Onze ideeën

A forerunner in citizen-centered, digital government services, the UK continues to attract attention for its efforts to change the way that citizens and government interact. So what should tommorow’s government services look like?

In the third and final part of this three-part article, we identify various benefits and challenges in designing services with dialogues. We conclude that designing with dialogues in a separate abstraction layer, service ecosystems with multiple touch points can provide a much more coherent citizen experience for public services.

This three-part article is about a new technique in design projects for citizen-centred government services: the ‘dialogue’. We will introduce dialogues to the service design community and share our lessons learned in using this technique. We also want to explore how dialogues create a shared understanding and commitment among designers and internal stakeholders.

In the second part of this three-part article, we outline how we use dialogues in our six step service design process. From establishing the service essentials to using dialogues for prototyping and further growth of services in the public sector.

Earlier this year we looked at the role that service design is increasingly playing in government, reflecting a trend that is being picked up around the world. While it’s one thing for designers and external parties to suggest the discipline to government clients, what’s the view from “the inside”?

In this final part of a trilogy on how to successfully design digital services for government, we outline the systematic approach used by Informaat. Service designer Mark Fonds explains our approach in a Pecha Kucha format.

With roughly five times the population as the UK, the USA has a challenge cut out for itself when it attempts to rethink the way its government works. A recent push by the Obama administration has made digital services a priority; the challenge now lays in its implementation.

The global economic crisis has triggered significant cuts to government budgets, forcing public services to be delivered both more efficiently, and less expensively. Especially in the UK, service design has made great inroads in influencing the way that central (and local) government engages with its citizenry.

In early 2009, the Dutch government laid out new requirements for its federal agencies, aiming to put in place cost-savings and efficiency measures. For the UWV (‘Uitvoeringsinstituut Werknemersverzekeringen’) -the agency responsible for employment– these triggered the start of a series of organization-wide changes that would dramatically improve the way it served its clients.