Why people-powered UX means good public services
Andy Lawson
Businesses have the luxury of identifying a target market and designing their products, services, and processes to fit that specific audience. But public services have a unique challenge – they need to work for everyone, taking into account a wide variety of circumstances. To complicate matters further, they have to do that while being acutely aware that as people are using those services, it could well be while they are under pressure or in a vulnerable situation.
Balancing those delicate factors is one of the reasons why user experience (UX) has become one of the hottest topics in government. Demand for UX designers has been on the rise across a number of departments, with the Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) currently recruiting for a number of roles. As more public services are transformed, digitised, and people’s needs change, the discipline is only likely to increase in importance.
The imperative of testing on real people
Handling around one billion citizen-facing transactions per year, across almost 400 services and 57 departments, necessitates complex systems in the background. And too often that’s reflected in the way users experience it. A confusing journey can prevent someone in difficult circumstances from receiving benefits they’re entitled to, understanding their rights, or accessing the support they may drastically need.
No public service should have barriers built into them because of back-office bureaucracy, or be unnecessarily complicated to use. Not only does that alienate citizens, it also creates more work for already stretched government departments – whether through avoidable contact, errors, complaints, missed deadlines, or repeat submissions.
Last year’s State of Digital Government Review found that in the past decade, satisfaction with public services in the UK has dropped from 79% to 68%. The report found that an individual moving home needs to contact 10 separate organisations, and managing a long-term condition or disability means speaking to more than 40 services across nine different organisations.
All in all, the average adult citizen spends a week and a half dealing with government bureaucracy every single year. But much of that could be streamlined or even removed if testing on real users was built into the process as the very first stage. Without this stage, assumptions, policy logic, or organisational structures are too often used to fill the void, instead of empirical evidence that demonstrates the way people actually engage with services.
Trialling a service on real users reveals where people are getting stuck, delays occur, mistakes are made, and specific groups are unintentionally excluded. Those insights then drive design improvements that are problem‑led, evidence‑led, and human‑led, rather than based on hypotheticals.
Accessibility from the start
A test user base that reflects the diverse needs of the population is critical. In today’s digital world, it’s easy to believe that the vast majority of people will want to engage with a public service through digital means. But, figures show that around one-quarter of the UK live with a disability, while millions more lack confidence going online or consider themselves digitally excluded.
Factoring in needs like these will ensure accessibility is built in from the start, rather than being treated as a check-box exercise at the end. Inclusive design also benefits everyone – not just people with declared accessibility needs. By accommodating outlying cases at either end of your user base, you will naturally catch everyone between too, making the service inherently more user friendly, consistent, and holistic.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember that UX isn’t just about apps or websites – it equally applies to letters, forms, call scripts, physical spaces, and staff workflows, with AI tools the latest addition to user journeys. A letter, form, or in-person meeting might be the first or most important interaction someone has with a service, before moving online or having to speak to an agent in a call centre, However, some letters still have legacy formats that haven’t changed for decades creating an immediate disconnect.
Every stage of the journey isn’t just a data‑collection mechanism; it is the bridge between a person, the funding they need, and the outcome they’re trying to achieve. If the language is unclear, laden with jargon, or overly policy‑driven, people may not understand what they need to do and it can cause disconnections between different parts of the process.
Designing services is never complete
Designing public services, therefore, is a continuous process of gathering data, insights, and constantly reiterating. After you’ve updated a contact centre script, it’s time to update the wording of letters, then review how the online part of the service fits in, and so on
By that point, technology will have advanced, policies may have changed, and updates need to be made once again – all of which require continuous improvements and adaptation. Each project should, therefore, be built around a six-stage framework:
- Understand: Carry out user research with a diverse range of people (including those with access needs and those relying on assisted digital routes) to understand who uses the service, the contexts they are in, and the outcomes they are trying to achieve right from the start.
- Diagnose: Observe people’s real behaviour, rather than relying on opinions or assumptions about how they may act. Identify where the service creates barriers, causes confusion or delays, and who is being excluded at different stages of the journey.
- Design: Use that research to improve plain language, accessibility, channel consistency, and journey flow. Prototype early and often, drawing on established service patterns to resolve issues quickly.
- Test: Validate changes with real users, including those with the lowest digital confidence and literacy. According to the National Literacy Trust, one in six adults aged 16 to 65 in England - equivalent to 6.6 million people - have very poor literacy skills.Use consistent language across the whole service to reduce errors, and identify where simplifications could be made by avoiding repeated questions.
- Measure: The only way to know if a service is working is by measuring it. Track completion rates, errors, and satisfaction across different user groups, and benchmark against comparable services.
- Improve: Iterate continuously, until the service works for everyone who needs it, making sure assisted digital and non-digital support routes are clear and accessible throughout.
UX at the heart of public service
UX cannot be treated as a one‑off project or optional. It must be embedded as an ongoing practice – a way of continually understanding, testing, and improving services as policies evolve and user needs evolve.
When public services are difficult to use, they become a barrier to the very support they are meant to provide – right when people might need it most. Good design can’t be seen as a luxury; it’s a matter of dignity, clarity, and access. Every app, letter, call script, and even internal workflows are part of that journey. The focus of each shouldn’t be whether it meets policy requirements or ticks the right boxes, instead has to be whether the service was designed with real people and their expected outcomes in mind.
Hedgehog lab is a partner at Government Transformation Summit, and will be hosting the discussion table User-Centric Design. Find out more below.
