When to Use User-Centered Design for Public Policy

The failure to draw on user-centered design jeopardized the Affordable Care Act. (Photo by iStock/Ellenmck)

Silicon Valley has long sought to remake Washington in its own image.

Throughout Barack Obama’s presidency, technology company executives regularly sounded off on what, from their perspective, the administration might do differently. In 2010, Steve Jobs reportedly warned Obama that he likely wouldn’t win reelection, because his administration’s policies disadvantaged businesses like Apple. And in a speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, Peter Thiel expressed his disapproval of the political establishment by quipping, “Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East.”

Against this backdrop, one specific way Silicon Valley has tried to nudge Washington in a new direction is with respect to policy development. Specifically, leading technologists have begun encouraging policy makers to apply user-centered design (otherwise known as design thinking or human-centered design) to the public sector. The thinking goes that if government develops policy with users more squarely in mind, it might accelerate social progress rather than—as has often been the case—stifle it.

At a moment when fewer Americans than ever believe government is meeting their needs, a new approach that elevates the voices of citizens is long overdue. Even so, it would be misguided to view user-centered design as a cure-all for what ails the public sector. The approach holds great promise, but only in a well-defined set of circumstances.

User-Centered Design in the Public Policy Arena

The term “user-centered design” refers simply to a method of building products with an eye toward what users want and need.

To date, the approach has been applied primarily to the domain of for-profit start-ups. In recent months and years, however, supporters of user-centered design have sought to introduce it to other domains. A 2013 article authored by the head of a Danish design consultancy, for example, heralded the fact that “public sector design is on this rise.” And in the recent book Lean Impact, former Google executive and USAID official Ann-Mei Chang made an incisive and compelling case for why the social sector stands to benefit from this approach.

According to this line of thinking, we should be driving toward a world where government designs policy with an eye toward the individuals that stand to benefit from—or that could be hurt by—changes to public policy.

An Imperfect Fit

The merits of user-centered design in this context may seem self-evident. Yet it stands in stark contrast to how public sector leaders typically approach policy development. As leading design thinking theorist Jeanne Liedkta notes in her book Design Thinking for the Greater Good, “Innovation and design are [currently] the domain of experts, policy makers, planners and senior leaders. Everyone else is expected to step away.”

But while user-centered design has much to offer the policy development, it does not map perfectly onto this new territory. For one thing, in seeking to orient public policy toward the people it impacts, it’s important to ask: Which people are we designing for? While most start-ups initially seek to satisfy a discrete group of followers, public policy generally needs to satisfy multiple groups of users at once. Moreover, these efforts are often zero-sum: Designing a policy to benefit some users may well mean imposing costs on others.

Consider, for example, a state that wants to introduce new standardized tests at the junior-high-school level. Who are the users? Should policy makers design for the students taking the test, the teachers administering the test, the parents who want to see their student succeed, or the taxpayers footing the bill for an education system aimed at cultivating productive members of society? If policy makers seek to strike a balance between all of these users, what is the best way to do so?

In some instances, users aren’t necessarily equipped to weigh in on a policy, even if that policy materially impacts them—especially in the case of complex policy matters. For example, as someone who regularly consumes goods manufactured in China, the trade relationship between the United States and China impacts me. Even so, it would be unreasonable to call on me to resolve the current spat between the two countries.

In still other circumstances, users may have strong feelings about policy design—and it may be prudent for policy makers not to heed them. For example, natural gas companies may be the primary users of regulations designed to curb methane, but policy makers shouldn’t necessarily design regulatory policy to meet their needs. Indeed, even modest gestures in this direction—such as a meeting between the Secretary of the Interior and a natural gas executive—would understandably spark concern over regulatory capture.

When Policy Makers Should Heed the Call

So how can we reconcile the merits of a user-centered design approach with these limitations?

The way to square this circle is to recognize that user-centered design will be most valuable to policy design under one or more of the following conditions:

1. When voluntary user participation makes or breaks a policy. First, user-centered design is especially relevant when the success of a policy depends on users opting in, in the way policy makers envision.

Consider the Affordable Care Act. The botched launch of Healthcare.gov was not simply a political headache for the Obama administration. It was also a policy fiasco. A critical mass of users needed to sign up for the health care exchanges in order for them to be viable. As it turned out, the platform did a lousy job of meeting users’ needs, resulting in low initial enrollment in the exchanges and, in turn, imperiling the policy writ large.

2. When a policy involves a discrete set of users. User-centered design is also useful in instances where a policy needs to satisfy one group, rather than multiple groups, of users.

Suppose that the state of Michigan is developing a new program that would award a grant to graduating college seniors who take jobs working in state government. Relative to the previous example involving standardized testing, which implicated students, parents, teachers, and administrators, the grant program would materially impact only one group of users: the college seniors.

In this case, drawing on user-centered design would be more productive, since the issue of who the policy is for—the question that needs answering before any user-centered design process can begin—would be settled.

3. When users likely know what works better than policy makers. In the example of economic relations between the United States and China mentioned above, experts are likely better-positioned than laypeople to design policy. But the converse is true across a host of policy domains.

This is especially the case when sound policy is less a product of book learning and more of lived experience. Able-bodied policy makers are, almost by definition, not in a position to design zoning policy intended to serve disabled individuals. It is similarly little wonder that reproductive health care policies designed by male policy makers, criminal justice policies designed by white policy makers, and labor policies designed by heterosexual policy makers are among the most heavily criticized and ill-considered decisions political leaders have made in recent decades.

Technologists and ordinary citizens alike can agree that the public sector needs a product relaunch. But as user-centered design itself reminds us, identifying the problem is straightforward enough. The trickier task is to apply a well-crafted solution in a thoughtful way. As proponents of this new approach translate user-centered design to the public sector, they will need to do just that.

Read more stories by Stephen Moilanen.