The Impact of a UX Career within Government

Ruth Ellison at UXDX Community: Australia. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asavOlvYBs4

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Moving to Canberra, and how government used to build services

[00:00:00] Hi everyone. My name is Ruth Ellison. I'm a user researcher and strategic designer based in Canberra. I've been working in the design field for over 19 years and I'm really passionate about building healthy, curious teams who work on meaningful challenges. I'm currently head of user research and director of digital squads at the Digital Transformation Agency in the Australian Government.

[00:00:21] I'm here today to talk about change, what I've learned from going through change, as well as lessons learned about changing the way we design and deliver products and services in government.

[00:00:32] About 19 years ago, I made what seemed to be one of the scariest decisions of my life at that time. I was offered a job in Canberra, which was on the other side of Australia to where I was living, in Perth. I decided to leave everything and everyone I knew in Perth to explore these new lands. Now, I didn't know much about Canberra, or know anyone in Canberra, but I was really excited about this particular new job, and I was also very anxious about this very huge change in my life.

[00:01:00] Now, aside from being the capital of Australia, what's in Canberra? If you ask the internet, you get Questacon, our science museum, which many Sydneysiders have visited on school excursions. You'd also have seen the controversial Skywhale, a hot air balloon designed to mark the centenary of Canberra. And of course, we are also the seat of government. Decisions taken here have wide-reaching implications for our citizens, our economy, and also our global partnerships.

[00:01:28] Now, in the first few teams I worked in in government, this is how we designed and built services, using traditional waterfall methodology. Business analysts created specifications, we gathered the resources we needed, and then we built the thing and then launched it, and fingers crossed, hoped that it worked for the people that were using it. Teams were typically siloed, and the solutions were decided up front, and there was often little consideration of the user needs.

[00:01:52] Now, at the DTA, we promote the service design and delivery process, which includes rapid prototyping, continual learning, identifying blockers of success, and making sure we're building the right thing. The service design and delivery process has four stages, which would be very familiar to many of you, and is based upon common design methodologies.

[00:02:11] It includes discovery, which is all about understanding the problem by researching the real needs and problems faced by our users, and understanding the policy intent and also technology constraints. It also has alpha, the next stage, which is all about experimenting, exploring ideas, and iterating. Then we've got beta, which is about building the minimum viable product. And then live, which is about the team and the processes in place to continue operating and improving the service. So this brings together agile delivery methods with human-centered design thinking.

[00:02:46] Now, I'm really lucky that I get to work with many teams across government in my time, both in the private sector and now as a public servant. I've worked with teams that have lots of amazing people who care deeply about the services and products they're working on. There's often excitement about working on large digital transformation projects, but also lots of anxiety and also some fear about whether we're doing something that's outside the comfort zone of the teams we've worked with. So changing the way we design and deliver our products and services, and the way we think about our work, is often challenging and often very uncomfortable.

Enrolling a newborn in Medicare

[00:03:18] Now, talking about change, about three and a half years ago, I gave birth to this gorgeous little child. Now, despite having worked in consulting to the government over many years, I thought I knew government. But I quickly discovered that the birth of a child triggers a range of health administrative activities for new parents, with multiple government agencies at both state and federal levels. For example, registering the birth with births, deaths, and marriages, getting the birth certificate, enrolling in Medicare, and also the relevant social welfare services.

[00:03:45] Now, this process can take several weeks to complete, or in my case, when I was extremely sleep deprived and trying to get used to being a new mom, it took a lot longer. There are between 15 and 20 health service interactions for a healthy pregnancy, and definitely more if there are pregnancy complications. There are up to seven interactions with government agencies to register a birth and to enroll in Medicare and Centrelink.

[00:04:06] Parents need to provide the same information to government many times and in many forms. In addition, around 30% of birth registrations have errors that require follow-up, meaning rework for government and also for the parents and newborn babies, who really just want to sleep. So, what can we do to help with this life event and make it easier for parents?

[00:04:27] At the end of 2015, my agency partnered with the Department of Human Services to look at how we could transform the Medicare enrollment process. This was a 20-week process that brought together a multi-disciplinary team from across DHS to work in agile ways and to go through discovery, alpha, and the beta stages. The team was looking at ways on how we can make it easy to enroll newborns into Medicare.

