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Human Centered Government Service Delivery

This is a course syllabus for a masters class I taught at the Kennedy School of Government from 2017 to 2020

You’ve actually been making design decisions your entire life. In this course, you’ll gain skills and learn techniques for using design consciously to define problem spaces and to carry out your intent. This highly interactive field course presents processes and practices for applying design to digital government and policy. The activities and assignments in this course will give you tools to understand the lived experience people have with government and how to deliver better services to them and outcomes for them.

This module is a deep dive on understanding user needs through the lens of government policymaking, using design thinking methods and techniques. The methods are best learned through practice. Lecture will be light. Class time will be workshops and activities. Work outside the classroom will be substantial, with at least 2 hours of reading/videos plus 3-5 hours each week of working with your team to complete the course challenge. The goal of the course challenge is for your team to reach and communicate a deep understanding of a social problem to identify opportunities to improve government service.

Course project: Design challenge

All teams will work on the same design challenge. For example:

  • How might we prevent families from dropping out of the public school registration system?
  • How might we increase participation in local elections?
    How might we make public transit universally accessible?
  • What challenges do people with disabilities face in a widespread health crisis?

The challenges emphasize interacting with government and advocates in ways students don’t, ordinarily, and with people they probably have never noticed before. You’ll learn about aspects of the lived experience that you’ve never thought about before.

The goal is to gain a deep understanding of a problem space through design processes and practices. 

Learning objectives

  • Learn the importance of and skills for understanding users’ needs
  • Learn how to define the right problem to design the right thing
  • Learn to tie systems thinking to design of government services
  • Learn to use discovery and research methods to mitigate risk

Before the first class meeting: Submit a 5-minute video 

With this information, I can deliver a better course for you because I’ll have information about your related experience and your goals.  

1. Read/watch these (they are all short):

2. Make a 5-minute video of you responding the statement, “Tell the story of a project you’re proud of as it relates to this course.” Address each of these points:

  • your role in the project and where you fit in the team
  • how you define what a “user” is
  • how you helped ensure that the team you worked with had a shared understanding of the work
  • your process or approach for testing requirements and assumptions (as related to the readings – for example, where did your work fit into the double diamond design process, what steps you and your team did or might have missed in the design thinking approach,)
  • challenges you encountered and how you overcame them
  • what you’re hoping to do differently at the end of this course

3. Submit a link for your video by email to the instructor (dana_chisnell@hks.harvard.edu) by Wednesday before the first class meeting. 

How to get the most out of this course 

Do the readings or watch the videos before each class, please. Doing that will help you understand better what we are doing in class and will help your team move faster. We will not go over the readings or videos in class. You will be expected to have done that work ahead of time. You may be quizzed about the content of the readings and videos.

Come to class ready to learn and practice a technique or method for a step in the process of problem definition. You may be asked in class how to perform the featured method and model it for the class.

You’ll get the best grade if you participate in discussion and activities during class, and make thoughtful and substantial contributions to group projects.

Assignments handed in after the due date will be credited at only a fraction of their total value, unless you ask me for prior approval to be late. I might not grant approval.

I expect students to devote a significant amount of time to their projects (3-5 hours a week). Students are expected to attend every class session, minimize outside class commitments, and make this class a priority.

I do not recommend taking this course while overloading, taking multiple client-based courses, or with an overly demanding schedule. Contact the instructor if you plan to take other high-commitment courses in the same semester such as DPI-663, Tech and Innovation in Government.

Laptops and Cellphones: There will be many class sessions in which you never touch a laptop. However, expect to bring a laptop to class for co-working sessions. Please refrain from using laptops during lectures and workshops, so you can focus and take part in discussion. Cell phones are not permitted in class.

Absences: This is a 6-week course. I expect students to be present for every class. If you must be absent, notify the instructor and your team at least two weeks in advance. Arrange beforehand with your team to make up the work.

Your grade will be lowered by a fraction for every absence. For example, if you would otherwise get an A, one absence will give you an A-. Absences also interact with the quality of your work. See the grading rubrics below.

Food in the classroom: Class meets for 3 hours each Friday for 6 Fridays. Please try to eat before you arrive at class. There will be brief breaks during which you may have a snack, but breaks will not be long enough to get meal-worthy food. Bring snacks with you.

Readings and resources

Course readings include articles, books, book chapters, videos, and blog posts, all of which are posted to the course website.

