early on, we identified, though well intentioned, the department wasn't conducting real user research to improve service delivery.
And when I say real user research, I mean actually talking to the people the service is being designed for. In government, far too often, decisions are made by staff or stakeholders who do their best to represent the interests of the user, but they aren't necessarily the users themselves. With various sensitivities surrounding research with veterans, the risks seem to outweigh the benefits. Here, constant resistance meant working closely with our partners to demonstrate what an ethical research process could look like to continue working with veterans. We did this by bringing both our and VACC's policy and legal teams together to create and collaborate on a highly ethical research process to continue working in a truly human centered way.
This resulted in a series of guidance and documentation, consent and privacy, data security, shareable research templates, so much more. This kind of paperwork might sound dull, but believe me when I say it's a game changer for breaking down research barriers. With these new resources, we went ahead and we conducted interviews with veterans still serving military members and their families. And all product members working on this service got a chance to listen to a real veteran story. This is Steve, one of our developers, who's waiting for a participant to show up.
His first ever interview research interview. Having all product members part of research sessions is now common practice at CDS. Gentle resistance. Gentle resistance challenges the belief that a one size fits all approach is most fair for the whole population. We believe that the public service must gently include those who are vulnerable, those who are disadvantaged, and those on the extremes of the spectrum.
For our research community, it's about being painstakingly intentional about creating an inclusive research practice. There's a few ways we do this. By committing that 100% of our product teams conduct research with persons with disabilities, that all our product teams are conducting research in both official languages, English and French, and that all our research documents, especially our participant facing documents, are written at an 8th grade reading level for easy comprehension, compared to the university level that most policy documents are. Let's revisit my example with Veterans Affairs Canada. Veterans experience a greater risk of health issues, PTSD, trouble adjusting to civilian life, and are considered a part of vulnerable populations.
Conducting research with any group, but especially vulnerable populations, demand a highly ethical approach. And as I just mentioned, we worked with them on actually creating this ethical process for us to be more comfortable in doing this research. This is important because creating the right conditions to do sensitive research might involve initial upfront work, but it's abundantly beneficial. And not just for small groups, small populations, but for everyone, including all of us. Things like age and disability are conditions we'll all experience in the course of our lives.
We also recognize that historically, groups marginalized on the basis of race, gender, disabilities have been unfairly excluded from research and the potential benefits of their research participation. Fair inclusion, on the other hand, can create both direct and indirect benefits. So for instance, participants learning more about the conditions that they're facing, or co designing and helping improve a whole community's problem that they're a part of. So in the case of including veterans in our research, this meant we were able to first create a product built on real needs and continuously test it, which we did with over a 100 veterans and frontline staff members in both official languages. All of this gave us a really good understanding of why the current system of benefits often seems inaccessible to veterans.
Here's what we learned. That the information presented to veterans is often in bureaucratic government language, often right from policy, that there's a massive information overload and inconsistencies in how benefits were communicated across different channels. We also heard that there's a strong sense of stigma around applying for benefits. Military culture and training makes it really hard to ask for help because they're trained to be tough and independent during difficult times, and this can make accessing benefits a sign of weakness. This feeling is magnified in young veterans who are facing the challenge of going from following orders and procedures to proactively navigating the VAX system and having to care for oneself.
In a fast paced work environment like ours, gentle resistance is slowing down to thoughtfully include voices like veterans. And this pace can be accelerated when the team is back in the office. Analysis, prototyping, design can continue to work quickly and be bold. But if you wanna be impactful when you're in the office, you must be gentle when you're in the field doing research. Polite resistance.
Polite resistance is changing how public servants perceive people's experiences to change the way government serves people. For researchers, polite resistance is delicately applying pressure for change. What's the change? To make government more human centric. What's the pressure?
Nurturing our relationships with government departments. Who are the ones actually providing services to Canadians. Our research, no matter how sophisticated, is only worthwhile if it's being used. And for it to be used, we need to be sincere and attentive to how we partner with federal teams and organizations. I'm proud to share that just a few weeks ago, our product with VAC was released.
It's called Find Benefits and Services, and it's now BetaLive. It's a tool to help veterans, current military members, and their families quickly find what benefits are out there for them in simple, plain language and take their next steps towards accessing these benefits. But perhaps one of the things I'm most proud of is that we've handed the research design and development to VAC by helping create a product team within their own department. Meet VAX's first ever multidisciplinary product team in Charlottetown. To get here, we busted some real government silos.
We brought together people from different parts of the organization, communications, operations, IT, to collaborate and start working in a cross functional team. They are now fully capable of using the same approaches to transforming other products and services in their portfolio. Using your voice as a researcher in government means empowering public servants to continue putting people's needs first. Because we have a responsibility to see that this work has a chance to scale. The truth is, workshops and post it notes can only go so far.
It's about resistance, but it's not about disruption. I've seen disruptive efforts enter with a bang and fizzle out as fast as these started. Polite resistance is knowing that trust, transparency, and respect take time. It's flipping the model to rethink our roles, not just as creators of products and services, but also as cultural translators between citizens and public servants. Researchers at CDS are focused on building the capacity of our partners from immigration, VAC, and involving them in research activities.
And it's important to revisit that improving service delivery means keeping policy teams informed of our research insights and observations. So to ensure that services aren't developed in a one directional policy led manner anymore, instead, they're an ongoing iterative conversation. Okay. Today, I've shared with you some ways that we've committed to helping serve this diverse, resilient, amazing country that is Canada by product teams that solve problems based on people's needs, by advocating for research that's inclusive and accessible, by designing for the margins and the extremes of society, and bringing public servants along the journey, and building their capacity in modern approaches. But when I look at all of you here today, I truly believe you're also serving the nation.
You're researchers, designers, and creators who are providing immense value to people from all walks and stages of life in Canada. And for that, I'd like to leave you with a request. When you do work on the hard problems for your customers and your clients, when you're solving complex issues for your stakeholders, and you're improving the experience for your employees, choose constant, gentle, polite resistance. Resist a one size fits all approach. Resist doing perfect research that ends up sitting on a shelf, and resist working in silos.
Instead, work across your teams to listen to diverse voices. Design a process that makes everyone feel welcome, and empower your people to go ahead of you in improving the well-being of the people they're serving. 1 of the founders of CDS wrote something amazing that I always think of when serving the nation seems like an impossibly enormous task. You don't work in government because of the speed of impact you will have. You do it for the scale of impact you can have.
You're trying to push on a mountain, and you may be only able to move it an inch. But you moved a mountain an inch. Bringing constant gentle polite resistance to the way government delivers services is an inch of a mountain. Because by pushing alongside others and listening to people, we design research, we can move mountains together.
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