[00:04:50] Now, one of the key changes was that rather than outsourcing the user research to a research team or to an outside company, the entire team was involved in the research and design process. This gave everyone on the team the opportunity to build a deep understanding of new parents' experiences and their needs when it came to interacting with government. The team learned about the challenges for new parents trying to navigate government while living through that newborn haze, which I'm very, very familiar with.

[00:05:16] And challenges included having to complete a 13-page form and to present at the local Medicare service center in person with a range of original or certified documents. I don't know about you, but trying to get documents certified with a newborn can be very challenging. And there were also implications around accessing medical services for your newborn when you didn't have a Medicare card for them.

Removing the form: 49 days down to five

[00:05:39] So initially the team was looking at how to digitize this process and how to make that as seamless as possible. But the biggest transformation occurred when a senior service designer and a lawyer joined the team. Between them, they questioned the fundamental assumption that a digital transformation should involve a digital interface.

[00:05:57] The team ended up exploring and implementing a trial at the Gold Coast University Hospital, which involved actually removing this form from this whole process. They looked at the sharing of information with consent and how it can be used so that parents of newborns didn't have to provide the same information multiple times.

[00:06:15] And during this trial, the outcome was that the number of days processing a newborn enrollment went from around 49 days down to about five to six days. And since then, this trial has involved a pilot program led by the ACT government, which uses a tell us once approach. The pilot is aiming to automate newborn birth registration and enrollment processes not just for Medicare, but for Centrelink, the Australian Immunisation Register, and My Health Record.

[00:06:41] So this was about creating a mindset shift. A mindset shift to think beyond the brief and to find innovative ways that meet the needs of our users, as well as the needs of government. It's also about having the courage to challenge assumptions and also challenge the way that this has always been done.

Hobby or business: putting a tax lawyer in the team

[00:06:59] Now, I'm going to shift tack now and share about a different team and situation. A few years ago, I got the opportunity to work with a team that was comprised of people from three different government agencies and from a range of skill sets. The team was exploring the problem space of starting a business. The team had a 20-week timeframe with a five-week discovery phase, which identified some areas in the starting a business space that was causing users pain and relying on them to correctly understand tax law.

[00:07:25] Now, this particular area that we ended up exploring after the five-week discovery was a very gray area that exists between being a hobby and being a business. We wanted to help creatives, artists, and makers determine if they run a business or practice a hobby, as there are taxation implications if they get this wrong. Now, tax law is not something the average citizen easily understands. Tax law is full of technical language and lots of layers of complexities.

[00:07:50] So, to address this problem, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, designers, developers, a product manager, delivery manager, and subject matter experts worked together. Now, this team was a high-performing team. A number of people had agile experience, but this was the very first time that we had all worked together from different government agencies and working this particular way. Some people had never worked in agile before and a number had never been on user research before.

[00:08:17] So the team collaborated closely, with everyone taking part in the user research and in the analysis. In this particular picture, we were analyzing the outcomes from the sprint's research. As we went through the analysis, we noted down actions we would take, in this example the bright pink post-it notes. And this helped us quickly work out as a team what were actions for the next sprint, what we'd put into the backlog, and what needed further research.

[00:08:39] But what we were finding was that although we had great engagement from different areas of the business, we were spinning our wheels each sprint going back and forth with the group of tax lawyers. We kept trying to convince them that what they were suggesting just wouldn't meet our users' needs, and they kept insisting that we couldn't simplify things any more, otherwise we could give someone the wrong advice.

[00:08:59] Now, each one of us was Fallon[?], and everyone had our users in mind, but we couldn't get to an outcome that would satisfy the user needs we identified while still being technically correct. So while we had a great group of people in our team, the team decided it was time to change up our team. One of the technical tax experts who we'd been consulting with was brought in to be part of our team. They began to participate in our user research sessions, our team discussions, our agile ceremonies, and also our on-the-ground decision-making.