You must do the readings and use the resources for each week before you arrive at class for that week. Doing so will help you in the class activities and the week’s assignments.

Required texts: 

There are these recommended texts: 

You can order the required books here.

Most of the videos are in the All You Can Learn from UIE. Everyone will use the same log-in information. (See below.) The service is free to students of this course. 

Activities and assignments

In the Course Overview below, each week lays out key topics, at least one activity, and related assignments. We’ll cover key topics and activities in class meetings. You’ll do assignments outside of class time.

Assignments and grading procedures

There are assignments every week.

Final grades will be based on the following:

% of final gradeDeliverable
25%Written reflections every week, submitted in the class discussion area in Canvas, due by noon on Saturday following each class meeting.
25%Written assignments that contribute to your final project. These are due by noon Eastern Time on the Wednesday after they are assigned. Each week, you will work with your team to develop and iterate on plans and artifacts (such as research plans and scripts, stakeholder maps, user journey maps, service blueprints, and other visualizations) that show your growing understanding of the problem space of the course challenge. You will submit polished, professional work worthy of distribution in a large organization to help everyone understand the project.
25%Team work and individual contributions, as well as participating in class. Your peers will also rate your contributions to the project.
25%Final team presentation, which includes a written final report and slide deck.

Assignment and reflection grading

Reflections are graded as submitted / incomplete. You will write a short reflection of what you learned each week. 

Assignments are graded as group or team submissions each week. Each assignment is worth 15 points. 

Completeness  Including items listed in the assignment5.0 
Evidence of work and progress  Showing steps and learning through research, analysis, and reflection5.0
Organization  Showing thoughtfulness in pulling together the pieces to make a coherent whole5.0

The final presentations, report, and slides are evaluated together for Week 6, for a total of 100 points. 

Evaluation criteria for final team presentation

See the description for the last week of class.

Course overview and class schedule

Note: You will write reflections after every class. Each reflection is due to the instructor by noon on the following Saturday.

Week 1, Monday-Thursday (March 23-26)

Yes, this is before the first class meeting. 

Read/watch these (this is the recommended order):

Videos

You must log into the All You Can Learn library to watch many of the videos. This page shows all of the videos in the AYCL library for this course: https://aycl.uie.com/offer/hks20 (Links to an external site.) 

Use this userid and password: 

userid: ocm@hks.harvard.edu
password: HKSDPI-676

Readings

Collective Story Harvest

User Research 

Policy and government services 

Week 1

Understanding users’ needs

The key to delivering government services that are useful, usable, and pleasant is understanding users’ needs. How do you do that? And how do you document and represent those needs in a way that you can track over time?

Class topics will include:

  • Importance of design and design thinking in government
  • Process of design: diverge, converge, diverge, converge
  • What a project looks like: our design challenge
  • Forming research questions and creating a research plan

In-class activity: Collective story harvest related to the challenge question.

Slides: HKS-DPI-676-Chisnell-week-1-2020

Download

Assignments

With your team, self-organize to get this work done:

  • Desk research – learn about accessibility in digital (hint: WCAG 2.0)
  • Draft a rough research plan (1-10 pages of bullet points) that includes 1-3 focus/research questions. Include a draft of your interview/observation guide.
  • Interview 5-10 people with accessibility challenges or disabilities about their experiences related to Covid-19. Remember to collect basic behavioral and demographic data, such as how and if they’re working, how they manage daily activities, what their age and disabilities are, etc.
  • Create one document that includes insights from the desk research, your research plan, interview guide, and insights from your first interviews. Extra points for a well formed, well organized document with clear, descriptive headings.
  • For Friday’s class, write out what you, as a team, think the project research will find the problem space to be. Print it and put it into a sealed envelope. Bring it to class.

Readings (for the next class)

Week 2

Sense making: systems thinking and service design

Government is a series of small systems that work within larger systems. Feeding into the overall government system are dozens of services. Some services talk to each other; some stand alone — or pretend to, or are forced to through poor governance and lack of political will.

This week we will understand how to see a government service in its truer context, how to push beyond pseudo silos, and how to begin widening our points of view to take a more meaningful approach to research.

