Designing the Unseen: Enabling Institutions to Build Public Trust
Summary
If we seek to build effective, trustworthy public institutions, we must look for opportunities to affect change with design in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. It’s important to focus on designing great customer experiences. But equally as important and perhaps less visible are the experiences of government employees with heavy workloads and scarce resources, internal systems, processes and data sources, as well as infrastructure and platforms that are prerequisites for building great products. These factors shape the ability of institutions to effectively do their work. And they are areas ripe for design. Public servants and civic technologists have an important role in restoring trust in our institutions. By building services that provide equitable access to benefits, seamless transactions, and streamlined user experiences, we have an opportunity to strengthen confidence in our government’s ability to serve people’s needs. Drawing from nearly a decade of experience supporting digital services—from rebuilding HealthCare.gov to launching integrated benefits programs nationwide– attendees will learn how Nava practices design within critical, yet often unseen scenarios, enabling the government to deliver transformational digital services to millions of people across the country.
Key Insights
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Human-centered design is key to rebuilding trust in government by improving both public-facing and backstage government services.
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Designer involvement ranges beyond UI to complex backstage systems like developer experience, policy prototyping, and enterprise operations.
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Understanding technically adept users, like developers, requires designers to become conversant in specialized tools and contexts.
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Prototyping policy enables qualitative exploration of how regulations affect lived experiences, surfacing unanticipated implementation challenges.
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Enterprise operations benefit from service design to break down silos and improve secure cloud infrastructure, reducing operational friction and costs.
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Large-scale technical assessments require design research expertise to recruit the right participants, synthesize findings, and produce actionable insights.
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Demonstration projects serve as low-risk innovation labs where designers integrate research, prototyping, and communication to guide future production decisions.
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Automating decision support for government staff must be sensitive to workload and uphold human responsibility while reducing labor.
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Navigating ambiguity and cross-team collaboration are essential for designers working in backstage government contexts far from direct user feedback.
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Government leadership support for design includes valuing design expertise, integrating design with implementation, and connecting work to mission outcomes.
Notable Quotes
"Public institutions continually earn trust by quickly and effectively responding to people's needs."
"The plumbing of government—the unseen systems, processes, people, and policies—are design opportunities too."
"Improving developer experience starts with understanding users and their technical contexts."
"Prototypes are just a means to an end; their purpose is to spark conversation with end users."
"Enterprise operations is a ripe context for service design because it involves many people, processes, and tools across silos."
"Designers and technical experts should work together as peers to produce the best outcomes in technical assessments."
"Demonstration projects produce focused learning that supports decision making for future directions."
"Staff working against long backlogs are inherently stretched for time, so engagement needs to be efficient and sensitive."
"Design without implementation is just theory; feedback loops must turn user needs into action."
"Trust is earned incrementally by responding to people's needs over and over in a variety of contexts."
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