[00:09:28] And this was the outcome. On the left is the original tax ruling, 930 words with a reading level of year 12.5. In the middle is the suggestion from the legal team. So as a team, we managed to transform that middle section of the 171 word summary with a reading level of year 22, to a 91 word question with a reading level of year five. Making information accessible to a wide range of our users, so it's easy for them to comply with government obligations.

[00:09:56] Now, if we hadn't had a tax lawyer in our team, we would have stopped at the legal suggestion, that middle bit, or maybe just scrapped the project as it wouldn't have delivered value to our end users.

[00:10:06] So, as user experience designers, we often focus on the end user's experience. It wasn't until we had our lawyer in the team that we started empathizing about how hard this problem space actually was, and how careful they had to be, and what previously had been seen as a blocker took on a new light. This knowledge changed the way our team worked, and also made us realize that empathy with our team members is just as important as empathy with our end users.

[00:10:31] By being embedded in the team, those saying no, we can't, started exploring how might we, collaboratively as a team. This allowed for a collective shift in these agile human-centered ways of working that spread beyond the scope of this particular product.

Lessons: complexity, the iceberg, and maturity

[00:10:43] Now, while I've shared two stories today, I've learned a lot from the many teams I've had the pleasure to work with over the last few years. The very first is that government work is highly complex. What may look like a simple user interface change can have a huge impact on whether someone submits the correct information, and therefore affects the payments or services that they can receive.

[00:11:06] And that the product or service we're working on is just really the tip of that iceberg. There are often systemic change challenges. We have to understand the bigger context of the section underneath the iceberg that lies under the water. Creating larger organizational-wide change is much harder. The iceberg model is a useful tool when working with teams on your products and services to help broaden and deepen your perspective.

[00:11:29] Rather than reacting to individual problems that arise in our user research, these kinds of models help us ask about the relationships within the system, think of patterns over time, and seek root causes. And each level down the iceberg offers a deeper understanding of the system we're working in, as well as the potential increased leverage for changing it.

[00:11:48] Now, another thing I've also learned is that transformation maturity is extremely varied across government, and even within the same agency. Now, rather than assuming that everyone in government has a lower maturity, it's really important to spend some time understanding the maturity of the team in terms of the ways of working, the culture, and the capability. So this means that the approaches and the solutions that we suggest should be tailored depending upon the maturity level of that particular team. And this helps to create more impactful and sustainable change.

Four levers, COVID-19, and some questions

[00:12:17] Now, change is difficult and uncomfortable. But understanding how these four levers of people, processes, technology, and legislation impact the product or service that you're working on can go a long way to influencing change.

[00:12:29] So, people is all about the capability, the culture, and the mindsets, but also understanding whether the organizational culture will support or inhibit digital transformation. And processes is about the processes that support the delivery and management of that particular product or service. And technology is about understanding the complex and often fragmented technological ecosystem, but also looking for options for sharing and reusing. And finally, legislation refers to the legislation, the government policy, and the standard operating procedures, and also understanding where outdated policy can potentially transfer complexity to the product or service, resulting in a very difficult user experience.

[00:13:07] Okay, so while working in or with government can be very challenging, what I love is that we're working on meaningful and impactful policy and services. Take COVID-19. This global pandemic has created immense demands for digital information, services, and support. It has driven us to think and work differently as the whole world changed around us. Now, as government, the COVID-19 response has shown us how swiftly we had to move to enable access to services for all Australians.

[00:13:33] Now, the DTA worked across the Australian public service and with states and territories to deliver the government's coronavirus information hub, australia.gov.au. This was done in just one day and has had more than 29 million visits as at September last year. Our teams also developed the government's WhatsApp channel, and that was just under a week and has more than three million users, I'm sorry, more than a million users. And we built the Coronavirus Australia information app and the COVIDSafe tracing app in just under three weeks.

[00:14:01] So throughout all this change, one thing that has remained constant is that taking a human-centered lens can have a huge impact on understanding the problem space and influencing the direction of products and services.

[00:14:14] But to wrap up, I'll leave you with a few questions. The first is, what does meaningful work look like to you? And with the product and service that you're working on, what's the impact on the user, on the organization, and on our society? And why not consider working in or working with government? And together we can keep making positive and impactful services and products for our people. Thank you very much for listening, and please stay in touch.