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Designing for the people: A framework for developing effective federal services

Human-centered design is a powerful tool for federal leaders to help their teams work more efficiently, effectively and equitably on behalf of the public.

Employed correctly, this framework enables leaders to design and shape services with people rather than for them, working iteratively with customers and other stakeholders to develop solutions to public needs.  

A human-centered design process generally has four phases: discovery, design, delivery and measurement.  

The four phases of human-centered design 

Discovery: The first phase of human-centered design is about really understanding how people currently experience your services. There are two key things to keep in mind:  

1. You need to gather lots of data from lots of different stakeholders to understand the current experience of your customers and what changes to products and services you should make. That means asking yourself “Who are we designing for?” and then determining whether the data you might already have provides clarity for all the folks who will be impacted by any changes you make to how you serve customers. At this stage, an important equity question to ask yourself is whether there are any perspectives missing from your data, and if so, how you might gather those perspectives.

2. It is crucial to remain open to lots of possibilities. Don’t start with a solution in mind, but rather let people’s experiences guide you in identifying the right problems.  

Design: As you begin to think about solutions to these problems, start by engaging in root cause analysis. Taking time to engage with something as simple as a fishbone diagram or the 5 Whys protocol can help ensure that the design doesn’t just address symptoms of larger challenges.  

For teams engaging in customer experience work, it can be helpful to use a journey map, like this example from the Department of Veterans Affairs, which can help you see the entire system customers interact with to access services—and identify its pain points.  

Delivery: Human-centered design encourages you to start implementing changes to services and programs in small and simple ways. It can be tempting to rush to quickly make broad changes to help people, but this method supports using smaller-scale tests and pilots first and then gathering feedback on them to be sure that the design meets the needs of those targeted.  

Measurement: Work to include lots of ways to gather feedback so you can understand what is working, what should be scaled up and what needs to be eliminated—all of which are critical to making design improvements, working iteratively and continually adapting services to people’s needs.  

Human-centered design is a relatively simple process to follow, and doing so can make a big impact on employee engagement, customer experience and, ultimately, mission success.

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