Class topics will include:

  • Service design blueprint
  • Stakeholder mapping
  • Mapping the user/customer journey
  • Touchpoint canvas

DPI-676_Week2_class_meeting_2020

Download

HKS-DPI-676-Chisnell-week-2-2020

Download

Assignments

Team: Conduct field research. In addition:

  • Revise your research plan, interview guides, etc. to reflect the direction of the research and the research questions you have narrowed down to
  • Conduct 5-10 interviews or observations with MBTA riders
  • Sketch out your service design blueprint (version 1, in class)
  • Create a stakeholder map and interview 3-10 stakeholders (who are not riders)
  • Pull all of the artifacts together into one document and write a narrative (5 to 25 pages) that describes each, what it represents, where your gaps in knowledge/data/research are, assumptions you’re making, questions you still have about the problem space.

Readings (for next week)

Week 3

Problem definition and convergence — how does it feel?

Now you have some of the story of the lived experience. And a lot of qualitative data. How does it feel to be in the problem space?

It’s time to revise the blueprints and maps based on your recent research: refine observations and fill gaps (or clarify what the gaps are in your data, why they are there, and whether you’re going to do anything about them). But before you do that, what could you learn by doing versus listening?

Physical, experiential prototypes of the problem space help us understand nuances of the user experience in ways you can’t just by observing, and validate (or dispel) assumptions that have built up through research.

Class topics include:

  • Role playing and writing the future story
  • Body storming
  • Physical prototyping of touchpoints, especially ones you don’t know well, risky transactions, and core interactions between service and user

Assignments

  • As a team, create a physical prototype that you can literally walk through.
  • Document walkthroughs and discoveries with photos and videos (if appropriate) — show before-and-afters.
  • Update journey maps, service blueprints, and stakeholder maps based on insights from walking through physical prototypes.
  • Add these artifacts, with explanatory narrative, to the  document you developed in week 1 that includes insights from the desk research, your research plan, interview guide, and insights from your first interviews.

Readings and resources (for next week)

Videos 

Week 4

Analyze and synthesize collaboratively

Teams that deliver the best products, services, and experiences are cross-functional and highly collaborative. This week, we’ll practice some simple techniques for quickly documenting feedback from users, coming to consensus the priority of problems found, and for getting to better design direction.

Topics and techniques will include:

  • Design principles
  • Rolling issues
  • KJ
  • Obindi (observation to inference to design direction)

Bonus: Fishbone analysis — https://www.cms.gov/medicare/provider-enrollment-and-certification/qapi/downloads/fishbonerevised.pdf  

Assignments

  • Conduct 5-10 more interviews or observations with people staying home through the Covid-19 pandemic who may or may not have disabilities. Document the characteristics and habits of these participants in your report. 
  • Reach your own priorities using the methods. Show evidence on your journey map, stakeholder map, touchpoint canvas, and service blueprint of issues discovered / resolved, compare what you guessed would happen to what did happen.
  • Document points in the service / product where design has happened, show what seems intentionally designed and why you think that.
  • Review the future stories from Week 3 and compare to what you know now. Does the future story of outcomes change? If so how and why?
  • Create a document, or add to your ongoing report, that includes narrative reporting of the above items. Include a section or table that lists each participant, their characteristics, and their work and life routines and habits. 

Readings and resources (for next week, due April 24)

Week 5

Mitigate risk and measure outcomes

A classic problem in government is risk aversion. This is why most important IT projects have been massive and long: the idea that you could document all of the requirements ahead of time and then build to those requirements has never worked.

Government projects typically are measured based on schedules and budgets. But what if policies were concerned with measuring outcomes for individuals? This week, we’ll look at where design has happened intentionally and unintentionally, and how the difference affects people’s futures. We’ll generate ideas for addressing some the design problems that drive outcomes for individuals.

Class topics include:

  • Envisioning outcomes
  • Success criteria
  • Experience metrics

Assignment

Finish up projects:

  • Update all of your materials, documenting where you started, what you learned, and where you are now
  • Discuss methods and lessons learned
  • Describe what you know about the challenge: Define the problem space and success criteria, as well as how the success criteria would be measured
  • Document design principles for possible solutions
  • Compare what you thought you would find out with what you did find out

Week 6

In-class retrospective, AMA, working session, and walk-throughs 

Come to class and use the time to clarify, catch up, refine, and ask questions. You could even rehearse your final presentations. 

Week 7

Final presentations (25% of your grade)

This week, you’ll present your insights to the instructor and various other audience members. These major deliverables that make up 25% of your grade:

  • A written, narrative report
  • A slide deck
  • Your team’s presentation

Report

Please collect these items together in ONE document and develop a coherent, meaningful narrative with them:

__ The challenge question and a description of how your team approached it

__ Research report (based on the research plan outline)

__ Stakeholder maps (with written explanations of each and the progression)

__ Journey maps (with written explanation of each and the progression)

__ Service maps (with written explanation of each and the progression)

__ Description of the problem space, and how your research and the insights you gained helped you form that definition of the problem

__ Success criteria and measures: What would success look like and how would you measure it

__ Theories that you would propose working on in a new phase to approach closing the problem space

__ Send it to dana_chisnell@hks.harvard.edu by 5pm Eastern Time, <date>

Slides

In addition, as a summary that can stand by itself (without the report and without the presentation), deliver:

__ A slide deck that provides visuals and a backbone for the story of your work


__ Send it to dana_chisnell@hks.harvard.edu by 5pm Eastern Time, <date>

Presentation

__ An excellent, 15- to 20-minute presentation where each person on the team presents an equal part of the story, equally interestingly. Demonstrate that you all have fallen in love with the problem and that you are deeply interested in it.

Evaluation criteria

Your presentation will be judged on these criteria: 

The quality of the story you tell about the problem space. 
Quality of the story you tell, as a team, about the problem space and your understanding of it. Evidence of thoroughness and professionalism. Demonstrate an understanding of your core user’s needs. Apply systems thinking to answering the challenge question		 30 points
Individual knowledge. Evidence that each person on the team has an understanding of all of the research, your data, the models you have created, and the overall problem space. Each person on the team should be able to describe the work, the insights, and the problem space equally and similarly 30 points
Story of progress. Demonstrate that the team took a starting position, explored the space expansively, looked at adjacent possible explanations or ideas, and evolved your understanding of the question, the domain, and the problem space. Define the problem space. Apply discovery and research methods to demonstrate how you tied research questions to methods and insights to describe possible (positive and negative) outcomes.25 points 
Professionalism.
Show a clean and clear organization of the materials, sections, maps, etc. in your written presentation and report, and practiced preparation in your oral presentation		 15 points
Total possible points for final presentation   100 

Peer evaluations

During this last meeting, your teammates will rate your performance over the course. Participation in class, along with individual contributions to team project work make up 25% of your grade.

Revisions

You may get substantial feedback during your presentation. If you would like to make revisions to your report and slides to incorporate this feedback, you have until noon on May 1 to make the revisions and request a reconsideration of your grade for the project.

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Story-driven experience research on pandemic unemployment

The problem the work sought to address

The COVID-19 pandemic shut downs and stay-at-home orders starting in March 2020 put millions of Americans out of work. On March 28, 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act, which, among other things, made billions of dollars available in new pandemic unemployment programs, but states struggled to implement and deliver these benefits. As of the end of July, 30 million people had applied for unemployment assistance, many of them for the first time, ever.

In my role with Project Redesign at NCoC.org, and in partnership with New America’s New Practice lab, I led a team of researchers to interview people from across the U.S. in May and June to learn what it has been like to apply for unemployment and other benefits during the pandemic.

Our approach

Telling the story of living experts in near-real time

When Tara McGuinness contacted me about doing this project, she was ready to experiment with methods and techniques. She and her colleagues in the New Practice Lab at New America wanted to bring the experience people were having to life for law makers and advocates who usually make their decisions recommendations based on what they see in spreadsheets. We wanted to do a few big things with our approach.

Amplify voices and elevate stories of real people. Those real people are the experts on the experience they’re having — living experts. To convey the experience people had applying for unemployment and other benefits during the pandemic, we documented “thick data” in 2- to 4-page stories. The purpose of those stories was to make the people real for readers, who we hoped would be law makers and their staff members.

Urgently learn about the lived experience. The urgency came from 2 factors. One was that the depth of the needs changed over just a few weeks. As time passed, the experience claimants had shifted from applying to waiting for funds to show up. In the meantime, bills needed to be paid, savings were depleted, jobs disappeared permanently. The other consideration was that Congress would be drafting the next stimulus and recovery bills in May and June. We had a chance to get the stories to people who influenced the design of those bills.

Conduct the research in the open. Show the work. To invite everyone in. Those stories, along with a few slides that highlighted a story or two and key takeaways, went to partners on the project, community-based organizations, media, and to legislative staff on Capitol Hill. We had to give up being precious about how polished the deliverables were. They needed to be just good enough.

We had to give up being precious about how polished the deliverables were. They needed to be just good enough.

It was our intention to invite partners and community-based organizations and legislative staff to observe the interviews. Just scheduling the interviews and conducting them within the time we had proved to be pretty challenging, so we didn’t get to do that. I feel like we know how to do it now, and probably could pull it off for future research projects.

We did develop a research kit and a workbook for anyone who wants to do research like this. You can download the research plan, interview guide, and story template, along with a few other tools for free from the project website.

Share what we learned publicly, as we learned it. Typically, a research team would do the interviews, transcribe them, code the transcriptions, and analyze the coding to identify findings. As you can imagine, this would take a while — for 33 interviews, it could take months. We didn’t have months. We didn’t even have weeks.

As we captured what was working for claimants, what wasn’t, who helped them, who needed help, what time passing felt like, what else people had going on, we wrote up the interviews into stories within a day of doing the interview. We collected interviews together each week, and distributed those collections of 5 to 15 interviews each week.

We were not focused on making policy recommendations. Instead, we documented the stories and drew observations and insights from what we heard.

Doing experience research during a pandemic

There were more than the usual constraints on “field” research in May and June 2020. For example, we couldn’t actually go into the field. It wasn’t safe for the research team or the participants because anyone could be carrying COVID-19.

We also needed to hurry up and do this work because the benefits that were designed to help people were also scheduled to run out. Arranging home visits and traveling takes a lot of time. Congress had set time limits on the first stimulus and recovery bills. We wanted to use what we learned to help the people designing the next set of stimulus and recovery bills make good decisions.

So, it’s not like we could do ethnographic research, really. No access to living spaces. Not enough time. We went into the study thinking like ethnographers, but we needed a few shortcuts. So we borrowed an idea I learned from Kate Gomoll for the interview stories, and some techniques from collective story harvesting. So, we’re calling it experience research, and we relied on the living experts to help us begin to understand what they were going through. We used approaches lovingly borrowed from equity-centered community design, developed by Creative Reaction Lab.

Delivering stories, briefs, and a workbook

The 2- to 4-page stories we wrote after each interview, centering on a few focus questions, were our first deliverables, and we published them each week of the project as we completed interviews. Over 3 weeks, we conducted 33 interviews.

Next, using theme or lenses that we identified ahead of the interviews, we pulled observations and quotes from each interview and conducted some light synthesis. We used that synthesis to write briefs for each of the themes.

We wanted not only to convey insights from these interviews, but also to make the methods and techniques available to others. We hope that researchers in the public and private sectors will pick up inspiration, at least, from how we did the study. We also want to make it easy for organizations that don’t have professional researchers to learn what is happening with their constituents. Our research workbook and kit is available for free to anyone who wants to use them.

Artifacts and findings

The links below open up PDFs. (Sorry about that. Soon we’ll have a beautiful website with fully accessible content.)

Overview

Themed briefs

Doing research like this yourself

About the project 

Full report — Stories, briefs, participants, methods, mechanics, team

Would I work this way again? Yes.

Leading a diverse team of researchers, most of them part-time contributors, to collect a clear and specific snapshot of a civic experience through stories was intense, gratifying, and humbling (in the best possible ways). I learned from everyone who contributed — both researchers and participants. Years later, I carry that experience with me along with the voices of many of the people we interviewed. This project both tested some ways of conducting research and capturing what we learned, and formed a kind of playbook for how I’ve since shaped the work and training of practitioners of human-centered research and design. Key takeaways on approach and practice:

  • Stories and names are powerful. Not everyone in the study allowed us to use their real names, but being able to tell the story of a person’s experience carries a grounded truth that is meaningful and compelling for readers. Attaching a name makes the story a human story.

  • Veracity in insights and findings is shaped by both the people who conduct the research and the participants. The lived experiences of both intersect in the research design, data gathering, discussion, analysis, and conclusions.

  • Breaking the reporting into briefs that were thematic worked well for reaching different audiences. The format of asserting the insight in the headings within the briefs was effective, especially for busy readers.

  • Opening up preliminary findings to subject matter experts and interested stakeholders each week was extremely challenging but was helpful in testing out what we thought we were learning from what we heard in the interviews.

  • I’m proud of building the research kit and methods workbook, and that teams working in state governments picked these artifacts up and ran their own studies. They reported that the methods were effective for not only gaining understanding of the qualitative experience their public was having, but also bringing along partners and stakeholders so they could make better-informed policy implementation decisions.